PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

AM Pre-Conference Workshops (8:30-11:30am)

 1. "Doing Situational Maps", Adele E. Clarke

   Situational analysis is a new method of analysis for qualitative research that can be used with interview, ethnographic, historical, visual, and/or other discursive materials, especially useful for multi-site research. There are three main cartographic approaches:

 (1) Situational maps that lay out the major human, nonhuman, discursive and other elements in the research situation of inquiry and provoke analysis of relations among them;

 (2) Social worlds/arenas maps that lay out the collective actors, key nonhuman elements, and the arena(s) of commitment and discourse within which they are engaged in ongoing negotiations---mesolevel interpretations of the situation;

 (3) Positional maps that lay out the major positions taken, and not taken, in the discursive data vis-à-vis particular axes of difference, concern, and controversy around issues in the situation of inquiry.

    Through mapping the data, the analyst constructs the situation of inquiry empirically. The situation per se becomes the ultimate unit of analysis and understanding its elements and their relations is the primary goal.

    This workshop will focus on the first kind of map, the situational map. It can be used to design and conduct research in a flexible and iteratively responsive manner across the duration of the project. That is, the situational map can be reconstructed over time to specify the emergent elements in the research situation of concern about which data have been and still need to be gathered. The maps thus capture and frame the messy complexities of the situation in their dense relations and permutations, and intentionally work against the usual simplifications so characteristic of scientific work. They also allow design from the outset to explicitly gather data about theoretically and substantively underdeveloped areas that may lie in situations of inquiry.

     Participants are encouraged (but not required) to come to the workshop with a draft map and be prepared to discuss it in the group. The workshop goal is to help participants get a strong grip on the situation they are studying.

    See www.situationalanalysis.com for more information on SA. 

 

 2. "Writing Lives and Writing Deaths", Laurel Richardson

    Life and Living and Death and Dying are the "content" of this workshop. The theoretics of post structuralilsm are its "process." Because of my experiences/decisions about writing Death of a Friend: A Journal, I wanted to create a workshop in which researchers/writers could explore there writing processes, especially when friends or family were the "subjects."

 In this workshop we will:

 (1) Viscerally explore the "Problem" of reducing/selecting what "data" to report;

 (2) Discuss ethical, emotional, and epistemological issues around writing about lives and deaths;

 (3) Experiment with sharing and then altering our own writing;

 (4) Create a co-constructed narrative and perform.

 3. "New Experimental Writing Forms", Yvonna Lincoln

 4. "New Indirections for Qualitative Research", Ian Stronach, Jo Frankham, Dean Garratt & Heather Piper

    This workshop will address the hygienic, or ‘clean’ ambitions of qualitative research methodologies. It will problematise these methodologically cleansing acts, and seek to deconstruct the processes through which sanitised accounts of methodology are produced and disseminated as scientific or at least properly systematic rationales and procedures. A key focus in the workshop will be to address notions of reflexivity, in order to work out the extent to which reflexivity replaces objectivity as a proper ambition. And also the danger of reflexivity making its own covert claims to proper procedure. The workshop will consider improper strategies of data-gathering and interpretation, such as serendipity, analogy, extrapolation, and speculation. These sorts of manoeuvre, bereft of certainty, systematicity, or a priori justification will be examined through a consideration, amongst others, of art interpretation, drawing on Van Gogh, Velasquez, and the Congolese artist Tshibumba. 

    The workshop will be interactive, and enrolment is restricted to 25 in order to faciltate such interaction.

 5. "The Critical Use of Focus Groups", Gregory Dimitriadis and George Kamberelis

 6. "Doing Collective Biography", Bronwyn Davies

    In this workshop I will introduce participants to collective biography as a mode of doing research. In collective biography a group of researchers works together on a particular topic, drawing on their own memories relevant to that topic, and through the shared work of telling and listening and writing, they move beyond the clichés and usual explanations to the point where the written memories come as close as they can make them to “an embodied sense of what happened”. In working in this way we do not take memory to be “reliable” in the sense of providing an unquestionable facticity, nor do we take what initially surfaces as being truer, or more valid, than the texts that are worked and reworked in this approach. We take the talk around our memories, the listening to the detail of each other’s memories, as a technology for enabling us to produce, through attention to the embodied sense of being in the remembered moment, a truth in relation to what cannot actually be recovered -- the moment as it was lived. This is not a naïve, naturalistic truth, but a truth that is worked on through a technology of telling, listening and writing. In a sense it is the very unreliability of memory that enables this close discursive work.

