Authors of a paper published in American Psychologist (Levitt et al., 2018) have provided some guidelines and recommendations for reporting qualitative and mixed methods research and qualitative meta studies on behalf the the American Psychological Association (APA).
One of the more interesting of the recommendations in my view was that authors of qualitative research reports be provided with 10 more pages than standard guidelines. This is roughly (based on a DuckDuckGo search) 2500 more words. As a qualitative researcher/author of reports, I appreciate the idea of additional space - although if it is meant to be devoted to methods, I hope that is how authors use this. On the other hand, this seems to suggest that there is not much (or not as much) room needed to describe methods in non-quantitative studies. Given the complexity of many statistical processes, I am not entirely certain that this assumption should be generalized!
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This semester I am teaching a qualitative data analysis course with a focus on use of software or QDAS (Qualitative Data Analysis Software). One of the things I am particularly enjoying about this is that I am able to focus on the mechanics and style sof coding - by default most QDAS analysis is coding - this is what these programs were mostly set up to do and remains what they are most comfortable doing. I am not quite 1/3 of the way through the class/semester and I realized that I only barely touched on the idea of 'what should be coded?' This question came to me as I was reviewing a tutorial for HyperRESEARCH, a program I used in the past and think is among the particularly good alternatives for student researchers who are considering purchase of a user license for something. I also like the transcription software, HyperTRANSCRIBE, and know that at least one of my former students purchased this. HyperRESEARCH makes a free trial version available and has some nice coding examples. The amount of coding shown in the examples seemed just about right to me - but I wondered why I though so. So, what should be coded? How much coding is enough coding? I am going to consider this in terms of what I think of as the standard data type for qualitative research - a typed interview transcript, presented in a text or word processing file. By the way, this discussion is somewhat less relevant to classic grounded theory or any other researcher goals that incorporate a lot of reliance on the data to help define as well as refine or address the purpose.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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