Professor: Shirley Freed, PhD Class Times: 6-10 hours/week - your choice

Office Hours: by appointment Phone: 471-6163 (of), freed@andrews.edu

Office Address: Bell Hall Rm 173 e-mail: freed@andrews.edu

Web page: http://www.andrews.edu/~freed

Course Description: An introduction to the philosophy, theory, and methods of qualitative research. Features different theoretical approaches to ethnography. Initial training in using qualitative research methods with an emphasis on participant observation and the ethnographic interview.

Resources: The wonderful thing about teaching online is that I can share with you multiple links and many excellent resources. You should not feel compelled to chase every link to its' origin but should view many of these links as opportunities to expand your understanding of qualitative research.

Required Textbooks:

Clandinin, D. J. & Connelly, R. M. 2000. Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco.

Eisner, Elliot. 1998. The Enlightened Eye. Merrill Publishers. Columbus, Ohio.

Merriam, Sharan. 1998. Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education. Jossey-Bass Publishers. San Francisco.

Optional Textbooks:

Goodall, H. L. 2000. Writing the New Ethnography. AltaMira Press: Walnut Creek.

Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a Literature Review. Sage Publishers. Thousand Oaks.

Kopala, Mary & Susuli, Lisa. 1999. Using Qualitative Methods in Psychology. Sage Publishers. Thousand Oaks.

Lagerwey, Mary. 1998. Reading Auschwitz. AltaMira Press: Walnut Creek.

Wolcott, Harry. 1990. Writing Up Qualitative Research. Sage Publishers. Thousand Oaks.

Other readings will be required on an intermittent basis.

Conceptual Framework: Andrews University School of Education embraces the theme, "True education means more than the pursual of a certain course of study. It means more than a preparation for the life that now is. It has to do with the whole being, and the whole period of existence possible to all people. It is the harmonious develpment of the physical, mental, and spiritual powers. It prepares the student for the joy of service in this world and the higher joy of wider service in the world to come. . . In the highest sense the work of education and the work of redemption are one." White, pg. 13, 30.

The mission of the School of Education is to provide programs based on a redemptive Christian worldview to prepare professionals for global service. To Educate is to Redeem.

We believe we accomplish this mission through six major knowledge base areas - one of which is research. This knowledge base addresses valuing and conducting disciplined inquiry for decision-making. The outcomes of this knowledge base and shared by all programs in the School of Education are that each graduate will be able to:

• Read and evaluate research in their discipline
• Conduct research in their specialty area(s)
• Report research findings according to standard guidelines in their field

While these are the major outcomes for this course, you can expect to see some connections with the other SED core knowledge bases - in particularly, the knowledge bases on worldview and communication and technology. Throughout the course we will be challenged as researchers living in a postmodern world. How does our worldview influence the way we do research? We will be sharpening our technology skills as we use the data bases in the library as well as the internet as a sources of information.

What to expect:

Since qualitative research itself is nonlinear, you can expect this class to be an intertwining of reading, writing, talking, and listening as we seek to unravel some of the many issues surrounding interpretive forms of inquiry. Firstly, the idea of researcher as instrument is seminal to this kind of research. So you will be engaged in an ongoing internal critical examination of yourself as the instrument of social research. I'll be trying to move you to a more objective place from which you might view yourself, others, and then to once again view yourself through a different lens. I'll be wanting you to be thinking about the boundaries into which you were born; the boundaries of higher education; the boundaries of each field experience; the boundaries of culture, gender and race. The stories you will share will help facilitate this piece!

As a researcher myself, I will be sharing my philosophical viewpoint which comes from a Christian world view. In this online version of the class, we will not be discussing the 4 gospels, however, should you wish to access a Harmony of the Gospels, http://www2.andrews.edu/~freed/QualResearch/Gospels1.html - you'll find it fascinating how one gospel writer included some incidents while another completely left out that account. What does that tell us about how researchers collect and tell stories? Finally, it was Antony de Mello who said, "The Master gave his teaching in parables and stories which his disciples listened to with pleasure - and occasional frustration, for they longed for something deeper. The Master was unmoved. To all their objections He would say, 'You have yet to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story'."

In this class we begin to develop your observational skills and interviewing techniques. I believe these kinds of research skills can only be developed by using them! So you will have many opportunities in class and outside of class to practice these skills. At first you will feel somewhat tenuous and awkward but as the course progresses you will develop confidence in your own abilities and in the value of these methods as sources of data.