    With a maximum of twelve participants I will engage in the story-telling-writing-reading-rewriting process. Participants are encouraged to read in preparation:

    Davies, B. and Gannon, S. (2006) Doing Collective Biography. Maidenhead, Open University Press. 

 7. "State of the Art: The Latest in Qualitative Software Advances", Ray Maietta and Cesar Cisneros

    This session is based on the premise that the use of qualitative software does not threaten the methodological integrity of qualitative researchers’ work.  Highlighting both innovative and classic features of ATLAS.ti,  HyperRESEARCH, MAXqda, and NVIVO we demonstrate how off-screen manual methods used to analyze qualitative data can be employed and enhanced with qualitative software. 

Areas of focus include:

        1. Variety of data formats

        2. Episode Profiles

        3. Memo writing as stand alone method

        4. Codebook and theme evolution

        5. Strategies for data review and presentation

 

Ray Maietta

Dr. Raymond C. Maietta is president of ResearchTalk Inc., a qualitative research consulting company in Bohemia, New York.  A Ph.D. sociologist from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Ray's interests in the art of qualitative research methods motivated him to start ResearchTalk in 1996.  ResearchTalk Inc. provides advice on all phases of qualitative analysis to university, government, not-for-profit and corporate researchers. Work with ResearchTalk clients using qualitative software informs recent publications: "Systematic Procedures of Inquiry and Computer Data Analysis Software for Qualitative Research"  (co-authored with John Creswell, Handbook of Research Design and Social Measurement, Sage 2002) and "State of the Art: Integrating Software with Qualitative Analysis" (in Leslie Curry, Renee Shield and Terrie Wetle, (Eds.) Applying Qualitative and Mixed Methods in Aging and Public Health Research. Washington, DC: American Public Health Association and the Gerontological Society of America 2006).

Ray's work invites interactions with researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds.  He is an active participant at conferences around the country including invited presentations at American Evaluation Association, American Anthropological Association, and American Sociological Association.

 

 8. "In the PARticulars: Critical dilemmas and radical possibilities of participatory action research", Caitlin Cahill, Brett Stoudt, Maria Elena Torre and Eve Tuck

    The late Cynthia Chataway aptly described participatory action research (PAR) as more of a stance/posture toward research than a method because PAR can employ qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods,  be initiated by community members or academics, involve affected persons as equal partners or advisors and vary in other attributes from one research context to the next (Chataway, 2001). As an approach to research PAR explicitly attends to the political aspects of the research process and aims to produce knowledge and action that is directly useful to participants. PAR also fosters critical consciousness and self-determination by engaging participants in an in depth process of self awareness through collective inquiry and reflection (Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991; Reason, 1994).  Participatory Action Research as an epistemology and a politic (Fine, Tuck, Zeller-Berkman, 2006) can yield complex and rich data and / but at the same time, unforeseen dilemmas and learnings beyond imagination.  Citing the need for researchers to engage with one another around the practice and theory of PAR, this proposed session will feature the on-the-ground experiences of six researchers from six distinct research projects. 

    Participatory action research is a stance rooted in the belief that knowledge is produced in collaboration and in action: that those “studied” have knowledge and must be repositioned as subjects, architects, of research. This session, drawing from feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and Indigenous theorists will speak to the methods and ethics of PAR, the heart of which lies in the understanding that people—especially those who have experienced historic oppression—hold deep knowledge about their lives and experiences, and should help shape the questions, frame the interpretations and style the research products that ultimately affect them most intimately (Fine and Torre, 2006).

    Further, those in the session who do PAR with young people will speak to the ways in which repositioning youth as researchers rather than the “researched” in youth PAR, shifts the practice of researching on youth to with youth—a position that stands in sharp contrast to the current neo-liberal constructions of youth as dangerous, apathetic, empty receptacles, lacking connection, in need of product “branding,” or as blind consumers. The majority of the youth in these projects live largely hyphenated lives that all too often are relegated to society’s margins, and thus they bring a knowledge, critique and perspective crucial to the scientific rigor of the research (Fine and Torre, 2006; Torre and Cahill, 2005).

    As with all social movements, and all research approaches, PAR carries questions of ethics, vulnerabilities, and negotiations of power. The dynamics vary based on the nature of the work, the situatedness of the struggle and launching site for the research. Methods and strategic moves differ when PAR emerges from within community organizing, where allies and targets are clear, in contrast to PAR launched centrally from within inequitable (schools) or oppressive (prisons) social institutions (Fine and Torre, 2006).

