Qualitative Research

This article explores the possibility for researchers to embrace the unpredictability of focus groups by using activities as a stimulus for conversation. Reflecting on a recent study with young women in Bristol exploring their perceptions of celebrity feminists, it argues that using writing and drawing activities forces the researcher to relinquish control, and their role as questioner and as expert, to the participants. Furthermore, by analysing the ways in which I frequently became uncomfortable at the consequences of this loss of control, trying to regain it and failing, I argue that the activities forced me to fully commit to the feminist ideals of research that I subscribed to, particularly redressing the hierarchical relationships in research settings. Finally, the article discusses the implications of these findings in feminist research, and the need more broadly to reflect on how methodological decisions impact on researchers’ own performances in focus groups.

Participatory research increasingly seeks tangible outcomes contributing to social transformation. We reflexively examine the role of affect in two participatory research projects in Colombia to argue that intentionally making space for and reflecting on affective experiences can help generate more effective research. Such ‘praxis of affect’ focused on building social bonds, demonstrating solidarity, distributing expertise, and sharing hope were critical for sustaining motivation toward the research endeavor and social transformation efforts. This article contributes to literature on participatory research by considering ways to implement socially-responsible research that creates momentarily affective spaces and recasts the desire for more durable outcomes in such spaces.

Use of a codebook to categorize meaning units is a well-known research strategy in qualitative inquiry. However, methodology for the creation of a codebook in practice is not standardized, and specific guidance for codebook ideation is sometimes unclear, especially to novice qualitative researchers. This article describes the procedure that was utilized to create a codebook, which adapted an affinity diagram methodology (Scupin, 1997), an approach used in user-centered design. For this research, affinity diagramming was applied to a method outlined by Kurasaki (2000) for codebook ideation. Annotations of a subset of military veterans’ transcripts were utilized in congruence with affinity diagramming to create a codebook to categorize the phenomenon of reintegration into the civilian community after service (Haskins Lisle, 2017). This method could be useful in exploratory research that utilizes a codebook generated in vivo from annotations, especially for novice researchers who are overwhelmed by the codebook creation phase.

Despite the proliferation of differing methods for synthesising qualitative research, Sandelowski and Barroso’s approach stands out because it is a stimulus to thinking and creativity. Yet, when applying the approach within our qualitative meta-summary and meta-synthesis project, we encountered some methodological challenges. Key aspects of the approach are outlined and juxtaposed with how we handled them in practical terms thereby entering into a methodological discussion based on the existing international research synthesis literature. For example, we encountered challenges pertaining to the researchers’ underlying epistemological assumptions, the composition of the research team, the construction of a feasible research question, the application of critical appraisal tools and the determination of an appropriate cut-off point for effect sizes to create a more parsimonious theory. From that reflective process, we draw out lessons learned for each aspect to provide neophyte researchers with valuable information that can increase the validity of future meta-syntheses projects.

During the past decades, awareness has grown concerning the need for more democratic and inclusive research methods. This is especially salient for marginalised, colonised and silenced groups, such as the elderly, children and young people. In this article, we present and discuss future workshops as an appropriate method to achieve such democratic and inclusive research, and we posit that it can fruitfully be used together with other approaches outside the field of action research in which it has mostly been used to date. The discussion is based on our research with children and young people on sensitive and conflictual issues. We show how future workshops offer particular advantages when conducting research with children and young people in vulnerable situations, and about silenced and sensitive topics. We argue that these advantages, as well as ethical and other insights, can be transferred to research with other groups of people.

This paper explores the potential of voice audio in qualitative research, as data in its own right rather than only as a precursor to transcription. Building on critiques of voice in qualitative research, I argue that audio can enable researchers to work with the more-than-representational excesses of voice. Developing this line of thinking, I draw on Levi Bryant’s machinic ontology to set out a post-humanist conception of voice as arising within ecologies of media machines. As an example of what machinic voice audio can do, I describe an experimental audio work that I produced as part of research on a ruinous landscape. The final section of the paper makes more general observations about the malleability and fallibility of the machinic voice.

Research on racialized older immigrants does not fully acknowledge the interplay between the life course experiences of diverse populations and the structural conditions that shape these experiences. Our research team has developed the intersectional life course perspective to enhance researchers’ capacity to take account of the cumulative effects of structural discrimination as people experience it throughout the life course, the meanings that people attribute to those experiences, and the implications these have on later life. Here we propose an innovative methodological approach that combines life story narrative and photovoice methods in order to operationalize the intersectional life course. We piloted this approach in a study of the everyday stories of aging among diverse immigrant older adults in two distinct Canadian provinces with the goals of enhancing capacity to account for both context and story and engaging with participants and stakeholders from multiple sectors in order to influence change.

Realist evaluation submits that theories and models of how, why, for whom and under what circumstances programs work could be formulated by conceptualizing the relational links between the context within which programs are implemented, the generative mechanisms the programs trigger, and the outcomes of interest. Qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis allow for the description of the relevant context, the generative mechanisms, and the emergent outcomes of programs and provide explanatory power to link these elements. The ‘realist interviewing technique’, whereby interviewees comment on a suggested ‘program theory’ to provide refinement, is proposed as a distinctive approach for conducting interviews in a realist-informed inquiry. However, the application of this interviewing strategy within the realist evaluation studies is underutilized. In this study, we demonstrate how the realist interview technique reinforces and maintains theoretical awareness and contributes to trustworthiness through three theory-building phases: theory gleaning, theory refining, and theory consolidation.