International Journal of Qualitative Methods: ARCHIVE
Not a member yet
403 research outputs found
Sort by
Why Study People’s Stories? The Dialogical Ethics of Narrative Analysis
No full textNarrative analysis is presented as continuous with personal storytelling in the work of remoralizing what Weber identified as disenchanted modernity. Critics of contemporary storytelling seem to misunderstand what kind of authenticity of self is expressed in stories. Against those whom Charles Taylor calls "knockers" of the idea of personal authenticity, this article affirms authenticity, but in terms that are dialogical: authenticity is created in the process of storytelling, it is not a precondition of the telling, and authenticity remains in process. This authenticity is shown to have an affinity with democratic politics, in contrast to the neo-liberal affinity of the knocker position
Ethical Issues in Qualitative E-Learning Research
No full textIn the mid 1980s education researchers began exploring the use of the Internet within teaching and learning practices, now commonly referred to as e-learning. At the same time, many e-learning researchers were discovering that the application of existing ethical guidelines for qualitative research was resulting in confusion and uncertainty among both researchers and ethics review board members. Two decades later we continue to be plagued by these same ethical issues. On reflection on our research practices and examination of the literature on ethical issues relating to qualitative Internet- and Web-based research, the authors conclude that there are three main areas of confusion and uncertainty among researchers in the field of e-learning: (a) participant consent, (b) public versus private ownership, and (c) confidentiality and anonymity
Objections in Research Interviewing
No full textIn this article the author argues that research interviewing can be a form of research practice in which the subjects of study can object to the researcher’s questions and the interview’s theme. Researchers performing qualitative interviews should pay particular attention to situations where interviewees object to what we think, say, and write about them. The author draws on empirical examples where the objections and hesitations voiced by the interviewees toward the interviewer’s questions became part of reconsidering the initial theoretical concepts guiding the research process. She argues that the interviewer should not provoke such situations but, rather, be sensitive enough to remain open to the possibility that the interviewee might feel a need to object to or refuse the researcher’s interpretations. When this happens, it can allow for a fruitful exploration of the theme of conversation and the researcher’s agenda
Sampling Hurdles: “Borderline Illegitimate” to Legitimate Data
No full textIn this paper the author discusses how sampling access and recruitment problems encountered in an in-depth interview study heightened her sensitivity to “borderline illegitimate” data. The term illegitimate data usually refers to the data collected during a covert study, whereas “legitimate” data are collected during an overt study. Hence, data collected during any nonconsented period(s) of an overt study lie on the borderline of illegitimacy and legitimacy, and constitute what the author calls borderline illegitimate data. Such data need legitimization before use. The borderline illegitimate data were collected during the pre- and postinterview stages of her study as they explained how medical and ethnic cultures and sensitivity to racism as a topic combined to create sample recruitment difficulties of the study. The author later legitimized them by sharing them with the participants, guaranteeing anonymity, and asking their permission to use them
Getting Started: Initiating Critical Ethnography and Community-Based Action Research in a Program of Rural Health Studies
No full textRural populations experience higher rates of illness, less access to health care resources, and lower rates of health insurance coverage than do urban populations. A need exists to identify and address the health care needs of rural communities and other isolated populations and to contextualize the findings in the larger rural health environment. Critical ethnography combined with community-based action research is a constructive approach for improving the health status of rural elders as well as other members of isolated communities. Detailed guidelines on how to initiate an ethnographic community-based action study, as shown through a study that explores the definitions of health, health care perceptions, and health care issues for rural elders in the southwestern United States, highlight the value of this type of research for the study of the health care issues of rural populations
Qualitative Inquiry as Gegenwerk: Connections Between Art and Research
No full textIn this article, the authors apply the findings of research into transitional processes in the arts to a consideration of qualitative research. They identify and describe four types of transitional practice: the transferential, the transformational, the transpositional, and the transgressional. Transitional practices in both art and research are found to be dialectical, involving presencing and absencing, doing and undoing, and repetition with modifications, and to produce provisional or transitional outcomes. Such practices enable both artists and researchers to manage tangled connections, juxtapositions, intertwinings, overlappings, and dislocations. Research is therefore not a simple linear process but, like (other) artistic processes, involves absencing, transformation, and redetermination as processes of emergent disclosure. Transitional practices therefore involve “work against the work”: Gegenwerk. An understanding of, and training in, such practices has the potential to develop quality, reflexivity, and criticality in both the undertaking and the reading of qualitative research
Clipping and Coding Audio Files: A Research Method to Enable Participant Voice
No full textQualitative researchers have long used ethnographic methods to make sense of complex human activities and experiences. Their blessing is that through them, researchers can collect a wealth of raw data. Their challenge is that they require the researcher to find patterns and organize the various themes and concepts that emerge during the analysis stage into a coherent narrative that a reader can follow. In this article, the authors introduce a technology-enhanced data collection and analysis method based on clipped audio files. They suggest not only that the use of appropriate software and hardware can help in this process but, in fact, that their use can honor the participants’ voices, retaining the original three-dimensional recording well past the data collection stage
Role Relationships in Research: Noticing an Elephant
No full textUsing a collaborative writing process, three researchers reflect on their role relationships as researchers engaged together in a classroom study. Researcher role relationships are revealed to be complex, multifaceted, and implicated in every choice and act on a moment-by-moment basis in the classroom and in the processes of the research. Personal dilemmas of role choices and power differentials, including how the power shifted according to what they chose to value and who could influence the classroom drama, are some of the role relationship themes that emerged. The improvisation of researcher role is theorizing situated in praxis
The Analytic Challenge in Interpretive Description
No full textThe past decade has witnessed remarkable evolution within qualitative health research as scholars have moved beyond initial adherence to the specific methods of phenomenology, grounded theory, and ethnography to develop methods more responsive to the experience-based questions of interest to a practice-based discipline. Interpretive description (Thorne, Reimer Kirkham, & MacDonald-Emes, 1997) is an inductive analytic approaches designed to create ways of understanding clinical phenomena that yield applications implications. In this article, we further develop our understanding of this methodological alternative by elaborating on the objective and mechanisms of its analytic processes and by expanding our consideration of its interpretive products
Exploring Risky Youth Experiences: Popular Theatre as a Participatory, Performative Research Method
No full textThis article discusses a Popular Theatre project with a group of high school drama students in a rural Alberta community. As a research method, Popular Theatre draws on traditions in participatory research and performance ethnography. In our project, entitled “Life in the Sticks,” based on students’ initial claims that their issues were determined by their rural environment, Popular Theatre was a way to collectively draw out, represent and question their experiences through theatrical means. Our process helped students re-examine their beliefs and helped me reframe the notion “at-risk” to include the perceptions of youth. Popular Theatre is shown to be an effective pedagogical tool and research method in the new insights and critical understandings it yielded