qualitative research class activity

The Classroom | Empowering Students in Their College Journey

How to Engage Students in Qualitative Research Through Experiential Class Activities

How to Evaluate a School Project

An effective method to teach qualitative research is through student practice. According to The University of Texas at Austin 's website, qualitative research methods focus on gathering non-numeric information through interviews, focus groups, observations and document analysis. To actively engage students, instructors can assign exercises that allow the students to collect data in a classroom setting. A common method of qualitative data collection is face-to-face interviewing, an activity that can be conducted easily in class.

Explain the definition of qualitative research. Include descriptions of data collection methods. Common forms of qualitative data collection are interviewing subjects, gathering focus groups of individuals and performing group interviews, and observing groups or individuals without actively engaging them.

Choose one data collection method on which to focus an in-class activity. Face-to-face interviewing, for example, is an easily executed exercise.

Instruct students to choose a topic for their research's focus, developing interview questions that will help them collect appropriate data. This task can be assigned about one week before the activity takes place, ensuring students' preparedness on the day of the activity.

Separate students into groups of two so that they can interview each other during the class period, collecting data for each of their research projects.

Review for the class the methods of analyzing their data. For interview responses, the best form of analysis is coding, which is the process of assigning numerical codes to verbal responses in order to process them by statistical means.

Assign a written and detailed coded analysis of students' interview findings for the following class period.

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University of Texas at Austin: Instructional Assessment Resources--Glossary
"The Practice of Social Research;" Earl Robert Babbie; 2004

Jennifer Higgins McCormick has been a business and sociology professor since 2007. She has been writing articles online and Web content for several marketing firms since 2010. She holds a Master of Business Administration from Medaille College and a doctorate in sociology from the University at Buffalo.

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100 Activities for Teaching Research Methods

Catherine Dawson - Self-employed researcher and writer
Description

A sourcebook of exercises, games, scenarios and role plays, this practical, user-friendly guide provides a complete and valuable resource for research methods tutors, teachers and lecturers.

Developed to complement and enhance existing course materials, the 100 ready-to-use activities encourage innovative and engaging classroom practice in seven areas:

finding and using sources of information
planning a research project
conducting research
using and analyzing data
disseminating results
acting ethically
developing deeper research skills.

Each of the activities is divided into a section on tutor notes and student handouts. Tutor notes contain clear guidance about the purpose, level and type of activity, along with a range of discussion notes that signpost key issues and research insights. Important terms, related activities and further reading suggestions are also included.

Not only does the A4 format make the student handouts easy to photocopy, they are also available to download and print directly from the book’s companion website for easy distribution in class.

Supplements

Catherine's book is a fantastic resource for anyone who is teaching research methods in the social sciences. Covering all aspects of the research process, it is packed full of innovative ideas, useful tips, and structured activities for use within the classroom. If you are a tutor, teacher, or lecturer who is looking to provide interesting and engaging content for your students, this book is an absolute 'must have'.

Every university with a Social Science department has to deliver research methods in some capacity, but there is no need for us all to sit in our institutional silos and reinvent the wheel. Dawson provides a huge and varied list of pre-designed activities for methods teachers to draw upon covering the whole research process and an eclectic range of methodological approaches. The activities are pedagogically engaging, comprehensively resourced and provide us with an opportunity to rethink how social science research methods can be taught in a more interactive and engaging way.

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100 Activities for Teaching Research Methods: Listening to Interviewees

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100 Activities for Teaching Research Methods

Welcome to the companion website.

Thank you for visiting the companion website for 100 Activities for Teaching Research Methods . Log in to access the instructor resources using the top menu and download the student activity handouts.

About the book

A sourcebook of exercises, games, scenarios and role plays for research methods tutors, teachers and lecturers, this practical, user-friendly guide has been developed to complement and enhance existing course materials. It is full of activities that contain clear guidance about the purpose, level and type of activity, along with a range of discussion notes that signpost key issues and research insights. Important terms, related activities and further reading suggestions are included for each activity.

The book contains 100 ready-to-use activities that provide a complete and valuable resource for educators, all of which are also available to be downloaded online. Innovative and engaging classroom practice is encouraged in seven areas:

finding and using sources of information
planning a research project
conducting research
using and analyzing data
disseminating results
acting ethically
developing deeper research skills.

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This website may contain links to both internal and external websites. All links included were active at the time the website was launched. SAGE does not operate these external websites and does not necessarily endorse the views expressed within them. SAGE cannot take responsibility for the changing content or nature of linked sites, as these sites are outside of our control and subject to change without our knowledge. If you do find an inactive link to an external website, please try to locate that website by using a search engine. SAGE will endeavour to update inactive or broken links when possible.

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Innovative qualitative research data collection and analysis activities that engage nursing students

Affiliations.

1 College of Nursing, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA. Electronic address: [email protected].
2 College of Nursing, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA.
PMID: 33674106
DOI: 10.1016/j.profnurs.2020.11.009

Background: Rather than traditional teacher-centered classrooms, it is important for instructors to shift to student-centered models, encouraging active learning.

Problem: The challenge for instructors is to design in-person and/or virtual classroom activities that introduce and engage students in essential aspects of qualitative research data collection and analysis.

Approach: Two instructor-created and student-centered activities focused on qualitative data collection and analysis strategies that connect instructors and undergraduate or graduate nursing research students are described.

Outcomes: Instructors witnessed students' interaction and robust group discussion. Positive students' evaluations and quantitative success on assignments were noted. Outcomes suggest that these activities (in-person or virtual-platform) for qualitative data collection and analysis are effective classroom strategies to present difficult concepts in an easily understood and learner-friendly context.

Conclusions: These leaning activities move students to engage with and learn from one another under instructor's guidance. Other faculty may use these activities in structuring classrooms that involve and stimulate students' critical thinking about qualitative research methods.

Keywords: Computer-assisted instruction; Faculty; Qualitative nursing research; Student-centered learning.

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Chapter 1. Introduction

“Science is in danger, and for that reason it is becoming dangerous” -Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity

Why an Open Access Textbook on Qualitative Research Methods?

I have been teaching qualitative research methods to both undergraduates and graduate students for many years. Although there are some excellent textbooks out there, they are often costly, and none of them, to my mind, properly introduces qualitative research methods to the beginning student (whether undergraduate or graduate student). In contrast, this open-access textbook is designed as a (free) true introduction to the subject, with helpful, practical pointers on how to conduct research and how to access more advanced instruction.

Textbooks are typically arranged in one of two ways: (1) by technique (each chapter covers one method used in qualitative research); or (2) by process (chapters advance from research design through publication). But both of these approaches are necessary for the beginner student. This textbook will have sections dedicated to the process as well as the techniques of qualitative research. This is a true “comprehensive” book for the beginning student. In addition to covering techniques of data collection and data analysis, it provides a road map of how to get started and how to keep going and where to go for advanced instruction. It covers aspects of research design and research communication as well as methods employed. Along the way, it includes examples from many different disciplines in the social sciences.

The primary goal has been to create a useful, accessible, engaging textbook for use across many disciplines. And, let’s face it. Textbooks can be boring. I hope readers find this to be a little different. I have tried to write in a practical and forthright manner, with many lively examples and references to good and intellectually creative qualitative research. Woven throughout the text are short textual asides (in colored textboxes) by professional (academic) qualitative researchers in various disciplines. These short accounts by practitioners should help inspire students. So, let’s begin!

What is Research?

When we use the word research , what exactly do we mean by that? This is one of those words that everyone thinks they understand, but it is worth beginning this textbook with a short explanation. We use the term to refer to “empirical research,” which is actually a historically specific approach to understanding the world around us. Think about how you know things about the world. [1] You might know your mother loves you because she’s told you she does. Or because that is what “mothers” do by tradition. Or you might know because you’ve looked for evidence that she does, like taking care of you when you are sick or reading to you in bed or working two jobs so you can have the things you need to do OK in life. Maybe it seems churlish to look for evidence; you just take it “on faith” that you are loved.

Only one of the above comes close to what we mean by research. Empirical research is research (investigation) based on evidence. Conclusions can then be drawn from observable data. This observable data can also be “tested” or checked. If the data cannot be tested, that is a good indication that we are not doing research. Note that we can never “prove” conclusively, through observable data, that our mothers love us. We might have some “disconfirming evidence” (that time she didn’t show up to your graduation, for example) that could push you to question an original hypothesis , but no amount of “confirming evidence” will ever allow us to say with 100% certainty, “my mother loves me.” Faith and tradition and authority work differently. Our knowledge can be 100% certain using each of those alternative methods of knowledge, but our certainty in those cases will not be based on facts or evidence.