You will have opportunity to read qualitative studies and to conduct a small research project of your own. It's important that you see this requirement as something more than a class requirement. It should involve a serious "wonderment" that you have - something that you have wanted to understand on a deeper level - something that you have wished you had more time to figure out or understand.

I will be approaching this class as a teacher/researcher which means that all the activities and interactions I'm orchestrating for you will be modeling ways that you might conduct your own research from data collection to data analysis and representation. I'll be working hard to develop a responsiveness in you that will build trust and confidence with those whom you might work.

Finally, this class will be very short on lecturing but very long on experiential learning.

So what is qualitative research anyway? Several attempts at explanation might be helpful as we begin this journey together! Thomas Schwandt in Qualitative Inquiry: A Dictionary of Terms states that "qualitative" is a

not-so-descriptive adjective attached to the varieties of social inquiry that have their intellectual roots in hermeneutics, phenomenological sociology, and the Vertehen tradition. Most scholars use the phrase "qualitative inquiry" as a blanket designation for all forms of such inquiry including ethnography, case study research, naturalistic inquiry ethnomethodology, life history methodology, narrative inquiry, and the like. It has been used as a modifier for the terms "data," "method," "methodology," "research," and "paradigm" and as a synonym for "nonexperimental" and "ethnographic." Because the adjective does not clearly signal a particular meaning, a great number and variety of scholars have attempted to define just what is the so-called qualitative paradigm, what are the basic characteristics of qualitative research, and so on. One might reasonably view the entire Handbook of Qualitative Research (Sage, 1994) as an attempt at an extended definition of the term. "Qualitative research" is simply not a very useful term for denoting a specific set of characteristics of inquiry.

Often, attempts at definition involve both implicit and explicit comparisons to the equally ambiguously used adjective 'quantitative.' Perhaps the clearest use of the adjective is to distinguish between qualitative data-nonnumeric data in the form of words-and quantitative data-numeric data. The earliest qualitative versus quantitative debates might have been called "The Merits of Nonnumeric Versus Numeric Data Debates," but that doesn't have quite the same ring to it as the more common designation of the controversy. The same debate also meant defending as reliable and valid methods used to generate qualitative data (i.e., unstructured open-ended interviews, participant observation, and so on) from attacks by defenders of methods used to generate quantitative data (questionnaires, psychometric measures, tests, and so on).

'Qualitative' denotes of or relating to quality, and a quality, in turn, is an inherent or phenomenal property or essential characteristic of some thing (object or experience). Ironically, there appears to be only one variety of qualitative inquiry that takes the definition of quality as its starting point. Elliot Eisner's (e.g., The Enlightened Eye, Macmillan, 1991) explication of qualitative inquiry begins from the point of view that inquiry is a matter of the perception of qualities and an appraisal of their value. The work of Eisner and his students aims to define and illustrate an aesthetics that explains how qualitative aspects of the experiences and settings of teaching and learning are to be perceived, appreciated, interpreted, understood, and criticized. The metaphors he employs for capturing the dual features of this methodology are connoisseurship and criticism (p 129-130).

I often feel like C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University who says:

The most common question I am asked by students considering taking my course is "what are qualitative methods?" Unfortunately, that's a hard one to answer.

I could start by telling you who uses them: philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, students of literature, historians, biologists...anyone, in fact, who finds the methods of the physical sciences somehow inappropriate for understanding human (and, occasionally, even animal) realities.

But perhaps the best way to get at a definition is to look at why these people have turned to qualitative methods:

1. For some, the manipulation most experimental studies require at least verges on the unethical. Whereas a chemical substance, a subatomic particle, or perhaps a white rat has no cause to object to being manipulated, human beings certainly may. To frighten them, persuade them of something, expose them to various conditions, etc., even in the name of science, may undermine their self-respect, their psychological integrity, their sense of self-determination, or even their physical health.

2. For others, it is the reliance on measurement that is disturbing. While reducing everything to numbers may be justified in the physical sciences, doing the same to human experience seems to dismiss the other, non-quantitative dimensions of that experience. How do you quantify meaning, for example, or love, or anger, or confusion? You can describe the Grand Canyon using only numbers -- but somehow that wouldn't capture the essence of it!

3. For still others, the issue is control. In order to find the relationship between two variables, all others must be controlled, whether by a reduction of actual variety, or by the establishment of control groups, or by statistically factoring out other variables. But how do you control the lifetime of experiences that a person brings to an experiment? What is the significance of a causal relation that does not occur independently outside the laboratory? And do results established by examining group tendencies then apply to individuals. Control is problematic in complex physical systems; imagine the problem with human beings.

