Course Book:
Creswell, J., & Poth, C. (2018). Qualitative inquiry & research design: Choosing among five approaches,
4th. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
1-Read: Creswell & Poth: Chapter 9
https://www.quia.com/files/quia/users/ewattsvp/NOTES_Creswell_Chapter_9_Qualitative_Methods
2- Read:
https://academic.oup.com/jpepsy/article/41/5/493/2579928
3-Read: Welcome to Chapter 9, writing a qualitative study. We are going to now work on bringing everything together in order to compose a document. Before considering the architecture underpinning writing qualitative studies, we need to carefully consider relevant ethical issues. In particular, we must attend to the application of appropriate reporting strategies and compliance with ethical publishing practices. Thankfully, Creswell has developed an adapted checklist from the ethical compliance checklists in order to inform writing. Thus, these are some questions that should be considered by all qualitative researchers about their study manuscripts and research proposals. Have I obtained permission for use of unpublished instruments? Procedures or data the other researchers might consider theirs? Have I properly cited other published work presented in portions of the manuscript? Am I prepared to answer questions about institutional review of my study or studies? And my prepared to answer editorial questions about the informed consent and debriefing procedures used in the study? Have all authors reviewed the manuscript and agreed on the responsibility of its content? Have I adequately protected the confidentiality of research participants, clients, patients, organizations, third parties, or others who were a source of information presented in this manuscript? Have all authors agreed to the order of authorship? And have I obtained permission for use of any copyrighted material included? Qualitative researchers today are much more self-disclosing about their qualitative writings than they were a few years ago. How we write is a reflection of our own interpretation based on the cultural, social, gender, class, and personal politics that we bring to research. Researchers may consider the following questions as a means of ensuring responsibility in qualitative writings. Should I write about what people say or recognize that sometimes they cannot remember or choose not to remember? What are my political reflexivities that need to come into my report? Has my writing connected the voices and stories of individuals back to the set of historic, structural and economic relations in which they are situated. How far should I go and theorizing the words of participants? Have I considered how my words can be used for progressive, conservative, and repressive social policies? Have I backed into the passive voice and decoupled by responsibility from my interpretation? To what extent has my analysis and writing offered an alternative to common sense or to the dominant discourse. Essentially qualitative researchers need to position themselves in their writing. This is the concept of reflexivity in which the writer engages in self understanding about the biases, values, and experiences that he or she brings to a qualitative research study. All writers write for an audience. Thus, writers consciously think about their audience or multiple audiences for their studies. Identifying target audiences helps inform choices during the writing process. And sure, how the report is structured depends on how the readers engage or intend to engage with your writing. The following questions are adapted to inform writing decisions and should be considered by all qualitative researchers about their target audiences. For what audience or audiences is a study being written? What informs these choices? What am I hoping to achieve with this report to my audience? What writing structures would my audience expect? Are there other audiences who could benefit from my learning and knowledge? How might I structure my writings to fit other audiences needs. A closely related topic, is recognizing the importance of language in shaping our qualitative texts. The words we use encode our report, revealing how we perceive the needs of our audiences. So how does one encode a qualitative narrative? Such encoding might include the following. An overall structure that does not conform to the standard qualitative or quantitative introduction, methods, results and discussion format. A writing style that is personal, familiar, perhaps up-close, highly readable, friendly, and applied for a broad audience. Our qualitative writings should strive for a persuasive effect. Readers should find the material interesting and memorable, the Grab in writing. a level of detail that makes the work come alive. A good literary study in which the writing becomes real and alive. Writing that transports the reader directly into the world of the study. Whether this world is the cultural setting of Use resistance to both the counter-cultural and the dominant culture or an immigrant students in a classroom. In addition to encoding text with the language of qualitative research, authors bring in the voice of participants in this study. There are three types of quotes that are found to be most useful. The first consist of short, eye-catching quotations. These are easy to read, take up little space and stand out from the narrator's text. And are indented to signify different perspectives. The second approach consists of embedded quotes, briefly quoted phrases within the analysis narrative These quotes, according to Richardson, prepare reader for a shift in emphasis or display a points and allow the reader and writer to move on. A third type of quote is the longer quotation used to convey more complex understandings. These are difficult to use because of space limitations and publications and because longer quotes may contain many ideas. And so the reader needs to be guided both into the quote and out of the quote to focus his or her attention on the controlling idea that the writer would like the reader to see.
