The ACSPRI website has been updated. Please contact us by email, phone or using the chat function icon on the bottom right of the page if you have any difficulties navigating the site.
Introduction to Qualitative Research
This is an introductory unit for individuals with limited or no previous experience with qualitative traditions or techniques of inquiry.
Instructor
Dr Emma Mitchell is a Macquarie University Research Fellow in the Macquarie School of Communications, Society and Culture. She is an experienced teacher and has taught undergraduate, postgraduate, and intensive Bloc mode courses at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University. Emma has designed and convened undergraduate and specialist courses on qualitative inquiry in the social sciences and conducted qualitative research across multiple ARC and partner-funded projects. Emma's research has used inclusive methodologies to explore culturally and linguistically diverse contexts of poverty, welfare, and housing precarity, with a focus on the everyday forms of care that enable survival and make life liveable in hardship. Her current research uses child-focused, creative methods to investigate how children’s care activities help sustain low-income families.
Course Level
In this course you will learn about all elements of the qualitative research process and how they are interrelated. We will unpack the key components of qualitative research design, including the stances and theories that underpin qualitative methodologies, as well as techniques of data collection and analysis. We pay particular attention to what’s involved in ethically employing popular methods such as interviewing and observation. We also address the practical and ethical considerations of online methods, given the growing uptake of remote research during the coronavirus pandemic.
The course combines lectures covering foundational issues with practical workshops that give you a chance to practice qualitative techniques first-hand.
The target audience for this course is those who would like to become more familiar with qualitative research techniques, from postgraduate university students and staff to researchers in government and private organisations.
Day 1
- Situating qualitative inquiry in the social sciences.
- Designing qualitative methodologies: frames, methods, and issues.
- The politics and ethics of qualitative research.
Day 2
- Situating the researcher in the field: the researcher as instrument.
- Planning and conducting in-depth interviews: forms of interview, rapport, phrasing questions, probing).
- Group interviews: composition, structure, facilitation.
Day 3
- Observational practices: forms of observation, what to look for, writing field notes.
- Unobtrusive methods: access, interpretation, online data.
- Online research methods: doing research in a pandemic, tools, engaging participants.
Day 4
- Handling data: an iterative approach, preliminary data analysis, data storage.
- Data analysis: inductive logic, generating meaning.
- Using computer software in qualitative analysis
- Coding systems and cycles. Thematic analysis
Day 5
- Analysis continued: Discourse analysis.
- Writing up: The purpose of qualitative writing.
- Presenting data: audience and purpose/voice and style.
- Criteria for assessing good qualitative research.
There are no prerequisites for this course.
Other reading that may be useful:
- Creswell, J. (2016) 30 Essential Skills for the Qualitative Researcher, Sage: Thousand Oaks.
- Tracy, S.J. (2013) Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting evidence, crafting analysis and communicating impact, Wiley-Blackwell: West Sussex.
The instructor's course notes will serve as the course text. These will be provided to you on your first day.
New to Qual Research, so coming with a clean state. Leaving feeling that I am competent to commence projects to offer knowledge within a team structure.
Applied learning, individually and in group setting. Allowed sharing of ideas, encouraged group participation. Theory supported by practical exercises, include different learning studies.
Excellent practice combined with theory & awesome teacher!
Consolidated prior knowledge, allowed for discussions regarding research projects, allowed an understanding to develop beyond what had been read in texts.
We had equal balanced of lectures discussions group activity, individual activity, interactions
The course gave me great understanding of qualitative aspect of my research how to do interviews, how to do analysis.