Teaching Qualitative Research: Experiential Learning in Group-Based Interviews and Coding Assignments

Abstract

This article describes experiential-learning approaches to conveying the work and rewards involved in qualitative research. Seminar students interviewed one another, transcribed or took notes on those interviews, shared those materials to create a set of empirical materials for coding, developed coding schemes, and coded the materials using those schemes. Students’ input reveals that these assignments were more effective than readings and discussions in conveying the challenges and rewards of qualitative research. In particular, the coding assignment revealed the labor involved in doing qualitative research, but also the insights qualitative research can lead to. Others are urged to try similar assignments.

Keywords:

• experiential learning
• qualitative research
• coding
• interviews
• human geography

Notes

1. James Chaney, Stephanie Crider, Ian Debnam, Gentry Hanks, Corey David Hotard, E. Arnold Modlin, Martin Pfeiffer, and Jorn Seemann.

2. All students in the seminar were invited to participate in the manuscript. Not all elected to participate, but none was opposed to the idea.

3. Other course assignments, such as the archival assignment, were detailed in DeLyser (2008).

4. U.S. universities receiving federal funding are required to verify that researchers using human subjects in their research have been trained in the ethical practice of such research. The U.S. National Institutes of Health Web site supports an online certification course used by many U.S. universities including ours.

5. DeLyser wanted students to engage in manual data coding to learn to engage closely with their data, but because our university holds no site license for qualitative-data-analysis software there was no alternative.

6. Comparing the different students’ coding categories led to a rich discussion of how some topics recurred (family and education were common themes students identified), but other topics emerged from the individual interests and foci of individual students—both outcomes shed light for the students on the insights and situatedness of qualitative research. A deeper analysis of this is beyond the scope of this article and its data sources since not all students elected to participate as authors and not all the coding schemes were available for comparison at the time of writing but see Martin (2010, 413) who, in discussing a similar assignment observed that “diverse researcher interests can lead to very different coding strategies and reports of findings, as any constructivist, hermeneutic, or post-structural epistemology would suggest!”

7. For this article the authors coded both student comments and reaction papers.

8. The operation of the equipment made available was reviewed in class, however some students opted to use their own or borrowed equipment, and sometimes found they had not properly prepared to use that equipment.

9. Though both digital and analog transcription equipment with foot-pedals were made available, some students opted for other solutions.

10. The original dialogue did not omit letters in certain words.

11. Scholars have noted the difference of experience between software and manual coding (see, e.g., Este, Sieppert, and Barsky 1998; Basit 2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dydia DeLyser

Dydia DeLyser is Associate Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. A cultural geographer and qualitative researcher committed to advancing qualitative research in geography, she has published widely on qualitative research and pedagogy, and has taught qualitative geography courses at the graduate level since 2000.

Amy E. Potter

Amy E. Potter holds a Ph.D. in geography from the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. Her research incorporates a variety of qualitative methods to further engage in topics centered on the Caribbean region, most recently exploring the relationship between communal land tenure and transnational migration on the island of Barbuda.