Lifelong Education Administration and Policy

Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research Course Offerings

(QUAL)(EDEC)EDMS 7500 Action Research. Action research and participatory action research across diverse contexts. The course includes a consideration of history and definitions of action research and participatory action research, and an analysis of their purposes, processes, and theoretical foundations. Students will engage in practitioner-based research strategies such as observations, interviewing, and document analysis.

QUAL 8400 Qualitative Research Traditions: Formerly ERSH 7400 or ERSH 8400. Foundations of qualitative design: history, philosophy, nature, types, examples, and assessment. Reading and evaluating reports of qualitative research in education and identifying methodological issues.

QUAL 8410 Designing Qualitative Research: Formerly ERSH 8410. Disciplinary origins and cross-disciplinary uses, variations, applications, and evaluations of methods of collecting qualitative data. Choice of methods in the overall construction of qualitative designs, practice in selecting and collecting qualitative data for educational research, and examination of naturalistic data in the educational literature.

QUAL 8420 Analyzing Qualitative Data: Formerly ERSH 8420. Approaches to analysis in the design of qualitative research studies. Procedures are surveyed and compared from a range of social sciences and professional disciplines for use in studying educational problems and topics.

QUAL 8510 Theories in Qualitative Design in Education: Formerly ERSH 8510.. Theories in qualitative research design and conduct. Theories commonly used in qualitative approaches to educational problems and issues; socioculture, psychosocial, critical, feminist, and postmodern theories.

QUAL 8520 Interviewing in Educational Research: Formerly ERSH 8520. Conceptual framework for interviewing, approaches associated with various disciplines and schools of inquiry, forms and structures of interviews, the criteria developed to assess interviews, and interviewing practice across a variety of situations. Recording, analyzing, and reporting interview data, ethical and relationship issues, and research on interviewing methods.

QUAL 8525 Narrative Analysis. Examination of the contemporary place of narratives in qualitative research. Specifically, the history, prevalent methodologies, philosophical perspectives, and presentation techniques related to narratives will be examined.

QUAL 8530 Case Study Research in Education: Formerly ERSH 8530. Case study as a research design. Topics are types of case studies, defining the case, site and sample selection, data collection methods, within-case and cross-case analysis, and writing case reports.

QUAL 8540 Participants Observation in Research: Formerly ERSH 8540. Qualitative approaches to observation in education: participant and nonparticipant observation and ethnographic, ethological, and field study. Choices of such approaches in qualitative design, their development, application, and evaluation, are compared and selected; versions are practiced.

(QUAL) ELAN 8550 Representing Qualitative Research: Formerly (ERSH) ELAN 8550. Theoretical, ethical, and practical issues involved in transforming qualitative data into a written research report. Students both in dissertation and pre-dissertation, will write representations of data they have already collected.

QUAL 8560 Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies. Ethnomethodological (EM) and conversation analytic (CA) approaches to research. Other topics are philosophical assumptions; a review of literature in EM and CA in different disciplines; key scholars; scholarly debates; ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ CA; membership categorization analysis (MCA); and applications to naturally occurring data and interview data.

(QUAL)ELAN 8565 Theoretical Frameworks for Doctoral Studies in the Human Sciences. Readings in major theoretical frameworks used in doctoral studies and research, including critical, postmodernism, feminism, Marxism, positivism, and pragmatism.

(QUAL)ELAN 8570 The Postmodern Turn: Theories and Methods. Readings in postmodern theory, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Judith Butler, Patti Lather, etc. Focus on language, truth, power, knowledge, reason, and the subject.

(QUAL)ELAN 8580 Postmodern Qualitative Research. Qualitative research methodology using postmodern analyses, such as deconstruction, genealogy, archaeology, rhizoanalysis and power/knowledge readings.

(QUAL)ELAN 8590 Arts-Based Inquiry in Diverse Learning Communities. Examination of techniques of arts-based scholarship to increase thevalue, validity, and impact of qualitative research for understandingculturally and linguistically diverse learning communities. Studentswill practice poetic, theatrical, and artistic data collection, analysis and representation. Students will develop focused expertise, fostering a rigorous critical community for arts-based scholarship.

QUAL 8595 Research Ethics in the Professional and Social Sciences. Exploration of the ethical and moral dilemmas researchers have encountered in conducting research in the social, professional, and human sciences and the sources of ethical principles and practices they have used in addressing these dilemmas.

QUAL 9400. This seminar provides a scholarly environment for doctoral students who are either approaching the completion of their course work or working on qualitative dissertations to discuss issues pertinent to their individual research agendas. Topics include teaching qualitative research methods; writing proposals; writing for publication; conference presentations; and applying for positions. It is the capstone course for the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies Certificate.

QUAL 9800 Special Topics courses include studies in Oral History, Narrative Inquiry, Issues in Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research Resources

QUIG 2007