Chapter 4 of our textbook compares positivist, interpretive, critical, feminist, and postmodern approaches to research.  Subjectivity and objectivity on the part of the researcher is discussed in relation to these methodologies.  In my research project, I have become familiar with several models of electronic personal health records.  The first demo I saw showed many online screens where the user must enter a large quantity of family medical history, and continually update the website.  At that time, I immediately rejected the design as being overburdensome, requiring too much data entry, and not being very useful for consumers.  After reading this chapter, I realize that I was not making an objective observation, but was putting my value-judgment onto the product.  In fact, because I have an extremely busy schedule, without the time to gather family medical record detail, even though I know it is an important task, I was projecting this negative reaction to all users.  Perhaps someone else, perhaps a retired person, with more free time would find this activity valuable and the software extremely useful.  Having always considered myself an objective person, I started to judge myself harshly on this.  Then I read in the chapter that for critical social science (CSS) being objective is not being value free; it means a non-distorted picture of reality with the goal of making social change.  Then I talked to other people who also don’t like the idea of a large amount of data entry.  They feel it is the physician’s responsibility to provide the data and to monitor it.  However, one of the people I talked to with this attitude began to have a major health problem.  So I realized that people can’t solely rely on physicians whether they like data entry or not, and that perhaps my role as a researcher is to take a CSS viewpoint and try to find a design that is a compromise and brings about a change needed for technology acceptance, use, acceptance for responsibility over one’s own health, hopefully resulting in better societal health.

My topic is very complex and to narrow it down to a manageable level, I will first do a literature review and then focus on reviewing features of existing “tethered” vs. “untethered” products.  A “tethered” electronic personal health record is initiated and owned by an entity such as a hospital or health insurance plan which allows the patient access via a “portal.”  These vary in patient access levels, but most of them offer limited patient input.  The patient may be able to enter emergency contacts, allergies, make appointments, or fill pharmacy prescritions, but these things are optional and the lab or xray reports and medical records content is populated by the entity-owner.  The “untethered” products are the opposite; the patient is the purchaser and owner of the free-standing or online software, with some offering limited connectivity to physicians’ records.  I am going to try to take a CSS approach to this review.

I'm starting (just barely) to break down my readings in this area into different classes.  As we've seen in the ICIS papers, not all IS papers are IS papers, and CM/DR is an area with a lot of overlap with other disciplines.

So far, here's some of the classes of papers that I've seen:

• IS design science/action research: building systems to meet a crisis managment needs
• Psychology: human cognative theory involving crisis response (such as Recognition Primed Decision)
• Organizational Science: how organizational decision making processes adapt in crisis situations (or don't)

From the standpoint of moving into this area of research (for the purposes of an IS Ph.D.), I think I want to adopt an oscillating method of gathering information.  I don't want to start with *just* IS papers, since I'm going to need those organizational and psychology papers for background, but at the same time I don't want to start completely at the beginning, as I'll never be able to catch up to the "current state of affairs."

So, I'm going to do both.  Eventually I expect that this will move into either an action research or design science project; from an IS perspective, I don't see foundational work in crisis management being within the realm of IS unless I'm working essentially at the network layer, and IEEE Communications and Networking gets plenty of material on self-healing network routing protocols (and although that stuff is interesting, particularly from a mathematical standpoint, it's not really my bag, baby).

Research target for this week: start work on reading more about RPD (just checked out Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1999 ISBN 0262611465 from the Caltech library).  The theory was used to pretty good effect in the RIMSAT project I've linked before, and the model itself makes some intuitive sense.  While starting in on this, I'm going to see if I can get my hands on the conference proceeding from the last ISCRAM conference (unfortunately one boss ixnay'd paying for the conference, so I have to try another avenue).

The book I posted about last time (Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions) unfortunately sat on my desk for three days and was repossessed by some Caltech grad student that requested a recall through the library.  I didn't mind (I've just gone ahead and ordered it from Amazon), because after getting caught up on the billions of things going on in life, I found what might be the coolest web site ever - Research Blogging.

It's painfully new (started late Jan 08), and has a long way to go before it's got enough buy-in to really pay off, but the concept is fascinating.  Bridging the gap between peer-reviewed journals and "new media"?

Change Record Management System (CRMS) is undergoing major restructuring as a result of problem with the kernel theory. I have been relying on design science theory as posited by Hevner et al for the kernel theory, but the Professor corrected me and said that design science is a guideline and cannot serve as a kernel theory. So I am now in the process of restructuring my research using behavioral science research theory as the kernel theory. Although the process is very grueling because of the great extent I had reached in my research, I hope to be back on track very soon. I also hope to meet with the Professor about some fuzziness I am still harboring regarding kernel theory and the use of behavioral science theory as a kernel theory within the context of my research.

I'm in the process now of grabbing articles from the 2005 conference proceedings for ISCRAM.  The site allows the conference papers to be downloaded with a simple (free) registration.  2006 and 2007 papers are next.

My goal here is to grab a bunch of these papers that sound interesting and categorize them with meta tags and relationships by citation (sort of like what ISI Web of Science does).  I'm trying to get a visualization social network analysis done to give me a good sense of what the crisis management community is doing as a core section of reseasearch (via the meta tag analysis) and the core principals (via a reference analysis).

Dusting off some of my database knowledge to get started.  This is a similar problem to what Chris is dealing with, I'm going to try and work with him to get some python scripting done to get started.  I'll update on this as I go...