Blog

Writing qualitative findings is something many of us find challenging. Qualitative data is rich and nuanced which usually means a higher word count when we write our results. We love our quotes way too much to leave so many good ones out of our results section, yet in most journals we don’t get extra words for our results or are discouraged to submit manuscripts that are long and wordy.

As a result, when writing qualitative findings it’s worth asking the question, “what’s new here (i.e., in my results)? The importance of the question “what’s new?” became, once again, evident to me in a meeting with clinicians where they learned our preliminary findings, and told us what was “old news” in the field in contrast to the “juicy/novel” findings we got…

We ask people requesting access to Quali Q’s private Facebook group to answer three questions, and one of them really helps us to plan for content for the blog. Today’s blog post topic is the direct result of a new member asking to hear more about mothers as researchers, so here we go.

I think the experiences of mothers as researchers is too broad and diverse for me to attempt covering here. I decided to narrow this post to mothers as qualitative researchers, and to share some ways motherhood has impacted me as a qualitative researcher.

In 2020 I joined the board of the Emerging Health Leaders (EHL Edmonton Node) as a volunteer. A few weeks ago we hosted the first in-person event since 2019! The event’s name, “Facing the Great Re-evaluation,” was a spin of the “Great Resignation” that has been observed in North America since 2021. According to some newspaper articles I found online, approximately 4 million people in the US alone left their jobs during the pandemic, with a high proportion shifting their career in a 180-degree fashion. When I left the event, I caught myself wondering whether the great resignation is also happening in academia, where extensive fundings cuts and higher teaching requirements are the current reality. I cannot say I did any research on this so what I’m sharing here are my practical observations on the topic.

As some of you might already know, my last PhD study entailed a small MMR project. Because the quantitative and qualitative phases were both quite contained, and the qualitative data detailed important quantitative results, it was easy for us (myself and my co-authors) to report the findings in one paper. This certainly facilitated the integration of quantitative and qualitative findings, which is a key feature of MMR. My experience as a consultant has shown me that the integration of qualitative and quantitative data isn’t always that simple…

March has been extremely busy for Quali Q and has included a bit of everything – from proposal writing to data analysis and reporting. The proposal writing was an enriching experience because I had the incredible opportunity to collaborate with two qualitative scholars that I highly respect. During the process, I decided I wanted to share some of the discussions we had with you because choosing our study design was so interesting that I knew you would gain something from my experience with this!

I’m honoured to welcome my friend and colleague, Ashley Hyde, RN PhD, to the blog today to speak to us about her experience using interpretive description in her research and the ways in which ID differs from qualitative description (a common question). If you need a refresher on qualitative description and what it is before diving into Ashley’s post below, we wrote a blog post on this topic back in April of 2020 - you can read it here.

Take it away, Ashley!

In the last Quali Q blog post, my friend and colleague Alexa wrote about her career transition and growing as a qualitative researcher in different professional stages. I decided to continue this conversation by sharing a bit more about my current work, and what qualitative research skills I’m putting to good use right now!

As qualitative researchers, and as researchers in general, we often move through career transitions where we feel like we are leaving some skills and practices behind and having to learn to excel at something entirely new.

For today’s blog post, I have invited my friend and colleague, Alexa Ferdinands, PhD RD, back to the Quali Q blog to share her experience with us as she is currently doing exactly that!

This blog post will wrap up 2021 (cue the fireworks)!! This year was much harder for me than 2020 (the inaugural pandemic year), and as December comes to an end I’ve started to reflect on the things that brought me joy and gratitude in this rather exhaustive year. I’m going to share some of them with you and I hope that they will inspire you to pause, reflect, rest and, if possible, feel some peace with whatever 2021 brought for you.

We often see the discussion of being an insider versus outsider in the context of ethnography. But, my interest in this topic doesn’t only come from my experience with focus ethnography. Rather, it’s closely connected to my firm belief that being on the insider-outsider spectrum is inherent to qualitative research, and reflecting about this is VITAL to the research process. Much of that reflection can happen – or at least start – when we write our positionality statements.