Certificate in Qualitative Research Methods: Summer Session

After a successful first run, the SSRC will again offer a certificate course in qualitative research methods. The course will run on Saturdays from June 2 – July 7 (with no class on June 30).

This course will teach students the fundamentals of scientific qualitative research design and how to conduct the most common types of qualitative field research, including in-depth interviews, ethnography, life narratives, focus groups, and participant observation. Students will get hands-on, practical experience designing and conducting qualitative research, including data collection techniques. By its conclusion, they’ll be able to:

• Develop and elucidate testable hypotheses
• Understand how social theory and specific research methods work together
• Recognize an appropriate methodology based on research questions and develop a corresponding research design
• Craft quality control mechanisms for data collection activities
• Design data collection instruments
• Enumerate various ethical and political dilemmas in qualitative research
• Conduct qualitative field research
• Identify the most common qualitative field research pitfalls and strategies to avoid them

Chicago-area professionals working within behavioral and/or social science research and those just wanting to bolster their marketable research skills will benefit from the certificate program.

Recent graduates, both graduate and undergraduate, current graduate students, and advanced upperclassmen considering a career in social or behavioral science fields or graduate programs in sociology, psychology, anthropology, public service, policy studies, social work, and public health would also benefit.

Registration is now open! Contact Jessica Speer (jspeer3 at depaul.edu) to learn more.

The How & The Why: The Certificate in Qualitative Research Methods

Certificate in Qualitative Research Methods

There is a growing need for evidence-based, rigorous, methodologically sound social research in a wide variety of fields in the public and private sectors—business, government, non-profit, social service, public health, criminal justice, law enforcement. The list is long. Yet many professional staff in these fields feel inadequately trained to conduct the necessary research. With this in mind, the SSRC has developed a certificate course in qualitative research methods that will be offered at DePaul in the spring quarter.

This course will teach students the fundamentals of scientific qualitative research design and how to conduct the most common types of qualitative field research, including in-depth interviews, ethnography, life narratives, focus groups, and participant observation. Students will get hands-on, practical experience designing and conducting qualitative research, including data collection techniques. By its conclusion, they’ll be able to:

• Develop and elucidate testable hypotheses
• Understand how social theory and specific research methods work together
• Recognize an appropriate methodology based on research questions and develop a corresponding research design
• Craft quality control mechanisms for data collection activities
• Design data collection instruments
• Enumerate various ethical and political dilemmas in qualitative research
• Conduct qualitative field research
• Identify the most common qualitative field research pitfalls and strategies to avoid them

Chicago-area professionals working within behavioral and/or social science research and those just wanting to bolster their marketable research skills will benefit from the certificate program, which will run on five Saturdays from March 31 to May 12 (with the exception of April 7 and May 5).

Recent graduates, both graduate and undergraduate, current graduate students, and advanced upperclassmen considering a career in social or behavioral science fields or graduate programs in sociology, psychology, anthropology, public service, policy studies, social work, and public health would also benefit.

Registration is now open! Contact Jessica Speer (jspeer3 at depaul.edu) to learn more.

Kristen Miller: Question Design

Kristen Miller, the director of the CDC’s Question Design Research Lab, will be at DePaul next week sharing her survey know-how with anyone who wants to learn more about how survey research on a grand scale operates on the ground. Check out the schedule below and join us at the SSRC for a promising display of survey and methodological insights and derring-do.

Friday, February 10, 1 pm: Faculty Seminar
“Development and Evaluation of a Sexual Identity Measure for the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)”
Miller will describe the use of qualitative research in developing a precise sexual identity measure for a large-scale quantitative survey and the resulting complications.

Monday, February 13, daytime: Lab Visits
Faculty are invited to schedule appointments to meet with Miller to discuss their research, questionnaire design, or other research questions. 

Monday, February 13, 6 – 7:30 pm: Public Lecture
“Question Evaluation at the National Center for Health Statistics”
This lecture, open to the public, will center on Miller’s work at the CDC and will consider examples of questions that inadvertently compromised data quality through a lack of rigorous evaluation.

I talked with Kristen today to learn more about what she does and why it matters.

Provoking Big Data

As computing power expands exponentially, excitement in the research community grows regarding the availability, prevalence, and newfound ease in analyzing large data sets known colloquially as “Big Data”. Even the humanities (in the form of digital humanities) have begun to embrace computation as a mode of study, and popular publications have all but declared qualitative research dead.

Drawing on David Berry’s idea of the “computational turn” in the humanities and social sciences, researchers danah boyd and Kate Crawford raise serious, timely, and well-grounded questions about the implications, assumptions, and norms around the growing use of “Big Data” in their article, “Six Provocations for Big Data”.

The issues are largely intertwining questions of access, control, academic freedom, research ethics, and the assumptions, contours, and values of social research.

This article is valuable for anyone interested in the future of research and the use of social media data, and should provoke conversation, or at least inspire questions and second thoughts about the use of Big Data in studying society as a whole.