Salsa Magic

MacMoto

MacMoto

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My hubby stumbled upon an academic article titled:

Salsa Magic: An Exploratory Netnographic Analysis of the Salsa Experience
(Kathy Hamilton, Paul Hewer (2009), Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36)

The authors are former colleagues of my hubby's, but not salsa dancers themselves as far as he knows. I thought the article may interest other SFers, not least because it heavily draws on the discussions taking place here at SF.

Quote from the article's methodology section:

The material presented in this paper was collected through a netnographic analysis of an online salsa forum (http://www.salsaforums.com). Drawing on the excellent work of Kozinets (1997, 1998, 2001, 2002) we argue that a netnographic analysis is able to transcend the ‘limits of asking’ through observation of people’s talk. Salsaforum is an international forum that attracts people from all over the world. The forum began in February 2004 and a testament to its growing popularity is the fact that there are now 3382 registered users, who have made a total of 74638 postings since its outset. Members vary dramatically in the usage of the forum; some have not made any postings and the most active user has made a total of 7265 posts, averaging 4.92 posts per day (figures correct on 14 March 2008 ). The forum provides an arena for members to discuss salsa music, share salsa video clips, announce events and offer reviews of salsa clubs, DVDs etc. For our analysis, we focused on the “Just Dance” section of the forum. There are a total of 1750 discussion threads in this section of the forum covering a wide range of salsa dance issues. Some threads only receive a few replies while others have received almost 1000 replies. Interpretation was constructed around moving between individual postings, chunks of postings, entire discussion threads and the emergent understanding of the complete data set (de Valck 2007). In addition, our interpretation of the Salsa experience is also aided by knowledge gained through participant observation and interviews. The posting presented at the beginning of the paper highlights a number of issues that will now be explored. Specifically the findings are organised into three key experiential themes: the first exploring the salsa experience; followed by understanding the “magic” of the salsa dance floor; finally, we explore the apparent interaction between the music, the self and the body engendered by the salsa experience.
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You can download the paper from
w w w. acrwebsite.org/volumes/display.asp?id=14424
 
Amusing - online conversations being used instead of live interviews as data. A bit fluffy - all sorts of conclusions could have been cherry-picked. I wonder how rigorous their research was (i.e. did they scan through all of "Just Dance" at the very least)?

I was also amused to have noticed a mistake in their references: Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction was published in 1984 not 1992 :nope:; I have the book somewhere in storage - just like most my non-essential possessions :lol:.
 
I read most of the paper and loved it!

I sent both authors an invitation to discuss it over the air. This might be a bit difficult since they are in the U.K., but I remain hopeful.
 
So we're discussing a paper based on our discussions. Then someone else could write another paper on this thread, and the process could go on forever.:)
 
Both of the authors, Kathy Hamilton and Paul Hewer, have doctorates and their paper is very professionally done.
 
El Caobo said:
Both of the authors, Kathy Hamilton and Paul Hewer, have doctorates and their paper is very professionally done.
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Yes an no. Their theoretical arguments are, in my estimation, valid. To the extent hat they treat salsaforums as representative of salsa, however, there is a problem. They seem to conflate the attitude of posting here on SF with attitudes in salsa altogether, for instance, when in point of fact the friendly and supportive atmosphere they discuss is a complex result of both self-selection and SF policies.

As such, the analysis provided really only speaks to those posting in "Just Dance," on SF, with all of the limitations that implies. Does this provide rich theoretical ground for thinking about the role of salsa (and dance) in the ways they suggest? Absolutely. Does their article acurately speak to non-SFers experiences of salsa? Perhaps... but that is not substantiated by the materials, and would require additional research.

I still think this is a nice piece, and would be interested in more details of their analytical methodolgy (i.e. I'm wanting to know if/how their "Netnographic Analysis" is more rigorous than simply choosing the posts they'd like to discuss).
 
I hadn't heard of the word "netnography" before. Interesting idea. I think the true sample size on salsaforums is too small for an online community. Although there are 3000+ registered users, the highly active participants are probably only 50 or so.