For many periods of history, those in power have been nervous about “science” because it uses evidence and facts as the primary source of understanding the world, and facts can be at odds with what power or authority or tradition want you to believe. That is why I say that scientific empirical research is a historically specific approach to understand the world. You are in college or university now partly to learn how to engage in this historically specific approach.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, there was a newfound respect for empirical research, some of which was seriously challenging to the established church. Using observations and testing them, scientists found that the earth was not at the center of the universe, for example, but rather that it was but one planet of many which circled the sun. [2] For the next two centuries, the science of astronomy, physics, biology, and chemistry emerged and became disciplines taught in universities. All used the scientific method of observation and testing to advance knowledge. Knowledge about people , however, and social institutions, however, was still left to faith, tradition, and authority. Historians and philosophers and poets wrote about the human condition, but none of them used research to do so. [3]

It was not until the nineteenth century that “social science” really emerged, using the scientific method (empirical observation) to understand people and social institutions. New fields of sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology emerged. The first sociologists, people like Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, sought specifically to apply the scientific method of research to understand society, Engels famously claiming that Marx had done for the social world what Darwin did for the natural world, tracings its laws of development. Today we tend to take for granted the naturalness of science here, but it is actually a pretty recent and radical development.

To return to the question, “does your mother love you?” Well, this is actually not really how a researcher would frame the question, as it is too specific to your case. It doesn’t tell us much about the world at large, even if it does tell us something about you and your relationship with your mother. A social science researcher might ask, “do mothers love their children?” Or maybe they would be more interested in how this loving relationship might change over time (e.g., “do mothers love their children more now than they did in the 18th century when so many children died before reaching adulthood?”) or perhaps they might be interested in measuring quality of love across cultures or time periods, or even establishing “what love looks like” using the mother/child relationship as a site of exploration. All of these make good research questions because we can use observable data to answer them.

What is Qualitative Research?

“All we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk, how to tell. If we don’t tell the world, we don’t know the world. We’re lost in it, we die.” -Ursula LeGuin, The Telling

At its simplest, qualitative research is research about the social world that does not use numbers in its analyses. All those who fear statistics can breathe a sigh of relief – there are no mathematical formulae or regression models in this book! But this definition is less about what qualitative research can be and more about what it is not. To be honest, any simple statement will fail to capture the power and depth of qualitative research. One way of contrasting qualitative research to quantitative research is to note that the focus of qualitative research is less about explaining and predicting relationships between variables and more about understanding the social world. To use our mother love example, the question about “what love looks like” is a good question for the qualitative researcher while all questions measuring love or comparing incidences of love (both of which require measurement) are good questions for quantitative researchers. Patton writes,

Qualitative data describe. They take us, as readers, into the time and place of the observation so that we know what it was like to have been there. They capture and communicate someone else’s experience of the world in his or her own words. Qualitative data tell a story. ( Patton 2002:47 )

Qualitative researchers are asking different questions about the world than their quantitative colleagues. Even when researchers are employed in “mixed methods” research ( both quantitative and qualitative), they are using different methods to address different questions of the study. I do a lot of research about first-generation and working-college college students. Where a quantitative researcher might ask, how many first-generation college students graduate from college within four years? Or does first-generation college status predict high student debt loads? A qualitative researcher might ask, how does the college experience differ for first-generation college students? What is it like to carry a lot of debt, and how does this impact the ability to complete college on time? Both sets of questions are important, but they can only be answered using specific tools tailored to those questions. For the former, you need large numbers to make adequate comparisons. For the latter, you need to talk to people, find out what they are thinking and feeling, and try to inhabit their shoes for a little while so you can make sense of their experiences and beliefs.

Examples of Qualitative Research

You have probably seen examples of qualitative research before, but you might not have paid particular attention to how they were produced or realized that the accounts you were reading were the result of hours, months, even years of research “in the field.” A good qualitative researcher will present the product of their hours of work in such a way that it seems natural, even obvious, to the reader. Because we are trying to convey what it is like answers, qualitative research is often presented as stories – stories about how people live their lives, go to work, raise their children, interact with one another. In some ways, this can seem like reading particularly insightful novels. But, unlike novels, there are very specific rules and guidelines that qualitative researchers follow to ensure that the “story” they are telling is accurate , a truthful rendition of what life is like for the people being studied. Most of this textbook will be spent conveying those rules and guidelines. Let’s take a look, first, however, at three examples of what the end product looks like. I have chosen these three examples to showcase very different approaches to qualitative research, and I will return to these five examples throughout the book. They were all published as whole books (not chapters or articles), and they are worth the long read, if you have the time. I will also provide some information on how these books came to be and the length of time it takes to get them into book version. It is important you know about this process, and the rest of this textbook will help explain why it takes so long to conduct good qualitative research!

Example 1 : The End Game (ethnography + interviews)

Corey Abramson is a sociologist who teaches at the University of Arizona. In 2015 he published The End Game: How Inequality Shapes our Final Years ( 2015 ). This book was based on the research he did for his dissertation at the University of California-Berkeley in 2012. Actually, the dissertation was completed in 2012 but the work that was produced that took several years. The dissertation was entitled, “This is How We Live, This is How We Die: Social Stratification, Aging, and Health in Urban America” ( 2012 ). You can see how the book version, which was written for a more general audience, has a more engaging sound to it, but that the dissertation version, which is what academic faculty read and evaluate, has a more descriptive title. You can read the title and know that this is a study about aging and health and that the focus is going to be inequality and that the context (place) is going to be “urban America.” It’s a study about “how” people do something – in this case, how they deal with aging and death. This is the very first sentence of the dissertation, “From our first breath in the hospital to the day we die, we live in a society characterized by unequal opportunities for maintaining health and taking care of ourselves when ill. These disparities reflect persistent racial, socio-economic, and gender-based inequalities and contribute to their persistence over time” ( 1 ). What follows is a truthful account of how that is so.

Cory Abramson spent three years conducting his research in four different urban neighborhoods. We call the type of research he conducted “comparative ethnographic” because he designed his study to compare groups of seniors as they went about their everyday business. It’s comparative because he is comparing different groups (based on race, class, gender) and ethnographic because he is studying the culture/way of life of a group. [4] He had an educated guess, rooted in what previous research had shown and what social theory would suggest, that people’s experiences of aging differ by race, class, and gender. So, he set up a research design that would allow him to observe differences. He chose two primarily middle-class (one was racially diverse and the other was predominantly White) and two primarily poor neighborhoods (one was racially diverse and the other was predominantly African American). He hung out in senior centers and other places seniors congregated, watched them as they took the bus to get prescriptions filled, sat in doctor’s offices with them, and listened to their conversations with each other. He also conducted more formal conversations, what we call in-depth interviews, with sixty seniors from each of the four neighborhoods. As with a lot of fieldwork , as he got closer to the people involved, he both expanded and deepened his reach –

By the end of the project, I expanded my pool of general observations to include various settings frequented by seniors: apartment building common rooms, doctors’ offices, emergency rooms, pharmacies, senior centers, bars, parks, corner stores, shopping centers, pool halls, hair salons, coffee shops, and discount stores. Over the course of the three years of fieldwork, I observed hundreds of elders, and developed close relationships with a number of them. ( 2012:10 )

When Abramson rewrote the dissertation for a general audience and published his book in 2015, it got a lot of attention. It is a beautifully written book and it provided insight into a common human experience that we surprisingly know very little about. It won the Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological Association Section on Aging and the Life Course and was featured in the New York Times . The book was about aging, and specifically how inequality shapes the aging process, but it was also about much more than that. It helped show how inequality affects people’s everyday lives. For example, by observing the difficulties the poor had in setting up appointments and getting to them using public transportation and then being made to wait to see a doctor, sometimes in standing-room-only situations, when they are unwell, and then being treated dismissively by hospital staff, Abramson allowed readers to feel the material reality of being poor in the US. Comparing these examples with seniors with adequate supplemental insurance who have the resources to hire car services or have others assist them in arranging care when they need it, jolts the reader to understand and appreciate the difference money makes in the lives and circumstances of us all, and in a way that is different than simply reading a statistic (“80% of the poor do not keep regular doctor’s appointments”) does. Qualitative research can reach into spaces and places that often go unexamined and then reports back to the rest of us what it is like in those spaces and places.

Example 2: Racing for Innocence (Interviews + Content Analysis + Fictional Stories)

Jennifer Pierce is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Trained as a sociologist, she has written a number of books about gender, race, and power. Her very first book, Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms, published in 1995, is a brilliant look at gender dynamics within two law firms. Pierce was a participant observer, working as a paralegal, and she observed how female lawyers and female paralegals struggled to obtain parity with their male colleagues.

Fifteen years later, she reexamined the context of the law firm to include an examination of racial dynamics, particularly how elite white men working in these spaces created and maintained a culture that made it difficult for both female attorneys and attorneys of color to thrive. Her book, Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action , published in 2012, is an interesting and creative blending of interviews with attorneys, content analyses of popular films during this period, and fictional accounts of racial discrimination and sexual harassment. The law firm she chose to study had come under an affirmative action order and was in the process of implementing equitable policies and programs. She wanted to understand how recipients of white privilege (the elite white male attorneys) come to deny the role they play in reproducing inequality. Through interviews with attorneys who were present both before and during the affirmative action order, she creates a historical record of the “bad behavior” that necessitated new policies and procedures, but also, and more importantly , probed the participants ’ understanding of this behavior. It should come as no surprise that most (but not all) of the white male attorneys saw little need for change, and that almost everyone else had accounts that were different if not sometimes downright harrowing.