4. Others are disturbed by the tendency to reductionism. In the process of manipulating, measuring, and controlling variables, it is a matter of practicality to go down a level-of-analysis. Hence the predominance of physiological and information-processing explanations for human behavior. But, by their nature, these explanations avoid the very problems they were originally intended to explain -- e.g. consciousness, meaning, personality, self, etc.

5. One more problem is that the experimental method and related methods are intrinsically deterministic. What, in fact, would be the point of establishing causal relations if these relations could not be relied on? On the other hand, many people involved in the human sciences are interested in things that assume at least some degree of freedom. Morality, for example, has little meaning if people are as determined as falling bricks. What are we to do with concepts such as bravery, responsibility, generosity, honesty, or compassion (or, for that matter, evil, guilt, cowardice...) if these are not a matter of choice?

Generally, what disturbs so many people about traditional approaches in the human sciences is that they don't capture life as it is lived. And that, perhaps, is the closest we'll get to an essence of qualitative methods: They are methods that at least attempt to capture life as it is lived.

SO - with that introduction, let's look at what we'll be doing on a weekly basis! Please note that I have set this up so the week ends on Sunday night - I'm hoping that'll give you the better part of the weekend to work on assignments, if you haven't been able to get to them earlier.

Date	Objectives	Readings Due (Check modules)	Assignment Due
Intro Week Aug 18 - 24	Introduction to the Online Classroom and to one another	Syllabus	Share research interests and syllabus responses
Week One Aug 25 - 31	1.1. Articulates philosophical issues related to research	Cland 1-3 *Articles	Qualitative Research WebQuest optional activity
Week Two Sept 1-7	1.2. Articulates assumptions of basic research communities: positivist, interpretive, and critical and understands basic qualitative methods: case study, ethnography, phenomenology, narrative,	Eisner 1,2, 4 Merr 1,2 *Articles	#20 Chart of Dis Abs email freed@andrews.edu
Week Three Sept 8 - 14	1.3. Articulates life experiences that affect the research study when self is the primary research instrument - articulates personal bias	Eisner3 Merr pg 22-24	#Self As the Research Instrument - post in bb
Week Four Sept 15 - 21	1.4. Applies reliability,validity and generalizability concepts to qualitative	Eisner 6,9 Merr 10 *Articles	Rubric to Evaluate Qual Studies - post in bb
Week Five Sept 22- 28	1.5. Critiques qualitative studies for integrity, rigor, utility, ethics, verisimilitude and other criteria	Eisner 5	Eval of 5 qual studies - email freed
Week Six Sept 29- Oct 5	2.1. Collects and analyzes observational data from several sources	Cland 4 Eisner 8 Merr 5	#Observation Descriptions Interpretation - post in bb
Week Seven Oct 6 - 12	2.2. Interprets data by asking "why" and"what does this mean" and keeping field notes of emerging ideas	Cland 5, 6 *Articles	(you may want to get a head start on your interviews)
Week Eight Oct 13- 19	2.3. Conducts and transcribes data from structured interviews, active interviews, and/or focus group interviews, understands purposive sampling processes	Merr 4 *Articles	#Transcribed, Coded Interviews - email freed
Week Nine Oct 20- 26	2.4. Explores the use of other heuristic devices in data collection: life lines, photographs, journals etc. and other sources of data such as documents	Cland 7 Merr 6,7 *Articles	#Description of Alternative Data Collect. - post in bb
Week Ten Oct 27 - Nov 2	2.5. Analyzes data for "meaning" categories and makes connections across categories, displays data analysis to show connections with theoretical frameworks	Cland 8 Eisner 7 Merr 8, 9	Analysis of Raw Data - post in bb
Week Eleven Nov 3 - 9	3.1. Articulates the value of different forms of representation: story, poetry, graphic organizers, photographs etc.	Cland 9 Merr 11 *Articles	Writing up research report - feedback to Shirley on individual basis as needed
Week Twelve Nov 10 -16	3.2. Represents data in multiple forms and reflects on the process	Cland 10 Eisner 10 *Articles	#Alternative representation - post in bb
Week Thirteen Nov 17 - 23	3.3. Writes research report to include "thick description", coherent interpretation, and reflexivity	*Articles	Writing up research report - feedback to Shirley on individual basis as needed
Week Fourteen Nov 24 - 30	3.4. Writes report with strong connections to the relevant literature	*Articles	#Research Project
Week Fifteen Dec 1- 7	3.5. Evaluates peer research reports.	*Articles	Response to research project
Week Sixteen Dec 8 - 14	Final Examination