If I had wanted to draw conclusions from online discussion forums I would have selected Mac User forums or such. The top posters on forums like that have 100,000+ posts!!!! and there are tens of thousands of active participants.

Its still fun though to bring salsa into that context and way more fun than problems with a computer.
 
SDsalsaguy said:
Yes an no. Their theoretical arguments are, in my estimation, valid. To the extent hat they treat salsaforums as representative of salsa, however, there is a problem. They seem to conflate the attitude of posting here on SF with attitudes in salsa altogether, for instance, when in point of fact the friendly and supportive atmosphere they discuss is a complex result of both self-selection and SF policies.

As such, the analysis provided really only speaks to those posting in "Just Dance," on SF, with all of the limitations that implies. Does this provide rich theoretical ground for thinking about the role of salsa (and dance) in the ways they suggest? Absolutely. Does their article acurately speak to non-SFers experiences of salsa? Perhaps... but that is not substantiated by the materials, and would require additional research.

I still think this is a nice piece, and would be interested in more details of their analytical methodolgy (i.e. I'm wanting to know if/how their "Netnographic Analysis" is more rigorous than simply choosing the posts they'd like to discuss).
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Excellent points - I couldn’t have said some of your points better.

I think it would be difficult to make this type of study anything but anecdotal even if they contain elements of truth. Then again, this is problem in much of social sciences in my understanding.

My gut instinct suggests that euphoric effects (assuming real and disregarding underlying reasons) of Salsa dancing could be gotten from other partner dances. If so, would investigators come to a similar conclusion examining Ballroom Dance section of danceforums.com, which has somewhat larger number of posts and members?

I don’t know as much about other dance worlds of course. Is social dancing is as important in Ballroom as it is in Salsa or Argentine Tango, which I’m under the impression has as strong emphasis on social dancing as Salsa (except it’s probably not danced by as many people as Salsa)? Frequency of partner switching can be quite different among difference dances, no?
 
SDsalsaguy said:
Yes an no. Their theoretical arguments are, in my estimation, valid. To the extent hat they treat salsaforums as representative of salsa, however, there is a problem. They seem to conflate the attitude of posting here on SF with attitudes in salsa altogether, for instance, when in point of fact the friendly and supportive atmosphere they discuss is a complex result of both self-selection and SF policies.

As such, the analysis provided really only speaks to those posting in "Just Dance," on SF, with all of the limitations that implies. Does this provide rich theoretical ground for thinking about the role of salsa (and dance) in the ways they suggest? Absolutely. Does their article acurately speak to non-SFers experiences of salsa? Perhaps... but that is not substantiated by the materials, and would require additional research.

I still think this is a nice piece, and would be interested in more details of their analytical methodolgy (i.e. I'm wanting to know if/how their "Netnographic Analysis" is more rigorous than simply choosing the posts they'd like to discuss).
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Good points!
 
SDsalsaguy said:
I still think this is a nice piece, and would be interested in more details of their analytical methodolgy (i.e. I'm wanting to know if/how their "Netnographic Analysis" is more rigorous than simply choosing the posts they'd like to discuss).
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Thank you so much! I thought it was just me, that I'm just too used to dealing with pages and pages of regressions and can't handle a plain text, and that this was why I missed their point...
Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in the "absolute power of regressions" or "pseudo-analytical modelling" of problems that are just not supposed to be modelled, but I'd appreciate to know about the background of statements like "...Salsa culture has always offered a rich and fertile ground for the transcendence of cultural forms..." (p. 17).

I admit though, there's a lot I have to learn about scientific writing. Maybe it's just a naive view of someone who's still "practicing" :-)
 
Will have to read the paper later. I have to say I liked their approach. Even though the active posters in Just Dance section are self-selected and not representative of all the salsa dancers I still think a proper approach can glean very useful information of salsa dance culture. I am assuming that the information being sought is subjective. Intuitively I also think that even if the number of posters is very small compared to the number of salsa dancers worldwide, I don't see that as a limitation. We make many observations, provide opinions, make guesstimates, etc. As an aggregate they do present a pretty accurate picture of the salsa dance culture. What I am interested is how their model will give greater weight to reasonable opinions/observation (something most posters agree with) and less weight to opinions/observations that fall towards the extremities. Something like that will need massively sophisticated natural language programming intelligence to parse, interpret and extract useful information from thousands of postings.
 