I’ve used Pierce’s book in my qualitative research methods courses as an example of an interesting blend of techniques and presentation styles. My students often have a very difficult time with the fictional accounts she includes. But they serve an important communicative purpose here. They are her attempts at presenting “both sides” to an objective reality – something happens (Pierce writes this something so it is very clear what it is), and the two participants to the thing that happened have very different understandings of what this means. By including these stories, Pierce presents one of her key findings – people remember things differently and these different memories tend to support their own ideological positions. I wonder what Pierce would have written had she studied the murder of George Floyd or the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 or any number of other historic events whose observers and participants record very different happenings.

This is not to say that qualitative researchers write fictional accounts. In fact, the use of fiction in our work remains controversial. When used, it must be clearly identified as a presentation device, as Pierce did. I include Racing for Innocence here as an example of the multiple uses of methods and techniques and the way that these work together to produce better understandings by us, the readers, of what Pierce studied. We readers come away with a better grasp of how and why advantaged people understate their own involvement in situations and structures that advantage them. This is normal human behavior , in other words. This case may have been about elite white men in law firms, but the general insights here can be transposed to other settings. Indeed, Pierce argues that more research needs to be done about the role elites play in the reproduction of inequality in the workplace in general.

Example 3: Amplified Advantage (Mixed Methods: Survey Interviews + Focus Groups + Archives)

The final example comes from my own work with college students, particularly the ways in which class background affects the experience of college and outcomes for graduates. I include it here as an example of mixed methods, and for the use of supplementary archival research. I’ve done a lot of research over the years on first-generation, low-income, and working-class college students. I am curious (and skeptical) about the possibility of social mobility today, particularly with the rising cost of college and growing inequality in general. As one of the few people in my family to go to college, I didn’t grow up with a lot of examples of what college was like or how to make the most of it. And when I entered graduate school, I realized with dismay that there were very few people like me there. I worried about becoming too different from my family and friends back home. And I wasn’t at all sure that I would ever be able to pay back the huge load of debt I was taking on. And so I wrote my dissertation and first two books about working-class college students. These books focused on experiences in college and the difficulties of navigating between family and school ( Hurst 2010a, 2012 ). But even after all that research, I kept coming back to wondering if working-class students who made it through college had an equal chance at finding good jobs and happy lives,

What happens to students after college? Do working-class students fare as well as their peers? I knew from my own experience that barriers continued through graduate school and beyond, and that my debtload was higher than that of my peers, constraining some of the choices I made when I graduated. To answer these questions, I designed a study of students attending small liberal arts colleges, the type of college that tried to equalize the experience of students by requiring all students to live on campus and offering small classes with lots of interaction with faculty. These private colleges tend to have more money and resources so they can provide financial aid to low-income students. They also attract some very wealthy students. Because they enroll students across the class spectrum, I would be able to draw comparisons. I ended up spending about four years collecting data, both a survey of more than 2000 students (which formed the basis for quantitative analyses) and qualitative data collection (interviews, focus groups, archival research, and participant observation). This is what we call a “mixed methods” approach because we use both quantitative and qualitative data. The survey gave me a large enough number of students that I could make comparisons of the how many kind, and to be able to say with some authority that there were in fact significant differences in experience and outcome by class (e.g., wealthier students earned more money and had little debt; working-class students often found jobs that were not in their chosen careers and were very affected by debt, upper-middle-class students were more likely to go to graduate school). But the survey analyses could not explain why these differences existed. For that, I needed to talk to people and ask them about their motivations and aspirations. I needed to understand their perceptions of the world, and it is very hard to do this through a survey.

By interviewing students and recent graduates, I was able to discern particular patterns and pathways through college and beyond. Specifically, I identified three versions of gameplay. Upper-middle-class students, whose parents were themselves professionals (academics, lawyers, managers of non-profits), saw college as the first stage of their education and took classes and declared majors that would prepare them for graduate school. They also spent a lot of time building their resumes, taking advantage of opportunities to help professors with their research, or study abroad. This helped them gain admission to highly-ranked graduate schools and interesting jobs in the public sector. In contrast, upper-class students, whose parents were wealthy and more likely to be engaged in business (as CEOs or other high-level directors), prioritized building social capital. They did this by joining fraternities and sororities and playing club sports. This helped them when they graduated as they called on friends and parents of friends to find them well-paying jobs. Finally, low-income, first-generation, and working-class students were often adrift. They took the classes that were recommended to them but without the knowledge of how to connect them to life beyond college. They spent time working and studying rather than partying or building their resumes. All three sets of students thought they were “doing college” the right way, the way that one was supposed to do college. But these three versions of gameplay led to distinct outcomes that advantaged some students over others. I titled my work “Amplified Advantage” to highlight this process.

These three examples, Cory Abramson’s The End Game , Jennifer Peirce’s Racing for Innocence, and my own Amplified Advantage, demonstrate the range of approaches and tools available to the qualitative researcher. They also help explain why qualitative research is so important. Numbers can tell us some things about the world, but they cannot get at the hearts and minds, motivations and beliefs of the people who make up the social worlds we inhabit. For that, we need tools that allow us to listen and make sense of what people tell us and show us. That is what good qualitative research offers us.

How Is This Book Organized?

This textbook is organized as a comprehensive introduction to the use of qualitative research methods. The first half covers general topics (e.g., approaches to qualitative research, ethics) and research design (necessary steps for building a successful qualitative research study). The second half reviews various data collection and data analysis techniques. Of course, building a successful qualitative research study requires some knowledge of data collection and data analysis so the chapters in the first half and the chapters in the second half should be read in conversation with each other. That said, each chapter can be read on its own for assistance with a particular narrow topic. In addition to the chapters, a helpful glossary can be found in the back of the book. Rummage around in the text as needed.

Chapter Descriptions

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Research Design Process. How does one begin a study? What is an appropriate research question? How is the study to be done – with what methods ? Involving what people and sites? Although qualitative research studies can and often do change and develop over the course of data collection, it is important to have a good idea of what the aims and goals of your study are at the outset and a good plan of how to achieve those aims and goals. Chapter 2 provides a road map of the process.

Chapter 3 describes and explains various ways of knowing the (social) world. What is it possible for us to know about how other people think or why they behave the way they do? What does it mean to say something is a “fact” or that it is “well-known” and understood? Qualitative researchers are particularly interested in these questions because of the types of research questions we are interested in answering (the how questions rather than the how many questions of quantitative research). Qualitative researchers have adopted various epistemological approaches. Chapter 3 will explore these approaches, highlighting interpretivist approaches that acknowledge the subjective aspect of reality – in other words, reality and knowledge are not objective but rather influenced by (interpreted through) people.

Chapter 4 focuses on the practical matter of developing a research question and finding the right approach to data collection. In any given study (think of Cory Abramson’s study of aging, for example), there may be years of collected data, thousands of observations , hundreds of pages of notes to read and review and make sense of. If all you had was a general interest area (“aging”), it would be very difficult, nearly impossible, to make sense of all of that data. The research question provides a helpful lens to refine and clarify (and simplify) everything you find and collect. For that reason, it is important to pull out that lens (articulate the research question) before you get started. In the case of the aging study, Cory Abramson was interested in how inequalities affected understandings and responses to aging. It is for this reason he designed a study that would allow him to compare different groups of seniors (some middle-class, some poor). Inevitably, he saw much more in the three years in the field than what made it into his book (or dissertation), but he was able to narrow down the complexity of the social world to provide us with this rich account linked to the original research question. Developing a good research question is thus crucial to effective design and a successful outcome. Chapter 4 will provide pointers on how to do this. Chapter 4 also provides an overview of general approaches taken to doing qualitative research and various “traditions of inquiry.”

Chapter 5 explores sampling . After you have developed a research question and have a general idea of how you will collect data (Observations? Interviews?), how do you go about actually finding people and sites to study? Although there is no “correct number” of people to interview , the sample should follow the research question and research design. Unlike quantitative research, qualitative research involves nonprobability sampling. Chapter 5 explains why this is so and what qualities instead make a good sample for qualitative research.

Chapter 6 addresses the importance of reflexivity in qualitative research. Related to epistemological issues of how we know anything about the social world, qualitative researchers understand that we the researchers can never be truly neutral or outside the study we are conducting. As observers, we see things that make sense to us and may entirely miss what is either too obvious to note or too different to comprehend. As interviewers, as much as we would like to ask questions neutrally and remain in the background, interviews are a form of conversation, and the persons we interview are responding to us . Therefore, it is important to reflect upon our social positions and the knowledges and expectations we bring to our work and to work through any blind spots that we may have. Chapter 6 provides some examples of reflexivity in practice and exercises for thinking through one’s own biases.

