Course Description

Health and social services frequently require research eliciting in-depth understanding of human experience to enhance clinical approaches and to evaluate and refine programs and services. This interdisciplinary course provides theory and practice in design, sampling, data collection, analysis, and authenticity strategies of interpretive inquiry, with a particular emphasis on phenomenology, ethnography, biographical method, and ground theory method.

Objectives

Through this course, students will learn to:

1. develop research questions relevant to human inquiry;
2. create beginning-level qualitative research designs reflecting methodological coherence with the appropriate research paradigm;
3. use beginning-level skills in collecting and analyzing interpretative research data;
4. critique qualitative research studies, appraising their design, coherence, and authenticity.

Course Textbook

Patton M.Q. (1990). Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods. Newbury Park: Sage Publications.

• Getting to know each other
• Overview of the course
• Framework for "on-line" component
• On-site course introduction: paradigms, premises, and principles of qualitative research

Part II - On-Line

Teaching Methodology

In reading assignments, computer-mediated discussions and interactive experiential learning both on the computer and in other learning opportunities, students are encouraged to cultivate a critically reflective phenomenological approach to learning. The fundamental assumption underlying this approach is that all knowledge is personal and is coloured by both the personal and professional interests, experiences, and ideas of the individual, by the ideas that scholars present to us in the literature, by the ideas and experiences shared by all course participants, and acquired through experiential learning opportunities provided in this course. While all of these things contribute to learning experience, learning becomes meaningful to us only in retrospect through reflection. Thus, conscious critical reflection is an important strategy to foster personal learning.