4-READ: Narrative researchers are encouraged to write narrative studies that experiment with form. Researchers can come to their narrative form by first looking to their own experiences or preferences in reading, reading other narrative dissertations and books and viewing the narrative study as a back and forth writing as a process of important. Now is the close relationship between the data collection procedures, the analysis, and the form and structure of the writing report. Some characteristics associated with overall or larger writing structures of narratives include flexibility, use of three-dimensional space inquiry model, providing chronologies and reporting what participants say do and how they interact with others. The writing structures at the more micro level, known as embedded structures, relates to several elements of writing strategies the authors might use and composing a narrative study, often seen in the embedded structures is the progressive regressive method, whereby the biographer begins with a key event in the participant's life and then works forward and backward from the event. Additionally, the writing may emphasize the key event or epiphany. Moving now to phenomenological writing structures, those who write about phenomenology provide more extensive attention to overall writing structures then to embedded ones. Because phenomenology requires a highly detailed approach to analysis, there appears to be a clearly articulated procedure for organizing a report. There are three different research report recommendations provided via the text. First, Moustakas recommends, very specific chapters be crafted and the creation of a research manuscript. On the other hand, Polkinghorne offers less specific model where the researcher describes the procedures to collect data, the steps to move from the raw data to a more general description of the experience. In the third model, the study might be organized thematically. Examining essential aspects of the phenomenon under study might also be presented analytically by reworking the text data into larger ideas. Or focus narrowly on the description of particular life situation. Turning to embedded rhetorical structures, a researcher may utilize figures or tables of philosophical discussion or a creative close that speaks to the essence of the study. Oftentimes with grounded theory research, the reader emerges from the review of a particular study without a full sense of the entire project due to journal parameters. Most importantly, authors need to present the theory in any grounded theory narrative. The overall writing structure used in grounded theory research include that of May 1986, Strauss and Corbin 1990 and Charmaz 2014, which offers a less structured approach to writing the draft of a grounded theory study. There are several embedded structures used in narratives, including the extent of the analysis, which then tie into propositions. Visual diagrams that are often identified in the axial coding phase, and imparting emotions or mood into a theoretical discussion. Some ethnographies are written as realist tales, reports that provide direct matter of fact, portraits of studied cultures without much information about how the ethnographers produce these portraits. And this type of tell a writer uses a personal point of view, conveying a scientific and objective perspective. A confessional tell takes the opposite approach and the researcher focuses more on his or her fieldwork experiences than on the culture. The final type, the impressionistic tail, is a personalized account of the fieldwork case in dramatic form on a slightly different note, but yet related to the larger rhetorical structure, Wolcott provides three components of a good qualitative inquiry that are a centerpiece of good ethnographic writing as well as steps in data analysis. This includes writing a description, analyzing the data, and interpreting the meaning of the data. Another option is to develop a thematic narrative. Ethnographers use embedded rhetorical devices, such as figures of speech or tropes. You may find ethnographies to have colorful elements thick with description and extensive quotes. Essentially ethnographers tell a good story. There is no standard format for reporting case study research. Often one can open and close with a vignette, provide a detailed method of a study or an extensive description of the case and its contexts. At a more general level, reviewing the types of cases from a holistic approach and considering several possible alternative structures for composing a case study report may also be used. For instance, a linear analytic approach may be used where the researcher discusses the problem, the methods, the findings and the conclusions. Some of the specific narrative devices or embedded structures that case study writers used to mark their studies include approaching the description of the case in a chronology from a broader picture to a narrower one. That said, researchers need to be cognizant of the amount of description in their case studies versus the amount of analysis and interpretation or assertions.
5- OPEN FILE: 10 MIN INTERVIEW QUESTIONS ASSIGNMENT
THEMATIC ANALYSIS ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS
OVERVIEW
“Any researcher who wishes to become proficient at doing qualitative analysis must learn to code well and easily. The excellence of the research rests in large part on the excellence of the coding. (Strauss, 1987)
One of the most important steps in qualitative research is conducting a thematic analysis of the content in order to make sense of its meaning. The thematic analysis includes coding - a code in qualitative inquiry is most often a word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative,
salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data (Saldana, 2008). It is important to keep in mind that coding is not a precise science, rather it’s primarily an interpretive act (Saldana, 2008). Creswell & Poth (2018) recommend using lean coding – beginning with five or six categories with shorthand labels or codes and then expanding
as review and rereview of the data continues. After codes are constructed, the qualitative researcher must then classify the text or information by identifying five to seven general themes (Creswell & Poth, 2018) that allows for interpretation of the data.
INSTRUCTIONS
Using the transcription data from the 10-minute interview assignment, complete the following:
Content
• Read the transcripts in their entirety several times – get a sense of the interview before
breaking it into parts.
o Consider writing notes or memos in the margins.
• Develop codes that represent the data.
o Begin with 5 – 6 and expand to no more than 25 – 30 after reviewing the data
several times.
• Identify 5 – 6 themes from the codes.
o These are broad units of information that consist of several codes aggregated to
form a common idea.
• Create a codebook (see Creswell & Poth (2018), Table 8.4 for example).
o Include the following variables: themes, code names, definitions, criteria guiding
use, example segments of text from the study.
• Written explanation and interpretation of the data (2 – 4 pages in length).
o Abstracting out beyond the codes and themes to the larger meaning of the data.
o Provide a written explanation of how you interpret the meaning of the data based
on the identified themes.
? Include evidence to support your interpretations.
Structure
• Codebook in table format
o Includes a minimum of 5 variables
o Length (varies depending on number of identified themes and codes)
• Written explanation of interpretations of data:
o Length (3 – 5 pages, not including a title page or works cited)
o Format: APA; 12-point Times New Roman; double-spacing
o Accepted sources: peer-reviewed journals, textbooks
Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.
Creswell, J., & Poth, C. (2018). Qualitative inquiry & research design: Choosing among five approaches,
4th. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Saldana, J. (2008). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. London, UK: Sage.
Strauss, A. (1987). Qualitative analysis for social scientist. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.