    PAR takes theory, practice, politics and action seriously. The research community is often diverse and, by definition, grounded in local politics. Toward this end, PAR is designed to reveal the rhythms of injustice and those spots of possibility, extraordinary spaces where radical practice could/does take place.

    PAR with those exploited by hierarchies of domination and institutional and policy dysfunction, is work that can make the heart break and also soar. The panelists will share real examples of the painful yet inspiring nature of PAR, pointing to the ways in which PAR can expose and redress lived oppression toward the practice of freedom. Panelists will detail the critical dilemmas and radical possibilities of PAR in the following ways:

    1. The dilemma of the promise of confidentiality, which often disproportionately protects the power of already powerful institutions, exposes a murky terrain of ethics that demand reflection. PAR that refuses to colonize or commodify community knowledge is a site of possibility for previously uneven protection offered by promises of confidentiality.

    2. PAR research design exposes the structural inadequacies that are the very focus of inquiry, often hastening close encounters with structural racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia for researchers in a PAR collective. From this emerges a series of dilemmas related to critically engaging in mainstream perceptions that cast people of color, women, youth, and poor people as the problem—as dysfunctional, damaged, and hopeless. Still, PAR provides the possibility to revise, refute, and revolt against perceptions that disparage oppressed communities.

    3. Published descriptions of PAR and finished products of PAR rarely reveal the ethical bumps and bruises in doing the work—a dilemma in the portrayals of PAR that smooth over the significant ethical conflicts, exposed vulnerabilities, and contestations over interpretation and representation, some the very possibilities for needed change.

    4. A dilemma arises when doing PAR in a community or institution that, because it has for so long benefited by the status quo, is adverse to change. However, radical possibilities are in the hard-to-ignore data that PAR cultivates.

    5. Institutional barriers provide a series of dilemmas for those seeking to do PAR in prisons, and for those on the inside who are researchers. These dilemmas, while exposing where PAR can and cannot go, yield to the possibilities of the politics of PAR.

   6. PAR as a non-linear stance, practice, and politic can be misunderstood by those who wish to contain the ‘action’ components to one contained stage of the process. This spiral or cyclical quality of PAR can be experienced as a dilemma to new researchers, but embracing action as embedded throughout PAR renders possibilities for data collection, impact, and the nature of social change.

  These "cases" will detail the provocative dilemmas uncovered by PAR, and the ways in which the alchemy of PAR can work to generate new interpretations, new paths, and new possibilities.

 9. "Picture your data: Learn about new perspectivs for your QDA", Anne Kuckartz

    This workshop; will be an introduction to the new version of the Qualitative Data Analyses software MAXQDA 2007. The program is one of the pioneer packages in the field and has been used by qualitative researchers all over the world for more than 17 years.

    At the end of the workshop you will be able to use the basic functions: Inserting texts, CODING, writing and managing MEMOS, as well as doing simple RETRIEVALS.

    Moreover you will be introduced to the new features and do some exercises with them on your own. The core of the new features in MAXQDA 2007 is the use of visualization in order to allow the researcher to “picture” her/his data in the real sense of the word: The basis of all MAXQDA visualisation functions is the completely researcher-driven choice of colours during the coding procedure. Thus it is possible to “paint” various pictures out of your data revealing characteristics at a glance. Some examples: The CODELINER, for example, allows for the analysis of focus groups to see who is speaking when, how often, how long, etc. by using colours to represent different speakers. The TEXT PROTRAIT makes it possible to visually locate important topics of your research throughout the single interview by making an intentional use of colours according to different topics.

    The workshop could be hands-on if everybody brings her/his own laptop. Participants will be contacted in advance to check this.

 10. "Evaluación De Comunicaciones Cualitativas (Evaluation Of Qualitative Communications)", (IN SPANISH ONLY) Maria del Consuelo Chapela Mendoza & Martinez Salgado Ofelia Carolina

    En nuestro trabajo diario como investigador@s con orientación cualitativa, frecuentemente nos enfrentamos tanto a la necesidad de defender nuestras propuestas y comunicaciones como a la de dar nuestra opinión con respecto a comunicaciones de otros autores. Frecuentemente esto lo tenemos que hacer en contextos en donde la averiguación cualitativa no es del todo entendida y nos cuesta lograr argumentaciones convincentes tanto para defender como para opinar. A estas dificultades se agrega la propia del debate no resuelto aún y que es el tema de QI2007: ¿cuáles son criterios válidos para la evaluación de trabajos cualitativos?