Chapter 7 is a very important chapter and should not be overlooked. As a practical matter, it should also be read closely with chapters 6 and 8. Because qualitative researchers deal with people and the social world, it is imperative they develop and adhere to a strong ethical code for conducting research in a way that does not harm. There are legal requirements and guidelines for doing so (see chapter 8), but these requirements should not be considered synonymous with the ethical code required of us. Each researcher must constantly interrogate every aspect of their research, from research question to design to sample through analysis and presentation, to ensure that a minimum of harm (ideally, zero harm) is caused. Because each research project is unique, the standards of care for each study are unique. Part of being a professional researcher is carrying this code in one’s heart, being constantly attentive to what is required under particular circumstances. Chapter 7 provides various research scenarios and asks readers to weigh in on the suitability and appropriateness of the research. If done in a class setting, it will become obvious fairly quickly that there are often no absolutely correct answers, as different people find different aspects of the scenarios of greatest importance. Minimizing the harm in one area may require possible harm in another. Being attentive to all the ethical aspects of one’s research and making the best judgments one can, clearly and consciously, is an integral part of being a good researcher.

Chapter 8 , best to be read in conjunction with chapter 7, explains the role and importance of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) . Under federal guidelines, an IRB is an appropriately constituted group that has been formally designated to review and monitor research involving human subjects . Every institution that receives funding from the federal government has an IRB. IRBs have the authority to approve, require modifications to (to secure approval), or disapprove research. This group review serves an important role in the protection of the rights and welfare of human research subjects. Chapter 8 reviews the history of IRBs and the work they do but also argues that IRBs’ review of qualitative research is often both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. Some aspects of qualitative research are not well understood by IRBs, given that they were developed to prevent abuses in biomedical research. Thus, it is important not to rely on IRBs to identify all the potential ethical issues that emerge in our research (see chapter 7).

Chapter 9 provides help for getting started on formulating a research question based on gaps in the pre-existing literature. Research is conducted as part of a community, even if particular studies are done by single individuals (or small teams). What any of us finds and reports back becomes part of a much larger body of knowledge. Thus, it is important that we look at the larger body of knowledge before we actually start our bit to see how we can best contribute. When I first began interviewing working-class college students, there was only one other similar study I could find, and it hadn’t been published (it was a dissertation of students from poor backgrounds). But there had been a lot published by professors who had grown up working class and made it through college despite the odds. These accounts by “working-class academics” became an important inspiration for my study and helped me frame the questions I asked the students I interviewed. Chapter 9 will provide some pointers on how to search for relevant literature and how to use this to refine your research question.

Chapter 10 serves as a bridge between the two parts of the textbook, by introducing techniques of data collection. Qualitative research is often characterized by the form of data collection – for example, an ethnographic study is one that employs primarily observational data collection for the purpose of documenting and presenting a particular culture or ethnos. Techniques can be effectively combined, depending on the research question and the aims and goals of the study. Chapter 10 provides a general overview of all the various techniques and how they can be combined.

The second part of the textbook moves into the doing part of qualitative research once the research question has been articulated and the study designed. Chapters 11 through 17 cover various data collection techniques and approaches. Chapters 18 and 19 provide a very simple overview of basic data analysis. Chapter 20 covers communication of the data to various audiences, and in various formats.

Chapter 11 begins our overview of data collection techniques with a focus on interviewing , the true heart of qualitative research. This technique can serve as the primary and exclusive form of data collection, or it can be used to supplement other forms (observation, archival). An interview is distinct from a survey, where questions are asked in a specific order and often with a range of predetermined responses available. Interviews can be conversational and unstructured or, more conventionally, semistructured , where a general set of interview questions “guides” the conversation. Chapter 11 covers the basics of interviews: how to create interview guides, how many people to interview, where to conduct the interview, what to watch out for (how to prepare against things going wrong), and how to get the most out of your interviews.

Chapter 12 covers an important variant of interviewing, the focus group. Focus groups are semistructured interviews with a group of people moderated by a facilitator (the researcher or researcher’s assistant). Focus groups explicitly use group interaction to assist in the data collection. They are best used to collect data on a specific topic that is non-personal and shared among the group. For example, asking a group of college students about a common experience such as taking classes by remote delivery during the pandemic year of 2020. Chapter 12 covers the basics of focus groups: when to use them, how to create interview guides for them, and how to run them effectively.

Chapter 13 moves away from interviewing to the second major form of data collection unique to qualitative researchers – observation . Qualitative research that employs observation can best be understood as falling on a continuum of “fly on the wall” observation (e.g., observing how strangers interact in a doctor’s waiting room) to “participant” observation, where the researcher is also an active participant of the activity being observed. For example, an activist in the Black Lives Matter movement might want to study the movement, using her inside position to gain access to observe key meetings and interactions. Chapter 13 covers the basics of participant observation studies: advantages and disadvantages, gaining access, ethical concerns related to insider/outsider status and entanglement, and recording techniques.

Chapter 14 takes a closer look at “deep ethnography” – immersion in the field of a particularly long duration for the purpose of gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of a particular culture or social world. Clifford Geertz called this “deep hanging out.” Whereas participant observation is often combined with semistructured interview techniques, deep ethnography’s commitment to “living the life” or experiencing the situation as it really is demands more conversational and natural interactions with people. These interactions and conversations may take place over months or even years. As can be expected, there are some costs to this technique, as well as some very large rewards when done competently. Chapter 14 provides some examples of deep ethnographies that will inspire some beginning researchers and intimidate others.

Chapter 15 moves in the opposite direction of deep ethnography, a technique that is the least positivist of all those discussed here, to mixed methods , a set of techniques that is arguably the most positivist . A mixed methods approach combines both qualitative data collection and quantitative data collection, commonly by combining a survey that is analyzed statistically (e.g., cross-tabs or regression analyses of large number probability samples) with semi-structured interviews. Although it is somewhat unconventional to discuss mixed methods in textbooks on qualitative research, I think it is important to recognize this often-employed approach here. There are several advantages and some disadvantages to taking this route. Chapter 16 will describe those advantages and disadvantages and provide some particular guidance on how to design a mixed methods study for maximum effectiveness.

Chapter 16 covers data collection that does not involve live human subjects at all – archival and historical research (chapter 17 will also cover data that does not involve interacting with human subjects). Sometimes people are unavailable to us, either because they do not wish to be interviewed or observed (as is the case with many “elites”) or because they are too far away, in both place and time. Fortunately, humans leave many traces and we can often answer questions we have by examining those traces. Special collections and archives can be goldmines for social science research. This chapter will explain how to access these places, for what purposes, and how to begin to make sense of what you find.

Chapter 17 covers another data collection area that does not involve face-to-face interaction with humans: content analysis . Although content analysis may be understood more properly as a data analysis technique, the term is often used for the entire approach, which will be the case here. Content analysis involves interpreting meaning from a body of text. This body of text might be something found in historical records (see chapter 16) or something collected by the researcher, as in the case of comment posts on a popular blog post. I once used the stories told by student loan debtors on the website studentloanjustice.org as the content I analyzed. Content analysis is particularly useful when attempting to define and understand prevalent stories or communication about a topic of interest. In other words, when we are less interested in what particular people (our defined sample) are doing or believing and more interested in what general narratives exist about a particular topic or issue. This chapter will explore different approaches to content analysis and provide helpful tips on how to collect data, how to turn that data into codes for analysis, and how to go about presenting what is found through analysis.

Where chapter 17 has pushed us towards data analysis, chapters 18 and 19 are all about what to do with the data collected, whether that data be in the form of interview transcripts or fieldnotes from observations. Chapter 18 introduces the basics of coding , the iterative process of assigning meaning to the data in order to both simplify and identify patterns. What is a code and how does it work? What are the different ways of coding data, and when should you use them? What is a codebook, and why do you need one? What does the process of data analysis look like?

Chapter 19 goes further into detail on codes and how to use them, particularly the later stages of coding in which our codes are refined, simplified, combined, and organized. These later rounds of coding are essential to getting the most out of the data we’ve collected. As students are often overwhelmed with the amount of data (a corpus of interview transcripts typically runs into the hundreds of pages; fieldnotes can easily top that), this chapter will also address time management and provide suggestions for dealing with chaos and reminders that feeling overwhelmed at the analysis stage is part of the process. By the end of the chapter, you should understand how “findings” are actually found.

The book concludes with a chapter dedicated to the effective presentation of data results. Chapter 20 covers the many ways that researchers communicate their studies to various audiences (academic, personal, political), what elements must be included in these various publications, and the hallmarks of excellent qualitative research that various audiences will be expecting. Because qualitative researchers are motivated by understanding and conveying meaning , effective communication is not only an essential skill but a fundamental facet of the entire research project. Ethnographers must be able to convey a certain sense of verisimilitude , the appearance of true reality. Those employing interviews must faithfully depict the key meanings of the people they interviewed in a way that rings true to those people, even if the end result surprises them. And all researchers must strive for clarity in their publications so that various audiences can understand what was found and why it is important.

The book concludes with a short chapter ( chapter 21 ) discussing the value of qualitative research. At the very end of this book, you will find a glossary of terms. I recommend you make frequent use of the glossary and add to each entry as you find examples. Although the entries are meant to be simple and clear, you may also want to paraphrase the definition—make it “make sense” to you, in other words. In addition to the standard reference list (all works cited here), you will find various recommendations for further reading at the end of many chapters. Some of these recommendations will be examples of excellent qualitative research, indicated with an asterisk (*) at the end of the entry. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. A good example of qualitative research can teach you more about conducting research than any textbook can (this one included). I highly recommend you select one to three examples from these lists and read them along with the textbook.

