An Opportunity to Collaborate: Now What?
Hello Qualitative Mind,
In all spheres of life, we look for opportunities to build meaningful relationships and collaborations. After all, it’s one of the ways we can grow personally and professionally. In a recent meeting with one of my Coaching and Mentoring clients, we were talking about the details of a collaboration she (my client) had recently said yes to and how she had become part of a diverse research team with different interests.
When she asked my opinion on the research process the team was undertaking, I reiterated many aspects of the blog post I wrote following Dr. Maria Mayan’s guest talk with Qualitative Research Blueprint students back in April 2021. If you have yet to read this post (and absorb Maria’s wisdom), don’t miss it today!
Happy reading. ☺
Back in January 2021, I wrote a blog post entitled “What does teamwork mean to qualitative researchers?” in response to a number of requests I had received from readers on the topic in December 2020. The blog post was very well received, and because of that I invited my mentor (and former co-supervisor), Dr. Maria Mayan, to come to Qualitative Research Blueprint (QRB) in the spring and talk about teamwork in qualitative research.
Maria has quite a bit of experience working in teams, so she shared multiple strategies for teamwork with us. Many of the strategies she shared are covered in my blog post from January 2021 (after all, I learned from the best 😉). However, some details she shared were new to me so I decided to add them here.
Teamwork in qualitative research commonly involves people with different experiences and backgrounds. Sometimes it even includes collecting qualitative data separately in different physical locations. Maria has worked through that and she suggested sitting down together (in-person or virtually) to read one transcript from each data collection setting.
In this scenario, all team members involved in the project (collecting and analyzing data) would code at least one transcript from each setting individually. Then, they would come together and share their codes. By doing this, they had a team discussion about:
- Codes identified by one person and perhaps missed by another
- Codes labelled differently and what they meant for each team member
- Their initial impressions about the data
As a result of this coming together to analyze data, the team would develop a codebook that became a foundation for them to stand on. Over time, as more data was collected, they would check back and see if the codebook was still holding up. If a code was dropped or changed, they would discuss why.
This whole explanation of the initial teamwork process was interesting, but what stood out to me was when Maria emphasized that in the background of all her teamwork was/is the research question. She shared that she uses a sticky note and always keeps the research question in front of her (often on the computer screen). In other words, when working in small or large teams to conduct qualitative research, keep it in mind (and remind everyone else) what question you all are trying to answer. And here is why, in Maria’s own words:
“Because you will fall in love with your data, and you will love that data so much. You will see so many different questions that you could maybe answer with your data. There are so many different ways you can come at that data. So I'd always remind ourselves [i.e., the whole research team], what is the question we're trying to answer here? So we would always kind of revisit that, go back to our research question.” (Dr. Maria Mayan)
QRB members really enjoyed Maria’s strategies to navigate teamwork in qualitative research, and guess what? I think trying the codebook + sticky note combo might just translate into more “smooth sailing” teamwork for us all. And “smooth sailing” teamwork in qualitative research, who doesn’t want (and need) that?
Talk soon,
Maira
**This post was originally published on June 1, 2021 and was edited and re-published on October 5, 2021.