Evaluation: Your final grade will be calculated on the following basis:

1) Research Project 400 points

The project should involve a serious "wonderment" you have. I have tried to set up the assignments in such a way that you'll be working on your research project throughout the semester. The # symbol should help you see how the pieces are all connected. The project will include a review of the literature (a minimum of 20 dissertation abstracts and 5 other qualitative if possible, research studies - not opinion papers); a chart portraying the findings from the literature review including author, title, date, research questions, theoretical standpoint, evidence used, results, and other items you might choose; self as the research instrument stories; interviews (a minimum of 1 hour - could have multiple interviews) observations (if appropriate) and transcriptions of the interviews showing the way you have coded them, and analysis chart showing the themes that are common to all cases; a written piece connecting the literature with your findings with at least one alternative representation of your findings.

2) Daily Reading &Online Conversations in WebCT 300 points

Each week there are a number of required readings you'll want to explore. As you read, write down questions to bring to the WebCT bulletin board. You'll notice some suggestions for discussion starters in the modules - you should not feel limited to those and you should feel free to ask other questions. I will not be controlling or dominating the bulletin board space. Nor will I be counting your posts. I will be looking for quality and presence - not quantity. I will also be limiting the conversation to the one week assignment -- after which I will close that discussion thread so we can start another one. This is a reflective activity and you need to use it to ask real questions and to respond in authentic ways.

Use the rubric below to help you think about your interactions: Four Mental Models of Bulletin Board Posting

Mental Model	Posting	Questioning	Reflecting/connecting	Dialoguing
Definition	You post your message as if you were submitting an assignment - often repeating what has already been said - you don't respond to others	You ask questions but often they aren't connected with what others have said - you don't engender a response	You respond to what others have said - using their name or quoting them - sharing your personal experience or metaphor to explain further	You are present in the bulletin board - listening, asking for clarification, sharing experiences, affirming others, extending the conversation
Sometimes	2	4	5	7
All the time	1	3	6	8

3) Weekly assignments 150 points

Many weeks, there will be an assignment. These will usually be part of the final project. These will not represent a lot of time but are more to give me an indication of your progress in the class. Please note on the weekly schedule where you should post your assignments - sometimes I'd like you to send those to my email - freed@andrews.edu. Other times - when I believe the whole class could benefit from seeing your work, I'd like you to post those in the bulletin board spaces.

4) Examinations 150 points

There will be one final examination in this class. It will be taken online and timed.

• Total 1,000 points

Criteria: A 95-100%
A- 90-94
B+ 87-89
B 84-86
B- 80-83
C+ 77-79
C 74-76
C- 70-73

Clandinin, D. J., Davies, A., Hogan, P., & Kennard, B., (Eds) (1993). Learning to teach, teaching to learn: Stories of collaboration in teacher education. New York, NY: Teacher's College Press.

Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1995). Teachers' professional knowledge landscapes. New York, NY: Teacher's College.

Coles, R. (1989). The call of stories: Teaching and the moral imagination. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Coffey, Amanda and Atkinson, Paul. (1996). Making Sense of Qualitative Data. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Creswell, John. (1997). Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Denzin, N. K. (1989). Interpretive biography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds), (1994). Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Dobbert, M. L. (1982). Ethnographic research: Theory and application for modern schools and societies. New York, NY: Praeger Publishers.

Dunaway, David & Baum, Willa, Eds. (1997). Oral History. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Edwards, A. D. & Westgate, D. P. G. (1994). Investigating classroom talk. Bristol, PA: Falmer Press.

Eisner, E. W. (1985). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs, second ed. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company.

Eisner, E. W. & Peshkin, Alan. (Eds). (1990). Qualitative inquiry in education: the continuing debate. New York: Teachers College Press.

Ellis, Carolyn & Bochner, Arthur. (1996). Composing Ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Feldman, Martha S. (1995). Strategies for interpreting qualitative data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Flinders, David J. and Mills, Geoffrey. (1993). Theory and concepts in qualitative research: perspectives from the field. Teachers College Press.

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Heard, G. (1995). Writing toward home: Tales and lessons to find your way. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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Marshall, Catherine. (1995). Designing qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Pub.

Mason, J. (1996). Qualitative researching. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Maxwell, J. A. (1996). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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Bellah, Robert N. et al. (1985). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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