Qualitative Data Analysis

Short Bio Marie-Hélène Paré lectures program evaluation in the Master in Health Social Work at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, and is an international consultant in qualitative data analysis. She was educated in Quebec, Beirut and Oxford. She is a registered social worker who worked and conducted research in violence against women and community participation in humanitarian action. She taught social work at St-Joseph University in Beirut, Lebanon, and has lectured on qualitative data analysis in more than thirty universities worldwide. Her interests lie in qualitative data analysis, qualitative research synthesis, indigenous epistemologies and participatory methodologies. She teaches the introductory and advanced courses on qualitative data analysis at the ECPR SS and WS. Prerequisite knowledge Basic knowledge of qualitative research required. No requirement of qualitative analysis or NVivo. Short course outline Are you planning to conduct interviews or focus groups for your data collection, or perhaps do participant observation during key events or meetings? Or will you be collecting policy papers, press articles, or Internet data from blogs, Facebook or Twitter? If you do any of the above, you will soon or later have to face the pile of data and field notes you collected and analyse them. Will you know how? The aim of this course is to provide participants with strategic understanding and applied skills in planning, conducting, and reporting the process of qualitative data analysis (QDA) in a research project. At the end of the course, participants will be able to plan, conduct, and critically assess the quality of QDA in their own and other people’s research. Key topics covered are: common problems and prejudices associated with QDA, role of QDA in the research design, process and strategies in coding qualitative data, techniques to seek patterns and identify relationships, and best practices in displaying and reporting the outcome of QDA. The course alternates between lectures, guided exercises, and workshops with NVivo. Participants conducting qualitative research as part of their PhD / postdoc will particularly benefit from the course.