Teaching Qualitative Research

Abstract

Explicitly qualitative research has never before been so popular in human geography, and this article hopes to encourage more graduate students and faculty members to undertake the teaching of qualitative geography. The article describes one such course for graduate students, highlighting its challenges and rewards, and focusing on exercises undertaken by the students that encourage them to explore various qualitative approaches, techniques, strategies and theoretical perspectives including archival research, interviewing, transcription, participant observation, writing field notes, analytic memos, coding data and thinking/writing reflexively.

Keywords:

• Teaching
• qualitative research
• qualitative methods
• methodology
• human geography

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Sari Biklen and Bob Bogdan for their guidance, the students who have taken Advanced Qualitative Research for engaging classes that taught her so much, and Stuart Aitken, Bob Bednarz, Iain Hay, Deborah Martin, and the journal's anonymous referees for helpful comments on this paper.

Notes

¹ This information was obtained informally, in discussions with students and colleagues in conferences and during campus visits. I am aware of no study that has tracked the teaching of methods courses in graduate geography programmes. In the cases of departments that do offer qualitative research courses, most of those of which I am aware also seem to be quite recent, having been developed in the last 5 to 10 years. One exception is Stuart Aitken's course at San Diego State University which has been offered since the early 1990s and may have been the first graduate-level qualitative research course in geography in the US.

² Previous articles in this journal have discussed teaching qualitative methods, but have focused on teaching undergraduates (see Burgess & Jackson, 1992; Ley, 1992; Lowe, 1992; Pile, 1992; Sidaway, 1992).

³ Courses in American universities customarily involve three contact hours per week; seminar courses, common at the graduate level, stack those hours together in one meeting; courses meeting twice per week divide those hours into two sessions.

⁴ My university's Institutional Review Board readily grants the class exemption from their overview for the purposes of the assignments that relate to living human subjects, but I am required to obtain that exemption. Many American universities insist on this kind of procedure; in my case, fortunately, the exemption has been easy to obtain.