I wonder how they treated posts that get very few replies but a lot of views. I'm curious to see someone come up with a generalized interpretation of that effect. But, yeah, working in the life sciences, I consider everything without real-life precise measurement/observation to be "fluffy". That doesn't make it inconsequential or not interesting to read, though.
 
antigone said:
But, yeah, working in the life sciences, I consider everything without real-life precise measurement/observation to be "fluffy".
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That would make a lot of theoretical physics "fluffy", including at one time Einstein's general theory of relativity too :) The theory for a long time was just a set of equations without any real-life precise measurement/observation (through an experiment) to back it up :razz: Let's not even get started on the fluffy quantum mechanics :nope:
 
I'm still working on "digesting" the entire paper, but I'm assuming that they did their due diligence to create a paper that addresses all the concerns here. Considering that they both have doctorates, I tend to want to believe that they have approached the paper properly. However, I also know that some parts of it will be more subjective than others.
 
Offbeat said:
That would make a lot of theoretical physics "fluffy", including at one time Einstein's general theory of relativity too :) The theory for a long time was just a set of equations without any real-life precise measurement/observation (through an experiment) to back it up :razz: Let's not even get started on the fluffy quantum mechanics :nope:
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I thought physics, math etc. use the term "fuzzy" not "fluffy" and how about the two-handed economists ? They always get it right, but on the other hand...
 
antigone said:
I consider everything without real-life precise measurement/observation to be "fluffy".
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Social scientists are supposed to use statistics to support any conclusions that reach beyond the study subjects otherwise its just anecdotes. The statistics of life science measurements are not so different. We make assumptions, test hypothesis and are proven wrong more often than not. If it were not so we'd all be unemployed by now as all questions would already have answers.

oops, now we need philosophers to untie this knot.
 
bailar y tocar said:
I thought physics, math etc. use the term "fuzzy" not "fluffy"
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I believe you are quite right there. I would recommend fuzzy logic for your reasoning - it's so much more forgiving, even after a few drinks :D
But make sure you stay clear from rough sets theory - we would prefer something more refined to match our fancy salsa outfits, wouldn't we? :nope:
 
bailar y tocar said:
Social scientists are supposed to use statistics to support any conclusions that reach beyond the study subjects otherwise its just anecdotes. The statistics of life science measurements are not so different. We make assumptions, test hypothesis and are proven wrong more often than not. If it were not so we'd all be unemployed by now as all questions would already have answers.

oops, now we need philosophers to untie this knot.
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but in general life sciences (and chemistry..fine, physics too :) ) use precise, unambiguous measurements, which are as objective as measurements involving humans can be. Social sciences, on the other hand, use more "creative" endpoints, which can have a lot more possible interpretations.
 
bailar y tocar said:
I thought physics, math etc. use the term "fuzzy" not "fluffy" and how about the two-handed economists ? They always get it right, but on the other hand...
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I stopped at quantum mechanics and now you want bring in fuzzy logic?..that would be "parafluffy" :) The subject of economy is not an exact science so it can be as "fluffy" as it wants :P
 
antigone said:
but in general life sciences (and chemistry..fine, physics too :) ) use precise, unambiguous measurements, which are as objective as measurements involving humans can be. Social sciences, on the other hand, use more "creative" endpoints, which can have a lot more possible interpretations.
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May be because some disciplines (like social sciences) mostly study "subjective" matters. You can only apply probability measures (as oppose to precise) if dealing with things subjective.

Even in case where the things are finitely countable (e.g. census, population numbers) it has been shown that smaller statistical sampling yields accurate count compared to actual door-to-door count undertaken.

"Theory of Evolution" is just a theory and can't be proven according to Creationists (and they are kind of right in that). Yet its ability to accurately explain facts observed in the world is what makes it acceptable.
 
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