Doing Qualitative Research Design and Data Collection

Course Details

• 3 hours/week

Qualitative inquiry offers a crucial approach to knowledge production in the health sciences because many health issues are social in nature, requiring the investigation of meanings and processes. It is a continually evolving field, characterized as much by creativity as by rules and procedural conventions. Researchers are challenged to make many choices as they define a problem area or question within an appropriate tradition or method, frame a design, and develop a proposal. Engagement in fieldwork is often accompanied by many dilemmas and the researcher’s decisions shape the study design. These choices are accomplished in the context of continuing debates about the role of theory, the possibility of finding common indicators of rigour and the merit of various data collection techniques, among others.                                                                                                                                                                 

In this context, this course will deal with the issues and activities involved in the design and conduct of qualitative research studies in the health sciences. It will build on courses in the CQ interdisciplinary PhD curriculum that covers the theoretical foundations of methods (http://www.ccqhr.utoronto.ca/sites/default/files/Course%20map_rev6%20with%20link%20(PhD).pdf). It emphasizes the considerations associated with designing qualitative studies, coordinating fieldwork, field relations, techniques of data generation, data management, and data analysis. We will also consider the implications of the activities of knowledge construction by addressing the issues associated with reflexivity, positionality and rigour at various points in the design and conduct of qualitative studies. We will explore literature from the health and social sciences to gain insights into the fertile ground of the qualitative research nexus, where axiology, onto-epistemology, theory, methodology, and methods intersect. This course is guided by the value of epistemic justice, and denounces the production of absences and the reduction of human and natural life to scientific problems (Fricker, 2007). Classes will include discussions of weekly topics and readings, in addition to small group and individual exercises that encourage reflexive experiential learning.