    Aún reconociendo que existen múltiples razones y propósitos para comunicar resultados de nuestras averiguaciones cualitativas así como múltiples audiencias y criterios para su valoración, necesitamos desarrollar criterios para presentar y opinar de forma convincente. ¿Con qué criterios podemos proponer o leer una comunicación cualitativa si no existen ‘códigos de buena práctica, ni se rige por métodos universales como pudiera ser el científico? 

    El  objetivo de este taller es facilitar a sus participantes puntos de partida prácticos para valorar una comunicación cualitativa.

    Considerando que defender y opinar son acciones que existen en redes sociales específicas y que de las relaciones comunicativas implicadas de poder entre autores y lectores, jueces y defensores, investigadores y administradores, observadores e informantes, depende la posibilidad de convencimiento,  se hace una clasificación de autores, propósitos y audiencias que sirven como punto de partida para identificar qué es lo que se tiene que considerar ‘calidad’ o validez en una propuesta o comunicación.

    El análisis de las combinaciones entre autores y audiencia pueden orientarnos en la identificación de criterios. ¿Es el autor parte del objeto de la realidad que se intenta comprender y ante quien se presentan propuestas y resultados? Entonces,  ¿con qué criterios se valorará la comunicación? ¿Y si el autor necesita convencer a una audiencia acostumbrada a argumentaciones con bases estadísticas? ¿El autor busca entendimiento o conocimiento y la audiencia es académica?

    Este taller se desarrolla en tres partes:  En la primera se presentará un instrumento analítico para ayudar en este análisis y en la identificación de criterios.

    En la segunda parte se trabajará en grupos pequeños donde con la ayuda del instrumento analítico, cada grupo analizará y definirá criterios para valorar una comunicación cualitativa específica y emitirá un veredicto de calidad.

    En la tercera parte se hará un reporte de criterios y veredictos a la luz de los cuales se reflexionará sobre las posibilidades y los problemas objetivos y subjetivos de la evaluación de comunicaciones cualitativas. 

 

PM Pre-Conference Workshops (12:30-3:30pm)

 11. "An Introduction to Constructing Grounded Theory", Kathy Charmaz

    This workshop offers a brief introduction to grounded theory methods using a social constructionist approach.  The workshop includes basic grounded theory analytic guidelines and a couple of exercises.  We will emphasize grounded theory strategies of coding and memo-writing.  If you have collected some qualitative data, bring a completed interview, set of fieldnotes, or document to analyze.  If you do not have data yet, we will supply qualitative data for you.  If you prefer to use a laptop for writing, bring one, but you can complete the exercises without a computer.

 12."Writing Autoethnography and Narrative in Qualitative Research", Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner

    This workshop will focus on writing personal narratives and reflexively including researchers' selves and their interaction with participants in ethnographic projects. Topics covered will include: narrative truth; ethics; developing scenes, characters, conversation, and dramatic action; writing vulnerably and evocatively; truth and memory; writing as inquiry; interactive interviews and coconstructed narratives; evaluating and publishing autoethnography.  

 13. "Writing the Body", Pirkko Helena Markula, Jim Denison, Toni Bruce, and Robert Rinehart

    Qualitative researchers working across a range of disciplines have increasingly turned to the body as the focus of their inspiration, interpretation, and analysis. This includes examining how the body is represented as an always and already creator of knowledge. In this workshop we consider various performative aspects of the body, including how writing composes the body into being and reveals what the body can do—the body’s lived experiences. Specifically, through a series of practical writing and movement (Pilates) exercises aimed at helping participants access their corporeal understandings, this workshop addresses how to experiment with form, content, and style to uncover the political, pedagogical, and theoretical relevance of the body to qualitative researchers. We consider such a goal as highly relevant given our increasingly disembodied world where, for example, people have fewer and fewer opportunities to engage with their bodies. Therefore, we see this workshop providing participants the opportunity to problematise various aspects of the material body as it is experienced in contemporary culture. This includes asking, How can writing about the body, including movement, transform the way we think about identity and our practices? Please come to this workshop with a bodily experience you would like to understand better through writing.

 14. "Interpreting, Writing Up and Evaluating Qualitative Materials", Robin Jarrett and Angela Odoms-Young

 15. "Mixed-Method Social Inquiry: Possibilities and Strategies", Jennifer C. Greene

    This workshop will introduce participants to the domain of mixed methods social inquiry, with a focus on understanding the commitments and opportunities afforded by a “mixed methods way of thinking.” The idea of using a mixed methods approach to meaningfully engage with difference will be advanced for dialogue and critique. In addition, conceptual questions to be addressed include, “Just what is being mixed in mixed methods social inquiry?” and  “What are various legitimate purposes for mixing methods in social inquiry?” Practical issues to be discussed include key features of mixed methods designs and key issues in mixed methods analysis and representation.

