Virtual Qualitative Research for Ordinary and Challenging Times

It is critical that qualitative research be conducted to ensure that individuals’ lived experiences, perspectives, and inimitable stories are captured as we chart untrodden paths in education, healthcare, and the workplace. Attendees will interactively engage in various activities to learn methods for remotely employing qualitative approaches during ordinary and challenging times, including narrative, phenomenological, grounded theory, ethnographic, and case study research. To conduct off-site fieldwork, attendees will learn ethical ways to virtually recruit participants from diverse backgrounds and socio-economic status as well as remotely use audiovisual tools to conduct interviews and observations. Attendees will evaluate appropriate platforms for video and audio conferencing to support data collection methods including zoom.us, meet.google.com, and flipgrid.com, web-based tools, such as goformative.com, as well as telephones and traditional mail communication for those lacking access to online resources. Attendees will learn ways to analyze digital content such as videos and chats. Presenters will demonstrate strategies for creating rich descriptions of phenomena from digital data to make sense of an individual’s unique stories or inductively form theory grounded in qualitative data analysis. Takeaways include a) strategies to remotely conduct an aligned qualitative study, b) a digital toolkit for conducting qualitative research, c) making meaning from digital data, and d) procedures to make ethical considerations and ensure trustworthiness of findings. Presenters will be available for questions. In our increasingly technology-dependent society, it is important that we continuously conduct relevant qualitative research to improve the lives of others during typical and unprecedented times