From conversations to focus groups, this two-day intensive will help professionals, researchers and evaluators create careful and impactful interviews.
This course is being held 'live' online via Zoom and run on Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC +11)
(Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne daylight savings time)
Please check your timezones!
From conversations to focus groups, this two-day intensive will help professionals, researchers and evaluators create careful and impactful interviews.
This course will run over 2 days with the following sessions each day:
- 9.30 am - 11.00 am - Session 1
- 11.30 am - 1.00 pm - Session 2
- 2.00 pm - 3.30 pm - Session 3
Dr Claire Farrugia is an expert in applied qualitative research, working in areas of gender-based violence, LGBTIQA+ health and wellbeing and workplace anti-racism. They have a PhD in Sociology from Macquarie University and have led large-scale, participatory projects with the Australian Human Rights Commission, Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission and other national partners. Claire brings over a decade of experience in ethical qualitative research including ethnography, interviews and focus groups and works to translate findings for policy and practice impact. They are particularly interested in the ethics of qualitative research, how to safely include the lived experience and stories of marginalised communities and how to combine academic theory with real-world practicality.
This master-class is designed for professionals, researchers and evaluators who want to deepen their skills in collecting, managing and analysing qualitative interview and focus group data. Across two interactive days, you’ll move from theory to practice—considering the politics and ethics of qualitative research while learning how to recruit, design meaningful questions, build rapport, facilitate engaging conversations and analyse your data. Interviews and focus groups can be intimidating for everyone involved. This master-class will help clarify the steps to take before, during and after engagement to maximise the quality of your work. We will look at a range of questions that arise, including: how we balance the need to fill a particular research, policy or practice gap with slow, considered and ethical engagement, how we best work with interview transcripts to bring our insights to life, how we help ensure what people share with us contributes to change. This course is for you if you:
- Are working to better understand a research or policy issue
- Want to improve your stakeholder engagement and community engagement skills
- Want to understand how interviews can contribute to evidence-based policy and practice
- Are a researcher, evaluator or policy maker or studying an honours, masters or PhD course.
Day 1 - Interviewing in context: Why we interview and what we have to consider
- Qualitative research in context: ethics, politics and researcher position
- When do we choose interviews? When do we choose focus groups?
- Planning: Recruitment, rapport and preparation
- Crafting purposeful, open-ended questions
Day 2 - Focus Groups and Data Analysis
- What makes an effective engagement?
- Transcribing and managing interview and focus group data
- Thematic analysis: from coding to interpretation
- Knowledge translation for impact
This workshop will take place online using Zoom
You will be sent two short readings to consider before hand.
There are no pre-requisites for this course but it is helpful if you have been involved, (or are in the process of creating) a project that has used interviewing, focus groups or lived experience engagement.
Recommended reading will be sent a fortnight prior to the course.
Delivery of this course is online - via Zoom.
Please ensure you have the following:
- Reliable Internet connection with at least 5Gb per day of data available (i.e. a 5 day course will use about 25Gb of data just on the Zoom application)
- A computer/laptop with the Zoom application installed (free)
- A webcam (built in to most laptops)
- A headset with a microphone (not required but ideal)
- A second monitor/screen if possible
Please also check the course page for specific software requirements (if any).