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.