A final note on the choice of examples – you will note that many of the examples used in the text come from research on college students. This is for two reasons. First, as most of my research falls in this area, I am most familiar with this literature and have contacts with those who do research here and can call upon them to share their stories with you. Second, and more importantly, my hope is that this textbook reaches a wide audience of beginning researchers who study widely and deeply across the range of what can be known about the social world (from marine resources management to public policy to nursing to political science to sexuality studies and beyond). It is sometimes difficult to find examples that speak to all those research interests, however. A focus on college students is something that all readers can understand and, hopefully, appreciate, as we are all now or have been at some point a college student.

Patton’s Ten Suggestions for Doing Qualitative Research

The following ten suggestions were made by Michael Quinn Patton in his massive textbooks Qualitative Research and Evaluations Methods . This book is highly recommended for those of you who want more than an introduction to qualitative methods. It is the book I relied on heavily when I was a graduate student, although it is much easier to “dip into” when necessary than to read through as a whole. Patton is asked for “just one bit of advice” for a graduate student considering using qualitative research methods for their dissertation. Here are his top ten responses, in short form, heavily paraphrased, and with additional comments and emphases from me:

Make sure that a qualitative approach fits the research question. The following are the kinds of questions that call out for qualitative methods or where qualitative methods are particularly appropriate: questions about people’s experiences or how they make sense of those experiences; studying a person in their natural environment; researching a phenomenon so unknown that it would be impossible to study it with standardized instruments or other forms of quantitative data collection.
Study qualitative research by going to the original sources for the design and analysis appropriate to the particular approach you want to take (e.g., read Glaser and Straus if you are using grounded theory )
Find a dissertation adviser who understands or at least who will support your use of qualitative research methods. You are asking for trouble if your entire committee is populated by quantitative researchers, even if they are all very knowledgeable about the subject or focus of your study (maybe even more so if they are!)
Really work on design. Doing qualitative research effectively takes a lot of planning. Even if things are more flexible than in quantitative research, a good design is absolutely essential when starting out.
Practice data collection techniques, particularly interviewing and observing. There is definitely a set of learned skills here! Do not expect your first interview to be perfect. You will continue to grow as a researcher the more interviews you conduct, and you will probably come to understand yourself a bit more in the process, too. This is not easy, despite what others who don’t work with qualitative methods may assume (and tell you!)
Have a plan for analysis before you begin data collection. This is often a requirement in IRB protocols , although you can get away with writing something fairly simple. And even if you are taking an approach, such as grounded theory, that pushes you to remain fairly open-minded during the data collection process, you still want to know what you will be doing with all the data collected – creating a codebook? Writing analytical memos? Comparing cases? Having a plan in hand will also help prevent you from collecting too much extraneous data.
Be prepared to confront controversies both within the qualitative research community and between qualitative research and quantitative research. Don’t be naïve about this – qualitative research, particularly some approaches, will be derided by many more “positivist” researchers and audiences. For example, is an “n” of 1 really sufficient? Yes! But not everyone will agree.
Do not make the mistake of using qualitative research methods because someone told you it was easier, or because you are intimidated by the math required of statistical analyses. Qualitative research is difficult in its own way (and many would claim much more time-consuming than quantitative research). Do it because you are convinced it is right for your goals, aims, and research questions.
Find a good support network. This could be a research mentor, or it could be a group of friends or colleagues who are also using qualitative research, or it could be just someone who will listen to you work through all of the issues you will confront out in the field and during the writing process. Even though qualitative research often involves human subjects, it can be pretty lonely. A lot of times you will feel like you are working without a net. You have to create one for yourself. Take care of yourself.
And, finally, in the words of Patton, “Prepare to be changed. Looking deeply at other people’s lives will force you to look deeply at yourself.”
We will actually spend an entire chapter ( chapter 3 ) looking at this question in much more detail! ↵
Note that this might have been news to Europeans at the time, but many other societies around the world had also come to this conclusion through observation. There is often a tendency to equate “the scientific revolution” with the European world in which it took place, but this is somewhat misleading. ↵
Historians are a special case here. Historians have scrupulously and rigorously investigated the social world, but not for the purpose of understanding general laws about how things work, which is the point of scientific empirical research. History is often referred to as an idiographic field of study, meaning that it studies things that happened or are happening in themselves and not for general observations or conclusions. ↵
Don’t worry, we’ll spend more time later in this book unpacking the meaning of ethnography and other terms that are important here. Note the available glossary ↵

An approach to research that is “multimethod in focus, involving an interpretative, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. Qualitative research involves the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical materials – case study, personal experience, introspective, life story, interview, observational, historical, interactional, and visual texts – that describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in individuals’ lives." ( Denzin and Lincoln 2005:2 ). Contrast with quantitative research .

In contrast to methodology, methods are more simply the practices and tools used to collect and analyze data. Examples of common methods in qualitative research are interviews , observations , and documentary analysis . One’s methodology should connect to one’s choice of methods, of course, but they are distinguishable terms. See also methodology .

A proposed explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation. The positing of a hypothesis is often the first step in quantitative research but not in qualitative research. Even when qualitative researchers offer possible explanations in advance of conducting research, they will tend to not use the word “hypothesis” as it conjures up the kind of positivist research they are not conducting.

The foundational question to be addressed by the research study. This will form the anchor of the research design, collection, and analysis. Note that in qualitative research, the research question may, and probably will, alter or develop during the course of the research.

An approach to research that collects and analyzes numerical data for the purpose of finding patterns and averages, making predictions, testing causal relationships, and generalizing results to wider populations. Contrast with qualitative research .

Data collection that takes place in real-world settings, referred to as “the field;” a key component of much Grounded Theory and ethnographic research. Patton ( 2002 ) calls fieldwork “the central activity of qualitative inquiry” where “‘going into the field’ means having direct and personal contact with people under study in their own environments – getting close to people and situations being studied to personally understand the realities of minutiae of daily life” (48).

The people who are the subjects of a qualitative study. In interview-based studies, they may be the respondents to the interviewer; for purposes of IRBs, they are often referred to as the human subjects of the research.

The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. For researchers, it is important to recognize and adopt one of the many distinguishing epistemological perspectives as part of our understanding of what questions research can address or fully answer. See, e.g., constructivism , subjectivism, and objectivism .

An approach that refutes the possibility of neutrality in social science research. All research is “guided by a set of beliefs and feelings about the world and how it should be understood and studied” (Denzin and Lincoln 2005: 13). In contrast to positivism , interpretivism recognizes the social constructedness of reality, and researchers adopting this approach focus on capturing interpretations and understandings people have about the world rather than “the world” as it is (which is a chimera).

The cluster of data-collection tools and techniques that involve observing interactions between people, the behaviors, and practices of individuals (sometimes in contrast to what they say about how they act and behave), and cultures in context. Observational methods are the key tools employed by ethnographers and Grounded Theory .

Research based on data collected and analyzed by the research (in contrast to secondary “library” research).

The process of selecting people or other units of analysis to represent a larger population. In quantitative research, this representation is taken quite literally, as statistically representative. In qualitative research, in contrast, sample selection is often made based on potential to generate insight about a particular topic or phenomenon.

A method of data collection in which the researcher asks the participant questions; the answers to these questions are often recorded and transcribed verbatim. There are many different kinds of interviews - see also semistructured interview , structured interview , and unstructured interview .

The specific group of individuals that you will collect data from. Contrast population.

The practice of being conscious of and reflective upon one’s own social location and presence when conducting research. Because qualitative research often requires interaction with live humans, failing to take into account how one’s presence and prior expectations and social location affect the data collected and how analyzed may limit the reliability of the findings. This remains true even when dealing with historical archives and other content. Who we are matters when asking questions about how people experience the world because we, too, are a part of that world.

The science and practice of right conduct; in research, it is also the delineation of moral obligations towards research participants, communities to which we belong, and communities in which we conduct our research.

An administrative body established to protect the rights and welfare of human research subjects recruited to participate in research activities conducted under the auspices of the institution with which it is affiliated. The IRB is charged with the responsibility of reviewing all research involving human participants. The IRB is concerned with protecting the welfare, rights, and privacy of human subjects. The IRB has the authority to approve, disapprove, monitor, and require modifications in all research activities that fall within its jurisdiction as specified by both the federal regulations and institutional policy.

Research, according to US federal guidelines, that involves “a living individual about whom an investigator (whether professional or student) conducting research: (1) Obtains information or biospecimens through intervention or interaction with the individual, and uses, studies, or analyzes the information or biospecimens; or (2) Obtains, uses, studies, analyzes, or generates identifiable private information or identifiable biospecimens.”

One of the primary methodological traditions of inquiry in qualitative research, ethnography is the study of a group or group culture, largely through observational fieldwork supplemented by interviews. It is a form of fieldwork that may include participant-observation data collection. See chapter 14 for a discussion of deep ethnography.

