Planning your qualitative research journey: key skills, practices and considerations

By the end of the course participants will be able to:

• Plan a qualitative research project;
• Develop appropriate research questions;
• Focus a literature review to ensure it is efficient and effective;
• Understand qualitative methodologies and their underlying assumptions;
• Make appropriate choices around data collection and analytic methods to meet research objectives
• Use Quirkos to manage and analyse all qualitative materials in a project; including literature, primary and secondary data, and researcher notes.

Day 1

We begin discussing qualitative research design, the role of planning and developing research questions within methodological contexts. We move on to consider reviewing literature as a form of qualitative data analysis and experiment with different review methods through the use of software tools. We then consider the range of data collection methods, from working with existing qualitative materials (including online and archival data) and ways of generating qualitative materials for your project (e.g. via interviews, observations, focus-group discussions etc). This includes generating topic guides and methods of transcription (including recent advances in automated transcription).

Day 2

We consider the range of qualitative data analysis methods, grounding them in the methodological contexts discussed on Day 1. We put inductive, deductive and combined approaches to qualitative coding into practice and consider the role of memo-ing in interpretive processes. We cover data organisation and management and how demographic and other features in data can be captured. We then pull these building blocks together to explore patterns and relationships within qualitative data and how to write-up, present and share findings.

Throughout the two days we interweave hands-on exercises using qualitative software tools to bring aspects of the qualitative research journey into focus and to reflect on the relationship between strategies (what we plan to do) and tactics (how we plan to do it). For this workshop we use the software Quirkos, but the principles and skills learnt are transferable to doing qualitative research using pen-and-paper methods or other qualitative software programs. Framed by the qualitative research journey, we focus on key skills through an in-depth combination of discussion, demonstration and hands-on practical exercises, with signposting to supplementary resources to augment the topics covered and extend learning.

Presentations, demonstrations, guided hands-on exercises, independent hands-on work.

None.

There is no required pre-course reading. However, the following might be helpful resources with your further work with NVivo:

• Silver, C., & Lewins, A. (2014). Using software in qualitative research: A step-by-step guide (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.