Foundations of qualitative design: history, philosophy, nature, types, examples, and assessment. Reading and evaluating reports of qualitative research in education and identifying methodological issues.
Athena Title
Qualitative Research Tradition
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in QUAL 8400E
Prerequisite
ERSH 4200/6200 or ERSH 4200E/6200E or ERSH 4200H
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall and spring
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
Students will be able to identify and explain the range of problems addressed by qualitative research. What is qualitative research? What are the different ways it is conceptualized? How does it define problems? What are its origins?
Students will be able to reflect on their own presuppositions and subjectivities in regard to the educational research processes.
Students will be able to specify the units of analysis examined in qualitative research and the nature of the explanations generated. What kinds of human phenomena does qualitative research examine? What goals does it attempt to achieve?
Students will be able to identify the tasks and processes required to formulate appropriate research problems within educational settings, to design relevant qualitative research strategies for examining such problems, to select pertinent data sources, data collection methods, and data analysis methods, and to assess the results of such efforts.
Students will be able to examine ethical dilemmas and issues related to the research process.
Students will be able to recognize exemplars of qualitative research derived from varying approaches and traditions, identify the goals and presuppositions of these different exemplars, and critically assess the designs for their accomplishment of specified research goals.
Students will be able to develop an understanding of the relationship of educational theorizing to the research process through an examination of a variety of theoretical orientations.
Students will be able to formulate ways to compare and contrast different approaches to human inquiry: positivist, postpositivist, critical, feminist, postmodern, and others. They will be able to identify the origins and developments of these varying approaches, underlying values and assumptions, and their strengths and limitations.
Students will be able to analyze the basic assumptions and implications of the identified research traditions and specify the interrelationships among them. What assumptions about reality, knowledge, and value does each tradition entail?
Topical Outline
1. Qualitative Research: An Introduction
2. Considering Ethics
3. Considering Qualitative Research
4. Research Topics and Design
5. Constructionism, Interpretivism, Symbolic Interactionism, Grounded Theory
6. Phenomenology and Interviews
7. Book Discussion
8. Ethnography
9. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
10. Critical Inquiry and Critical Ethnography
11. The Posts (Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Postcolonialism)
12. Participatory action research/Action research
13. How do I analyze all this data? A Working Session