A form of interview that follows a standard guide of questions asked, although the order of the questions may change to match the particular needs of each individual interview subject, and probing “follow-up” questions are often added during the course of the interview. The semi-structured interview is the primary form of interviewing used by qualitative researchers in the social sciences. It is sometimes referred to as an “in-depth” interview. See also interview and interview guide .

A method of observational data collection taking place in a natural setting; a form of fieldwork . The term encompasses a continuum of relative participation by the researcher (from full participant to “fly-on-the-wall” observer). This is also sometimes referred to as ethnography , although the latter is characterized by a greater focus on the culture under observation.

A research design that employs both quantitative and qualitative methods, as in the case of a survey supplemented by interviews.

An epistemological perspective that posits the existence of reality through sensory experience similar to empiricism but goes further in denying any non-sensory basis of thought or consciousness. In the social sciences, the term has roots in the proto-sociologist August Comte, who believed he could discern “laws” of society similar to the laws of natural science (e.g., gravity). The term has come to mean the kinds of measurable and verifiable science conducted by quantitative researchers and is thus used pejoratively by some qualitative researchers interested in interpretation, consciousness, and human understanding. Calling someone a “positivist” is often intended as an insult. See also empiricism and objectivism.

A place or collection containing records, documents, or other materials of historical interest; most universities have an archive of material related to the university’s history, as well as other “special collections” that may be of interest to members of the community.

A method of both data collection and data analysis in which a given content (textual, visual, graphic) is examined systematically and rigorously to identify meanings, themes, patterns and assumptions. Qualitative content analysis (QCA) is concerned with gathering and interpreting an existing body of material.

A word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data (Saldaña 2021:5).

Usually a verbatim written record of an interview or focus group discussion.

The primary form of data for fieldwork , participant observation , and ethnography . These notes, taken by the researcher either during the course of fieldwork or at day’s end, should include as many details as possible on what was observed and what was said. They should include clear identifiers of date, time, setting, and names (or identifying characteristics) of participants.

The process of labeling and organizing qualitative data to identify different themes and the relationships between them; a way of simplifying data to allow better management and retrieval of key themes and illustrative passages. See coding frame and codebook.

A methodological tradition of inquiry and approach to analyzing qualitative data in which theories emerge from a rigorous and systematic process of induction. This approach was pioneered by the sociologists Glaser and Strauss (1967). The elements of theory generated from comparative analysis of data are, first, conceptual categories and their properties and, second, hypotheses or generalized relations among the categories and their properties – “The constant comparing of many groups draws the [researcher’s] attention to their many similarities and differences. Considering these leads [the researcher] to generate abstract categories and their properties, which, since they emerge from the data, will clearly be important to a theory explaining the kind of behavior under observation.” (36).

A detailed description of any proposed research that involves human subjects for review by IRB. The protocol serves as the recipe for the conduct of the research activity. It includes the scientific rationale to justify the conduct of the study, the information necessary to conduct the study, the plan for managing and analyzing the data, and a discussion of the research ethical issues relevant to the research. Protocols for qualitative research often include interview guides, all documents related to recruitment, informed consent forms, very clear guidelines on the safekeeping of materials collected, and plans for de-identifying transcripts or other data that include personal identifying information.

University of Minnesota Duluth

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Lesson Ideas: Qualitative Methods

Travis Dixon December 14, 2017 Qualitative Research Methods , Teaching Ideas

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Full credit for the ideas in this post go to Alan Law who shared these with me recently.

Problem-based Approach

Find and source a real example of a qualitative study and provide students with a very brief summary of the central research question of the study. Then ask students in small groups to decide what method they would use to conduct the study and ask them to justify it. Tell them they’ll then be given the real research and see if they thought the same as the researchers.

You can use one or more of these studies for this activity.

This can work for a number of reasons:

#1) They will naturally want to know if they guessed “right” and chose the same as the actual researchers. So while reading about qualitative studies can often seem like a chore, you’ll get students reading about the studies more enthusiastically to see if they were right.

#2) It will reinforce comprehension of the methodologies because students won’t be able to discuss the options they have if they don’t know what those options are. Simply providing a list of the potential options they have will help reinforce these building blocks of knowledge.

#3) It gets students think about the why from a researcher’s perspective, which is essential in being able to explain the use of the methods and also to evaluate them.

#4) Once you get passed the methodology, you can now discuss a whole range of other important concepts, like ethical considerations, generalizability, triangulation, researcher bias, etc.

There are plenty of freely available qualitative studies on google scholar. One way to find studies is to ask your students to think of a topical subject in the media that has caught their attention lately. Google search “qualitative psychology (your topic)” and see what you can find.

Learning about research methodology is about understanding how and why particular methods are used. To teach the “why” we need to get students trying to see research from a researcher’s perspective. In fact, this is really what the Paper 3 is designed to do.

But Paper Three is consistently the lowest scoring exam for HL IB Psychology students. Why? In reality, the concepts aren’t any more difficult than the rest of the course and, in fact, it should be an easy exam. The problem is that many of the concepts are abstract and they’re taught in the abstract. So in order to build towards abstract, conceptual understanding we need to begin with the concrete examples.

One big question that I come back to frequently when teaching qualitative methods is “why use qualitative instead of quantitative?” Working towards this bigger picture will help students better understand the relevant methods. This question is much easier to discuss when we are looking at specific examples of research.

I think one reason teachers and students find quantitative methods easier is because there are heaps of examples of studies that use these methods that we can use to demonstrate concepts. Therefore, in order to teach a deep understanding of qualitative methods we could follow the same approach – use real examples of studies in every lesson.

You can find studies online or in Chapter 9 of the student’s guide, and we’re also putting together a digital resource with more examples to be used for practice Paper 3 questions.

Travis Dixon is an IB Psychology teacher, author, workshop leader, examiner and IA moderator.

Guidelines for Classroom Activities Involving Research Methods

Definitions.

Graduate thesis and capstone projects are clearly understood as research and fall within the IRB purview when human participants are involved.
If a student's proposed research project involving human subjects may result in a formal publication or presentation (beyond Utica University's Student Research Day), involves more than minimal risk to the subjects, or in any other way meets the federal definition of "research" according to 45 CFR 46, the student must receive IRB approval before beginning the study.
There may be instances when a student or instructor wishes to use data for research that was previously collected for educational purposes. An application should be submitted to the IRB when a student or instructor wishes to analyze the data with the intent of contributing to generalizable knowledge.

James Teliha

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Engaging Students in Qualitative Research through Experiential Class Activities.

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Psychology Teaching Review

Adam Danquah

This paper describes the development and delivery of an innovative approach to teaching qualitative research methods in psychology. The teaching incorporated a range of ‘active’ pedagogical practices that it shares with other teaching in this area, but was designed in such a way as to follow the arc of a qualitative research project in its entirety over several sessions, whilst episodicallydealing with distinct methodological approaches along the way. In line with this design, and the mutuality of the learning, it was called a ‘qualitative learning series’. Following Mason (2002), the paper also considers the challenge of qualitative teaching in the context of academic psychology, and touches upon whether developments in theyears since have made for much difference. These strands of the paper come together in how the teaching met these challenges.

Oliver Mason

Psychology Learning & Teaching

Stephen Gibson , Cath Sullivan

Marcella Stark , Julie Combs , John Slate Ph. D.

In this article, we outline a course wherein the instructors teach students how to conduct rigorous qualitative research. We discuss the four major distinct, but overlapping, phases of the course: conceptual/theoretical, technical, applied, and emergent scholar. Students write several qualitative reports, called qualitative notebooks, which involve data that they collect (via three different types of interviews), analyze (using nine qualitative analysis techniques via qualitative software), and interpret. Each notebook is edited by the instructors to help them improve the quality of subsequent notebook reports. Finally, we advocate asking students who have previously taken this course to team-teach future courses. We hope that our exemplar for teaching and learning qualitative research will be useful for teachers and students alike.

Heba Kostandy

Concepción Domínguez , I. Maslo , Ineta Luka

The sixth volume of the Qualitative Psychology Nexus comprises documents and contributions of the sixth international meeting on qualitative psychology, organized by EARLI SIG 17 "Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Learning and Instruction". The meeting was organised by ...

Gina Koutsopoulou

The teaching of qualitative methods is now a required element of degree courses in the UK which seek to gain professional accreditation. This paper reports the work of a network group focused on enhancing the teaching of qualitative methods at the undergraduate level. Following a brief summary of the results of a survey into current teaching practices we indicate potential areas of resource support with linked references to examples produced by the network group.

Journal of Geography

James Chaney

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.

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Qualitative Research: Design, Implementation and Methods

DESIGN X440.2

Get an introduction to what qualitative research is, the types of qualitative research methods, the appropriate situations to apply qualitative methods, and how to conduct your own qualitative research. You learn to build a research protocol and use various techniques to design, conduct, analyze and present an informative research study.

At the end of the course, you are expected to conduct your own qualitative research study . To that end, you develop a research plan based on the given situation, collect data using qualitative methodologies , engage with various techniques for coding and analyzing qualitative data effectively, and present the data and insights in a manner that is best aligned with the goals of the research.

