New website for Working Papers on
Handling Qualitative Data
Qualitative research notoriously lacks accounts of
process, the detailed, nitty gritty of what was done to
the data in order to arrive at the report. What's
needed, by many, especially novice researchers, is a
range of candid accounts of what happened, what worked,
what didn't and how the conclusions were reached.
Authors publishing in journals are rarely able to give a
fraction of the detail required, or a hint of the open
discussion and honest appraisal necessary for others to
learn from their successes and trials. How to provide
for such accounts?
Following discussions with many teachers and
researchers. I'm planning that the second edition of
Handling Qualitative Data will be accompanied by a
website carrying working papers on 'methods-in-practice'
reports of
qualitative research in progress. The reports
will represent a wide range of methods and
projects. They will be refereed and can be cited as
publications, but they'll be a very different sort of
publication from most journal or conference papers.
Please contribute!
Click here for details of
my call for online Methods in
Practice reports.
New places to
publish your work?
Increasingly, disciplines offer
specialist qualitative publishing outlets. Current
example is
Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management:
An International Journal, which has out a
call for papers for a special issue on
“Teaching Qualitative Research in Organization and
Management", to be edited
by:
Professor
Michael Humphreys and Dr. Mark Learmonth, University of
Nottingham, UK. Go to the
publisher's website for details.
Looking back... and forward
How can you
start a project without knowing what you will need to do
to finish it? Qualitative research has a miasma of
messages that confuse new researchers. The theory
will emerge from the data? I’ve known students wait
for months for theory to emerge. You keep reading
till it makes sense? What if it doesn’t? Just
wait and you will achieve saturation? Hmmm, as in so
many other exciting areas, how will you know if you get
there? Jan Morse and I tackled these myths in
Readme
First.
Qualitative methods have always
enjoyed the soft and fuzzy feelings of such statements,
but they are no help to desperate researchers who know
they have been entrusted with perhaps very private and
precious memories or accounts of personal experiences.
And qualitative computing of course exposed the
inadequacy of these methodological dodges. The
inadequacy of literature on
qualitative computing
is of course highly
relevant here. But I suspect that much of the practice
(or lack of practice!) blamed on software was there
before computers. Software exposed the absence of a
literature on what you would do with data if you ever
had any. In
Handling Qualitative Data,
I made a move to filling that gap.
Use the Online Resources for
starting
For a general introduction there
are many websites. A good place to start is the
ongoing research
site in
progress,
Online
QDA which already
brings together accessible explanations of methods,
research processes and software options, or the
famous QualPage,
launched in 1995 by Judy Norris and now maintained by
Jude Preissle.
These links send you to many other sources of
bibliography on qualitative work and computing. For more
sites, go to
Online Resources
