Teaching Activities

1
Teaching Activities ResourcesTQRMUL York April
2009

• Mike Forrester
• Department of Psychology
• University of Kent
• Siobhan Hugh-Jones
• Institute of Psychological Sciences
• University of Leeds

2
quick overview

• hope to stimulate your thinking about the range
  of teaching opportunities around qualitative work
  with students.
• introduce you to Psychology Network Dataset
  ways in which it could be used
• Data collection
• Data analysis
• experience the teaching activities

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examples of qualitative data collection methods

• diaries
• focus groups
• archived text (newspapers, documents)
• on-line forums
• interviews
• structured
• unstructured
• dilemma interview
• feminist interview
• free association narrative interview
• narrative interview
• life history / life story interview
• telephone / electronic
• semi-structured most common form in social
  sciences

4
use of subjective data (activity 1)

• many qualitative approaches in psychology are
  interested in peoples subjective experiences
  (i.e. what were things like for them? How did
  they experience an event / phenomenon?).
• however, using subjective accounts as research
  data is sometimes criticised by psychologists and
  others.
• Why do you think this is?
• Do you think subjective accounts have a value in
  psychological research?

5
Interviews interpretation

• ..Common across all forms of qualitative
  interviews though is the focus on subjective 
   interpretations of individual experience
• . they are exploratory means that they do not
  presume that all of the issues, or ways of
  experiencing them, are known in advance.

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Interviews interpretation

• .. That they focus on subject interpretations
  means that they are not concerned with
  'fact-finding' or getting verifiable accounts.
• . Rather, they acknowledge that human experience
  has diverse qualities and meanings, that the
  interview can explore these and that they can
  tell us something important about human
  behaviour.
  Hugh-Jones, in
  press).

7
research questions interview schedules

• research question (activities 2 3)
• Remember, we want qualitative work
• to focus on a defined aspect of a research topic
• to generate a manageable amount of data
• for use with an appropriate analytic method
• and to subsequently provoke a critical discussion
  of that research field.
• in other words, aim to say a lot about a little.
• developing interview schedule (activities 4, 5, 6
  7)
• what do I need to ask this participant in order
  to understand their experiences?
• develop with analytic method in mind
• in general, looking for descriptions of events /
  everyday life, with concern for relevant value

8

• Psychology Network Resources and forms of
  qualitative analysis
• In order to allow for the collection of data that
  would be suitable for analysis using the various
  analytic approaches we had in mind, we would need
  to collect a dataset specifically for the purpose
  of developing this resource. Our decision to
  select the range of analytic approaches ..was
  based on a survey we conducted to find out the
  commonly used approaches in UK based Departments
  of Psychology (Forrester Koutsopoulou, 2008).
• The collection of a new dataset had the advantage
  of allowing us to consider exactly what it was we
  felt was needed for teaching and learning
  qualitative methods. In this respect, the
  decision to use video recordings meant that we
  could enable students, as far as possible, to see
  for themselves what the process of data
  collection actually looks like. (Gibson, in
  press).

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Psychology Network Resources and forms of
qualitative analysis

• The resources can be found at ltURLgt, where you
  will find the following items for each of the
  five interviews
•  
• (i) Digital video files (in Quicktime .mov
  format), split into segments of approximately 15
  minutes each
•  
• (ii) Digital audio files, split into the same
  segments as the video files
•  
• (iii) Playscript transcrip (iv)
  Jeffersonian transcript 

10

• Interviews and friendship why this topic?
• Always topical
• Personal yet accessible
• Rich background literature in social psychology
  and personality
• Something students would relate to
• Not controversial in any obvious way

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Interviews as co-constructed

• View of interview as data excavation, and
  interviewer as neutral replaced by
  conceptualisation of interview data as
  co-constructed.

See Activity 8
12
The TQRMUL Data Set Two analytic approaches

• IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis)
• CA (Conversation Analysis)
• (see activity 8 for ideas for discourse analysis)

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Data Collection Teaching Activities and
Resources

• IPA
• IPA is essentially a idiographic approach
  which focuses on the individual level of a
  persons experience in other words it is very
  much concerned with the fine-detail of an
  individuals meaning making, and how we can study
  this. This in-depth approach to the study of an
  individual is becoming an increasingly popular
  qualitative methodology in psychology, sometimes
  used to complement associated quantitative
  work..IPA involves what is known as a double
  hermeneutic , in other words, the analyst is
  seeking to make sense out of how participants
  makes sense out of their experiences.
  (Forrester, in press)

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Data Collection Teaching Activities and
Resources

• Conversation Analysis
• The emphasise is on structures and procedures in
  the conversation. CA does not necessarily focus
  on the content of the talk. What is central is
  the methods (these are the ways and means people
  use to produce talk-in-interaction) people use
  to make sense of their social world as they are
  producing it.
•  A CA researcher approaches the task of
  transcription and analysis with unmmotivated
  attention. She/he is simply asking the
  question, what do we have here and what
  particular patterns can we identify? What do
  people themselves do when engaged in talk with
  one another?

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Data Collection Teaching Activities and
Resources

• Meaning making and IPA
• (a) Have a look at the playscript transcript
  and see whether you can identify particular
  themes, issues or indications of the interviewee
  making sense of his experience.

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Data Collection Teaching Activities and
Resources

• Doing formulating and CA
• A commonly occurring structure we find in talk is
  known as the formulation a moment in the
  ongoing conversation when somebody refers to, or
  spells out, what they have been saying. Phrases
  such as Look, what Im getting at.. or Oh I
  see, what youre suggesting is or The thing
  Im saying is.. are typical examples.
• (b) Look carefully at the CA transcript and
  consider whether you can find indications that
  people formulate the fact that they are doing
  whatever it is they are doing

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Data Collection Teaching Activities and
Resources

• 7. Summary comnent
• There is no one correct interpretation of
  naturally occuring talk-in-interaction