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Course Objectives

Understand what constitutes qualitative research, how it differs from quantitative research and when to apply qualitative research methods
Identify and formulate appropriate qualitative research plans
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Develop coding schemes for analysis of qualitative data
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Developing qualitative research questions
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Presenting qualitative results

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This course is intended for students in the Professional Program in User Experience (UX) Design , or anybody interested in obtaining skills in qualitative research. You do not need preexisting research experience for this course. Our experienced instructors provide practical information, leverage their qualitative research skills and monitor your development along with peer-to-peer support on our student online platform.

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Learning Interviewing for Qualitative Research: A Step-By-Step Guide

Ana Lopez Ricoy + −

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Learning Goals and Assessments

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Students will know how to use interviews as a qualitative research method
• Students will identify the type of information contributed by qualitative interviews for sociological analysis
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Qualitative Assessments
Risk Assessments
Respiratory Disease Season Outlooks

What is a Risk Assessment?

CDC's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) applies qualitative risk assessment methods to rapidly assess the public health implications of an outbreak. These methods can be used early in an outbreak when quantitative data are limited. For each assessment, we consider evidence underpinning risk, key uncertainties, and factors that could change the assessment.

Assessments typically focus on either populations at risk or transmission scenarios of concern. For each population or scenario examined, we estimate overall risk by combining the likelihood of infection and the impact of the disease. We also assign confidence levels to each of our assessments, based on the quality and amount of evidence that underpins the assessment. See our methods for more details.

CFA's qualitative risk assessments inform CDC leadership, public health professionals, and partners engaged in emergency response activities.

Mpox Assessment

Cfa: qualitative assessments.

The Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics qualitative assessments - including risk assessments, seasonal outlooks, and more.

Exploring physical education teachers’ willingness and barriers to integrating digital technology in their lessons

Open access
Published: 24 September 2024

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Pablo Saiz-González ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6729-8065 1 ,
Jacob Sierra-Díaz ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1098-4870 1 ,
Damián Iglesias ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9773-0813 2 &
Javier Fernandez-Rio ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1368-3723 1

3 Altmetric

The use of digital technologies to support learning in physical education (PE) has grown in recent years. However, little is known about what teachers think when PE meets technology in the digital era. The purpose of this descriptive study was to use a carefully constructed, face-validated, and pilot-tested web survey to identify PE teachers’ willingness and barriers to integrating digital technology in their lessons. A total of 265 PE teachers returned completed surveys. The results showed a widespread interest in the use of digital technology in the school context, as well as in promoting the transfer of learning to the out-of-school context. Also, PE teachers expressed some reasons for interest in its use related to (a) learning and assessment, (b) physical activity, (c) teaching support, (d) communication with families and (e) teamwork among students inside and outside the class. In contrast to these interests and attitudes, teachers identified five major barriers that might be limiting the introduction of digital technology in PE: (a) not having sufficient access to technological resources, (b) not having received the necessary training to use it effectively, (c) lack of institutional support, (d) lack of time to effectively introduce it and (f) students’ data privacy. The findings of this study suggest the implementation of measures that can address the identified barriers to facilitate the incorporation of digital technology in PE. Understanding teachers' perceptions regarding the delivery of digital technology in schools may help guide future research and policy to support digital technology in PE lessons.

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Digital Education and Educational Technology

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1 Introduction

The use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in educational contexts is increasingly becoming a tangible reality worldwide. More and more attention has been given to the potential of using technologies during Physical Education (PE) in both face-to-face and distance educational settings (Goodyear, 2020 ; Miller et al., 2024 ; Mokmin and Rassy, 2024 ). In this sense, digitalisation is a new concept to identify how ICT is integrated into daily activities, including teaching and learning processes (Karlsson et al., 2023 ). Different international institutions such as the Organization for Economy Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2020 ) argued that digitalisation would increase the quality of education in terms of universalisation and personalisation. For that reason, a wide range of measures is taken to provide tools and resources for increasing digital skills among citizens such as The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens also termed as DigComp 2.1 (Carretero et al., 2017 ). Within this kind of political strategy, the emphasis is placed on investing in digital skills enhancement for competitiveness and economic growth.

1.1 The concept of digital competence

Digital literacy (also called digital competence) is a set of skills which involves the confident and critical use of ICT for work, leisure and communication; and which is underpinned by basic competence in terms of the use of digital devices to retrieve, assess, store, produce, present and exchange information wirelessly (Spante et al., 2018 ). Considering the majority of European national objectives of promoting a more prosperous society and economic growth expressed in their respective educational curricula, original DigComp 1.0 (Ferrari et al., 2014 ) started dividing the digital competence into four main levels of proficiency (i.e., foundation, intermediate, advance and highly specialised) to facilitate relationships between the rest of key competences for lifelong learning (e.g., communication in a foreign language, mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology or learning to learn).

In a reviewed and updated version of DigComp 2.1 (Carretero et al., 2017 ), the previous four proficiency levels were subdivided into two different categories expressed with numbers from one to eight. These levels were associated with a cognitive domain including remembering (1–2), understanding (3–4), applying (5–6) and creating (7–8). In this sense, national governments have been in charge of promoting digital competence courses and resources for all citizens according to their specific digital skills. In terms of the specific set of skills that are needed to achieve a specific proficiency level, DigComp 2.2 (Vuorikari et al., 2022 ) differentiate five main areas in the shape of knowledge, skills and attitudes. For all the above, a person is digitally literate when he/she achieves highly specialised (8) knowledge, skills and attitudes in the five areas of interest shown in Fig. 1 . However, in some investigations, these levels of expertise are reduced to three factors (i.e., low, medium and low, medium and high) to facilitate the interpretation of the overall digital literacy enabling easy comparisons in the literature (Cerny, 2021 ).

Digital competence entails five different areas and their respective proficiency levels

1.2 The concept of Teachers’ professional digital competence

Teachers of the twenty-first century have to add a new important competence for their daily activity (alongside another pedagogical set of skills): Teachers’ Professional Digital Competence (TPDC). It is rooted in the definition of (general) digital competence but it is centred on providing students with tools and resources to develop their own digital competence. Therefore, both digital competence and TPDC have become an emerging topic of interest for education, policy-making and research. Unexpectedly, the analysis of the concept of a systematic review carried out by Spante et al. ( 2018 ) concluded that TPDC (and digital literacy) are sometimes used as an elusive and ambiguous concept by teachers, researchers and people in general. For that reason, Skantz-Åberg et al. ( 2022 ) noted that an exhaustive analysis including teachers’ points of view is needed to understand the whole concept of TPDC. This analysis is essential for understanding which extra measures must be developed in terms of teaching training and educational quality.

TPDC requires more comprehensive, complex and demanding knowledge, skills and attitudes than the digital literacy of a standard user (Novella-García & Cloquell-Lozano, 2021 ). In addition to the set of skills needed to use any digital device, TPDC implies that all teachers (including lecturers and professors) must meta-reflect on the use of ICT to both promote digital literacy and significant learning in all their students. An inevitable turning point in the development of TPDC was the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing teachers to mandatory use and teach how to use the devices during distance education periods (Sierra-Díaz et al., 2021 ). As was the case with digital competence, the European Commission has driven the Digital Competence Framework for Educators [DigCompEdu] (Redecker & Punie, 2017 ). In this case, the TPDC is divided into three main blocks of knowledge, skills and attitudes: (I) Educators’ professional competencies, (II) Educators’ pedagogical competencies and (III) learners’ competencies. Therefore, the TPDC is subdivided into six areas: (I) professional engagement, (II) digital resources, (III) teaching and learning, (IV) assessment, (V) empowering learners and (VI) facilitating learners’ digital competence.

In terms of researching TPDC, there are different approaches and methodological orientations. One of them is the analysis of the shortcomings of TPDC within the different educational levels (Skantz-Åberg et al., 2022 ) including real use of ICT in the classes or the attitudes towards digital technology. Indeed, according to these authors, a general tendency to examine whether teachers effectively integrate technologies into their classes beyond the limited use of digital but non-innovative tools has been observed. Indeed, an analysis of the contextual features (e.g., rural or urbal school) must be relevant to determine specific policies in order to increase the positive impact of the education.

Specifically, when it comes to researching the implementation of technologies in PE, most studies are focused on wearable technologies for tracking fitness (Almusawi et al., 2021 ). Results indicated that while ICT may not necessarily imply innovation in practical sessions, its presence in schools is viewed as a way of innovation. Previously, (Alemán de la Garza et al., 2019 ) established that two of the roles of digital innovations in educational settings are to objective metric and measure performance and to improve significant teaching and learning experiences. Nevertheless, more research is needed to shed some light on the state of the art of ICT in PE. To our knowledge, there is a gap in the literature regarding teachers’ background and personal digital competencies, as well as in the perceptions and attitudes of PE teachers about the use of technologies in their classes.

