Designing Qualitative Research for Multi-perspectivity and Research Quality

11:30 -13:00 (Azores timetable) - In-person Workshop 

In this 90-minute workshop, we will first focus on central issues of planning and designing a qualitative research project. We will address the decisions to be taken in the process of doing a qualitative study, for example: When to use which design? How to plan a study with this design, for example a multi-perspective study? How to refine research questions? How to sample participants or settings and why?

The second focus will be on combining approaches for multi-perspectivity, in qualitative research for example by using triangulation: this part will focus on using triangulation of multiple qualitative methods and approaches in one design.

We will apply the discussions of research design and triangulation to approaches in qualitative research, which have not paid much attention to them so far, e.g., grounded theory research, or only implicitly have considered them, e.g., ethnography. Discussions will be illustrated by examples from my own research. In the end we will discuss, how these issues are related to questions of advancing the quality of qualitative research.

A major part of the workshop will be devoted to discussing the participants’ research projects – studies that are in the planning phase or are ongoing or in the writing phase. Participants in the workshop will be discussing their current projects, supported in framing their studies, in formulating their research questions and methodologies.

_

Uwe Flick is Senior Professor of Qualitative Research in Social Science and Education at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. As a trained psychologist and sociologist and after completing his PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin, he held positions as Professor at Technical University Berlin (psychology), Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin (nursing and social work research), and at the University of Vienna, Austria (political sciences). His main research interests are qualitative methods, social representations in the fields of individual and public health, vulnerability in fields like youth homelessness or (forced) migration. He is author of An Introduction to Qualitative Research (7th ed, 2023, Sage), Doing Interview Research (2022, Sage), Introducing Research Methodology (3rd ed, 2020, Sage), Doing Grounded Theory (2018, Sage) and editor of several SAGE Handbooks (of Qualitative Data Analysis, 2014; of Qualitative Data Collection, 2018; and of Qualitative Research Design, 2022). In 2019, Uwe Flick received the Lifetime Award in Qualitative Inquiry at the 15th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. His current research is on peer relations of chronically ill young adults and their role in coping with the diseases and their impact on everyday lives under chronical conditions.