Colleagues Pt 1 |
The candidate interview
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“I once had a doctoral student who as a phenomenologist,” said one of my department colleagues, managing to make the word “phenomenologist” sound like a disease that is both contagious and incurable. I think this example was offered to demonstrate our commonalities but all it did for me was to emphasize our differences.
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"I have minimal experience with statistics," the applicant to the Ph.D. program told the selection committee. "I mostly do qualitative." I kept quiet until everyone else turned to look at me, then asked, hesitantly, "What can you tell us about your experience with qualitative inquiry?" "It mostly deals with actual people," the applicant said, helpfully.
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Best of the best
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1/3 of my time
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After I heard that focus groups are the “gold standard” of qualitative inquiry, I discovered that no country currently uses a “gold standard” for currency. I now recommend people who do focus groups consider calling these the “gold medal” of qualitative inquiry, because “gold medal” is still relevant, at least for Olympic athletes and bakers.
Colleagues Pt 2
I was helping someone write a conference abstract and told him: “Your theme names look like buckets you placed around a room with holes in the roof during a rainstorm, to catch as much leakage as possible.” To my surprise, this comment inspired an interesting exchange that, I think, resulted in a really good abstract.
I liked “Underworld” myself
“Qualitative researchers can be like vampires,” I told students in a class, using this analogy to describe some exchanges between researchers and participants. A few students looked up with interest, and as I looped my scarf around my neck a second time, I wondered how old they were when the “Twilight” movie series was released.
Transcribing Pt 1
I train students every semester to transcribe data like I do using headphones and a foot pedal. They usually praise me for knowing about “new” technology. Sometimes I pretend like they’re right but other times I confess I found a Mac compatible foot pedal after I remembered seeing transcriptionists in offices during the twentieth century.
Transcribing Pt 2
When I play the tape that isn’t actually at tape, my fingers jump around the keys, my brain chases after the words until its full and I have to pause to get caught up. Then repeat. And repeat again. It can be agonizing work but it impresses other people, which makes up for a lot.
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One of my former advisees expressed negative opinions about qualitative research. She once said to me, describing a paper: “This is typical of qualitative research: reports that do not include any evidence to support the authors’ assertions.” I argued just a little, because by then I knew the conversation was not really about research methodologies.
Writing for publication
A reviewer told me once: “Eliminate first person voice to eliminate the bias in your research.” I wanted to reply: “If it was only that simple,” or “Thanks so much for this useful information,” or “The author deferred to take the reviewer’s advice,” but the editor told me to disregard the comment and I did.
Emergence“Themes emerged,” he said, and I wondered again what emergence looks like. I considered asking: “Did they rise from the data, fully formed, like Boticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus, or did they start as shapeless lumps that slowly became more recognizable, like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I didn’t.
Interpretation“So, does this NVivo program make these themes for you?” the poster judge asked. “Actually, no,” I replied. “It just helps me with data management. I came up with the theme labels by clustering similar codes, and comparing the data excerpts to summarize what I think participants meant to express.” “Thanks,” she said, walking away.
Coding (revised version)
“I used line-by-line coding,” the student said, “Because this is a grounded theory approach.” “OK,” I agreed. “But the lines are in different places when I opened the transcript on my tablet so the coding I did on my laptop is messed up,” she added. "Change the font size?" I offered, not necessarily being helpful.
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