 16. "Performance Ethnography", Norman Denzin

    This workshop, draws on background readings in Denzin, Performance Ethnography (2003), Madison, Critical Ethnography (2006), and Saldana, (2005), Ethnodrama, We will form improvisational performance groups of  5-7 members each, membership based on random assignment. Performance Assignment: Writing  and performing a racial epiphany. Delegates will create a personal performance text based on a life experience when race as power and performance intersected with gender, class and personal identity. Each group will create and perform a 2-4 minute improvised co-performance, bringing into relation personal, popular and scholarly discourses on race and identity.

 17. "Evidence Based Social Work: Where are we Going? How do we Get There?", Karen Staller and Jane Gilgun

       This workshop is for researchers in applied disciplines whose research contributes to interventions in social service agencies, schools, and medical settings, among others.  We will address many of the issues currently under debate, such as what constitutes evidence, evidence-based practice as process, and what kinds of evidence are applicable at which points in the processes of doing practice. Of particular interest is our examination of the fit between nomothetic research and the idiographic settings in which interventions are implemented and evaluated. When process and outcome evaluations are continually fed back into models of interventions, evidence-based practice becomes constructed as a dynamic, situated series of events specific to the actors involved, as practice should be.  How the emerging notion of practice-based evidence fits into evidence-based practice also will be addressed.  

     We conceptualize evidence-based practice as composed of four cornerstones: research and theory; practitioners’ knowledge and expertise gained from doing practice and from their working knowledge of research and theory; program participants’ preferences, wants, and values; and the person of the practitioner that include personal and professional values, world views, assumptions, and personal experience.  These four cornerstones are in reciprocal interaction throughout the processes of doing practice and contribute to what can be thought of as best practices.  Unlike typical constructions, we view evidence-based practice as processes that involve mutually enriching exchanges among the four cornerstones.

      Qualitative approaches have important roles to play in this construction of evidence-based practice, including, but not limited to, the development of knowledge related to the four cornerstones and to accurate accounts of processes and outcomes of interventions.

      This will be an interactive workshop where we will share many examples of each of these issues and seek participants’ responses.  We also will encourage participants to share their experiences regarding the politics and practice of using and teaching evidence-based practice.  

 18. "Performative Writing", Ron Pelias

    The workshop is designed to help participants think through what constitutes performative writing and to apply that thinking to their own work. The workshop will address how texts can perform on the page, how performative writing stands in relationship to other qualitative methods, how particular writing strategies can be deployed to make a text perform, how to manage ethical concerns that emerge in performative writing, and how experience, rendered evocatively, functions as evidence. The participants will have an opportunity to engage in performative writing through a series of planned exercises that will demonstrate the power of performative writing techniques. The workshop is open to all who have an interest in performative writing as a method.

 19. "Computer Assisted Software for Qualitative Data Analysis: How to Integrate Software into Your Analysis of Qualitative Data ", Sharlene Hesse-Biber

    This didactic seminar is for qualitative researchers who wish to use computer software to analyze textual data (e.g., case records, newspaper articles,fieldnotes, transcripts of interviews or focus groups discussions), pictures, graphics or audio and video digital data. We will discuss the factors you should consider in selecting a software program. We provide specific examples on how to integrate software into your analysis of qualitative data using the multi-media computer-assisted software program HyperRESEARCH ( Windows/and /MAC) and the transcription software ( Windows and MAC) HyperTranscribe. We describe how to code, memo, and retrieve your qualitative data.

    We will demonstrate how to use software to perform analytical induction ( grounded theory) as well as how to use software in mixed methods studies.

    This is NOT a hands-on session, but you will be provided with a range of workshop materials to utilize as you take these ideas back to your own analysis and specific research projects. The seminar will run for 3.5 hours.

 20. "That Can't Be Wrong -- I Do that Myself:  Rethinking Whiteness in Research and the Classroom ", Audrey Thompson (Professor of Philosophy of Education and Gender Studies, University of Utah).

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
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Center for Qualitative Inquiry
The Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI),
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Sage Publications
The International Association of Educators
International Journal of Progressive Education
Turkish Journal of Educational Policy Analysis and Strategic Research
Center for Global Studies
SSSI
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Institute of Communications Research
Native American House/American Indian Studies(NAH/AIS)
The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities(IPRH)