Ms Eve Ansell1, Dr Sam Hames2
1Qcif Ltd, Brisbane, Australia, 2The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
Biography:
Eve Ansell is a Data Scientist focused in the HASS field, and a PhD Candidate with the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. Her research interests are in conversation, interaction and working practices, with related Research Infrastructure interests in Digital/Computational Humanities, text analytics, and working with data for research in interaction. Eve specialises in supporting qualitative research.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3467-9782
Abstract:
Researchers across many disciplines are collecting human interactional data through approaches such as interviews, focus groups and recorded conversations. There are many fields such as health and medicine that are faced with a need to research via qualitative methods, but without specific expertise in the team, leading to requests for qualitative expertise. The most asked questions are about recommendations for tools for qualitative analysis.
This is not a simple choice. Tools constrain how you can approach data in a qualitative research design by making implicit and explicit assumptions about what the data is and how it is to be handled. Questions of how the data is stored, transformed, and otherwise made manipulatable for the researcher are intrinsically linked to the researchers’ ways of making meaning and insight. In a field like biostatistics, a data scientist can take a dataset and assist with processing the statistics. If the dataset isn’t very good, they can only do so much. However, it is the opposite in qualitative research. Once interactional data has been collected, it can be examined as many ways as there are tools, theoretical frameworks, and researchers.
This talk will discuss tool choice in the context of qualitative research, how tools can shape qualitative research for better and for worse, and discuss good practice for how researchers can be supported to choose tools appropriately in the context of qualitative methods and theories while designing their analysis workflow.