Words don’t make qualitative data: Conducting qualitative inquiry scientifically

1. Words don’t make qualitative data: Conducting qualitative inquiry scientifically Kakali Bhattacharya

3. Travel around the qualitative world Look through the representative samples of qualitative work. Write any questions you might have on the associated index cards.

4. Epistemology, Theory, Methodology, Methods Epistemology Theory Iterative process of qualitative inquiry Representation Methodology Analysis

5. Terrain of Qualitative Research Portions modified from Lather, P. (1991), Getting Smart. Routledge: NY

6. Understanding Various Paradigms

7. Alignment • How do I view the world? Reality? Truth? Knowledge? Rationality? • What matters to me most? Why does it matter? • The purpose of my research study is • Research questions • Theoretical framework • Research design • Data collection methods • Data analysis • Data representation EDPR 7/8561 EDPR 8562

8. What do you want to know? Suppose you want to study disenfranchisement of millions of African American people during and before the civil rights movement. Suppose you want to know the essence of people’s suffering, including what they had to endure, how they empowered themselves and organized personal and public resistance forces.

9. Suppose you are interested in studying educational policies. You have a feeling that there are certain levels of systematic discrimination in the current educational system that affect curriculum and instructional design, the quality of education, and the ways students perceive history, social sciences, culture, from mainstream dominant perspective. You are primarily interested in raising questions about issues of social justice and power in education by exploring the experiences of minority students to reveal the effects of maintaining status quo in their everyday lives. What do you want to know?

10. You are a teacher. You want to employ several interactive techniques in the classroom and see how your students learn. You want to go beyond evaluating students’ learning based on test scores. You want to be able to explore the students’ experiences are based on your interactive techniques, what they are taking away from each of the techniques, and the ways the students respond to higher level learning tasks based on the competencies you have designed for the class. What do you want to know?

11. Methods of data collection • Interviews • Conversations • Observations • Documents • Artifacts • Elicitations

12. Scientific rigor in qualitative research • Alignment • Trustworthiness • Prolonged engagement • Persistent observation • Triangulation • Peer debriefing • Negative case analysis • Referential accuracy • Member checks • Transferability • Thick description • Adequate information • Confirmability • Reflexive journaling • Audit trail • Triangulation

13. Rocking Activity • Sort these rocks into any way you like. Once done create detailed hierarchical categories of your sorting. Go beyond shapes, color, size, and type of rock. Attach more meaning to the rocks, be creative, and have fun with it. There is no right or wrong answer here. People have seen celebrity figures on the face of these rocks. People attached emotions to the rocks as rocks that are popular, happy rocks, angry rocks etc. Be prepared to share your categorization with the rest of the class when done.

14. Answering Your Questions