Are we there yet? - Growing maturity in qualitative
tools and methods
Chris Thorn
Director, Technical Services, Winconsin Center for
Education Research
http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/people/staff.php?sid=1268
Like the children in the back seat of the family car, we've
been asking the question "Are we there yet?" for quite some
time. I'm seeing lots of signs that we have arrived.
In my area of research, Qual-Quant debates now seem old
fashioned. The American Education Research Association, for
example, has new draft "Standards for Reporting on Research
Methods" that discuss design, interpretation, and ethics
across methods. Many large scale evaluations routinely
include members with qualitative and quantitative skills
who work as a team in an iterative, interactive design.
Likewise, our tools have come of age. The CAQDAS "choosing
a package" paper outlines the growing number and increasing
sophistication of tools available. Indeed, enterprise
technologies in knowledge management and web based
collaboration are moving to link up with our tools as well.
Enterprise search and social network tools are probably the
areas in which we will encounter other social scientists
looking for us.
Multiple Perspectives : Our journey with CAQDAS
Ann Lewins & Christina Silver
Research Fellows, CAQDAS Networking Project, University of
Surrey
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/ann_lewins.htm
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/christina_silver.htm
Ann Lewins and Christina Silver have between them 21 years
experience of supporting and training researchers in the
use of a range of different software designed to support
qualitative data analysis. In this paper they discuss their
journey with the CAQDAS Networking Project. This unique
project has supported users on a worldwide basis, and
provided a forum in which the use of CAQDAS has become more
quickly widespread. They critically discuss relations over
time with different software programs (and developers!) and
their own personal and changing experiences of learning and
teaching in a close partnership. Such experiences are
coloured by the dynamics of balancing effectiveness with
demand, resources and constantly changing software. They
discuss how these elements and learning from the many
perspectives amongst researchers, has resulted in a
constant process of adjustment. In so doing, they expand on
how this has reinforced some key principles in their
thinking about CAQDAS training and use.
Many pathways, one package: using NVivo for
different methodological purposes
Pat Bazeley
Research Support Pty. Limited
http://www.researchsupport.com.au/
Farewell to the Lone Ranger? On the trend to Big
and Team research (with software, of course), and the
future of 'qualitative'
Lyn Richards
Founder of QSR
http://www.lynrichards.org/
Qualitative research is still, in most
literature, presented as a solo act – small is
written as not only beautiful but morally or
methodologically preferable. The method traditionally aims
at achievement of insight by an extraordinarily perceptive
solo researcher, creating “indepth”
understanding from small bodies of amazingly rich data.
It’s often, even usually, not like that in reality.
More obvious, in today’s academic or commercial
marketplace, are the trends to rigorous data management of
even large scale “qualitative” databases. The
blame (or much more occasionally, praise) for such changes
is normally given to software tools, which are also
expected to solve the problems. Teams are required to meet
standards set for small, “indepth” projects,
and lone researchers are under significant pressures to
perform to standards set for teams. I see this as a crisis
in the method, and one, interestingly, not noticed in the
long list of crises normally debated. What is to be done,
and can software help?