1.3 Digital technology at school: Barriers and facilitators

One of the priorities of PE is to promote an active and healthy lifestyle, supporting an autonomous climate, social interaction and comprehensive participation during class (Ryan & Deci, 2020 ). Inactive children and adolescents are mainly due to the increasing use of digital technology (Kerres, 2022 ). As Moore et al. ( 2023 ) highlighted, this aforementioned disengagement is caused by a new trend based on spending time on computer games (sometimes called e-sports), TV and social media. Another relevant barrier is the negative experience that students underwent in previous sports and physical activity programs. Paradoxically, new technologies can have a relevant role in motivating and engaging students in PE classes. For that reason, the TPDC is conceived as a highly relevant 21st-century capability among teachers for PE.

However, barriers do not only come from students. When it comes to practical barriers to teachers’ uses of digital technology at PE, Bodsworth and Goodyear ( 2017 ) highlighted time, expense, TPDC, teacher burden as well as a certain level of resistance to change and use of digital technology. Another resisting factor is the minimal use of digital technology for certain tasks only to meet curricular expectations (Casey et al., 2016 ). For those reasons, effective integration of ICT and pedagogy is an issue that research must cover in order to suggest better strategies to address the aforementioned barriers.

Several studies have observed the potential role of technologies with several pedagogical models such as Cooperative Learning (Casey et al., 2017 ). It is observed that student-centred approaches are in line with strategies for introducing digital devices to empower students’ meaningful learning. All in all, the first step is to consider an effective integration between digital technology and pedagogy considering the teachers’ opinions to understand what they have and what they need to achieve the acquisition of students’ key competencies alongside digital literacy.

1.4 A brief literature overview and current study

The implementation of digital technology in PE classes and its implications for the students’ learning has been a line of research since the last decade of the twentieth century. At this time, Mohnsen and Lamaster ( 1998 ) carried out a survey to gather PE teachers’ attitudes concerning the application of computer technologies. Results showed that teachers had positive attitudes toward technologies, indicating that computers would assist them in finding information, creating materials and managing class records. However, they also consider the need to develop workshops and training courses to demonstrate how to implement technologies in PE.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interest in ICT of teachers and researchers has increased. At this time, heavy computers started to become more compact and mobile, enabling people (and students) to use them anywhere including PE classes. For instance, Zita ( 2008 ) observed the potential of using devices such as GPS or smartwatches in outdoor education. At the same time, different studies confirmed positive outcomes related to the implementation in educational settings (e.g., Donovan et al., 2007 ). Specifically, Bisgin ( 2014 ) confirmed that motivation is a variable that was able to improve in contrast to traditional methods, because technologies promote support and flexibility to students allowing them to see, hear, speak, move, read, write, understand, attend, organise and memorise in different paths. More recently, various systematic reviews highlighted the positive contribution of the use of digital technology in PE in areas such as health or motivational variables (Gil-Espinosa et al., 2022 ; Sargent & Calderón, 2022 ). However, previous evidence has also identified a lack of connection between digital technology and curricular aspects related to student learning. In other words, there is a gap between digital technology and pedagogy (Goodyear, 2020 ; Sargent & Casey, 2018 ; Wallace et al., 2023 ). Similarly, a major barrier related to the lack of teacher training in the use of digital technology in the PE class has also been consistently identified (Jastrow et al., 2022 ; Koekoek & van Hilvoorde, 2019 ).

Technologies have changed society. As a result, the World Health Organization (Bull et al., 2020 ) has warned against the excessive use of technologies to consolidate unhealthy sedentary behaviours. Although it may be paradoxical, new technologies continue to be essential for creating a relevant learning environment for learners in PE. Wyant and Baek ( 2019 ) emphasized that the focus is not on the digital technology itself, but how this digital technology may be used to enrich learning and acquire digital competence. Juniu ( 2013 ) also supported this idea adding that digital technology must be a resource to support teaching instead of fitting methodologies to fit the available digital technology. After all, digital educative frameworks are needed to motivate today’s generation of students (Ospankulov et al., 2023 ).

For all the above, it is essential to understand the level of TPDC and the implementation of digital technology in real contexts. Therefore, the present research aims to find an answer to the following research question: what are the factors that directly and indirectly impact PE teachers’ decision to use new technologies in their lessons? Therefore, this research aimed to analyse PE teachers' acceptability of the use of digital technology in their classes. In this sense, an initial hypothesis states that TPDC is an essential and relevant competence that all teachers must have in order to show high levels of digital competence.

2 Research methodology

A quantitative research method was used following a cross-sectional design (Cohen et al., 2018 ). A web-based survey study was conducted, where participants self-reported their responses via online (Dillman et al., 2014 ).

2.2 Survey development and questions

The researchers’ University Ethics Committee granted ethical approval for the survey. The survey was initially designed via recent literature reviews of digital technology related to PE (Gil-Espinosa et al., 2022 ; Jastrow et al., 2022 ; Sargent & Calderón, 2022 ) and several books and chapters that were deemed of interest in this research area (Casey et al., 2016 ; Koekoek & van Hilvoorde, 2019 ). The authors jointly defined the categories for the survey. Each author then created a list of 10 items per each of them. Subsequently, we met to review, reformulate, and select the most relevant items. Later, an external panel of experts was contacted to determine the face validity of the questions (Patton, 2015 ). Specifically, five professors with extensive experience in PE research and questionnaire development reviewed the survey questions. Positive feedback was received on all items, except for slight changes (e.g., three items were rephrased). A pilot survey was undertaken to examine the face and content validity (Ball, 2019 ) with ten PE teachers. They were approached to provide feedback on the pilot survey’s usability and content. This information allowed the authors to review and make amendments to improve the clarity of the survey. Only few slight modifications were made before the final version (spelling/format changes).

The survey had two sections. (a) Demographic and technology use statistics. At the beginning, a series of inquiries were presented to collect socio-demographic, professional and technology-use information: age, gender, years of teaching experience, educational stage taught, type of educational institution (e.g., public–private and rural–urban), average class size ratio, perceived level of digital competence and ownership and current use of technology. (b) Ad-hoc questions. Two main categories of inquiries were defined to group responses regarding the acceptability of digital technology use in line with our research objectives: (I) interest in the use of digital technology in PE and in transferring learning to the out-of-school context (eg., to what extent do you think digital technology can enrich the learning experience in your subject?), and (II) reasons to use or not to use digital technology in PE (eg., I have not received the necessary training to use digital technology effectively). A Likert scale with 5 options (1 = not at all, 5 = very much) was used for the first category and a dichotomous scale (Leppink, 2019 ) was used for the second one. These different scales were chosen to adjust to the content.

2.3 Procedure, participant recruitment and data collection

Participant information and consent forms were embedded into the survey platform. The exact number of participants was not defined before the survey was distributed. Instead, an attempt was made to gather as many responses as possible to increase the reliability of the results. To this aim, the survey was distributed via schools’ email addresses and Twitter, and through a non-probability snowball sampling strategy focusing on recruiting in-service PE teachers in primary and secondary education. Specifically, the survey was distributed through all the e-mail addresses to which the authors had access in Spain. The result was the questionnaire dissemination to around 1000 schools (the exact number is difficult to determine because it is uncertain whether some of these e-mails were received, as schools change their e-mail addresses relatively frequently). Online snowball surveys are very effective in contacting participants from different locations and the response rate is higher than in other strategies (Baltar & Brunet, 2012 ; Goodman, 1961 ). The final number of participants is thus presented in the results section. These participants were informed that their responses would be kept anonymous and that they had the right to withdraw from the study at any time. Surveys were completed by Spanish PE teachers during the 4-week period from November 15, 2023 to December 15, 2023. The survey took 10–15 min to complete.

2.4 Data analysis

All data were analysed using SPSS version 24.0 (IBM Co. LTD, Chicago, IL). First, demographic and digital technology use statistics were calculated for the total sample, primary and secondary education PE teachers. Then, the interest in the use of digital technology in PE and in transferring learning to the out-of-school context was analysed, again, for the total sample, primary education teachers and secondary education teachers. The same was done for the reasons to use or not to use digital technology in PE. The Mann–Whitney U test was used to analyse differences between school levels (primary and secondary education) for continuous variables and X 2 testing of difference for categorical variables. Finally, the differences between the responses to the items for both categories of inquiries (I and II) were analysed considering the different groups derived from demographic and technology use statistics. Specifically, the differences were analysed based on age, gender, years of teaching experience, average class size ratio, type of institution (public/private and rural/urban) and perceived level of competence. Again, the same data analysis was performed for continuous and categorical variables.

Completed surveys were returned by 265 PE teachers (93 females and 172 males, ages 23–66, M = 41.34 years). Demographic and technology use statistics were calculated for the total sample, primary and secondary education teachers (Table 1 ). It was found that the average class size ratio was significantly different for primary and secondary education for each level assessed. Also, a higher number of primary education PE teachers (16.6%) reported low perceived digital competence than secondary education PE teachers (6.3%, p = 0.03). Regarding the previous use of digital technology during their classes, the proportion of PE teachers who reported having used a smartphone, music speaker, smartwatch/fitness tracker, social networks and apps was significantly higher ( p < 0.01) in secondary education than in primary education (see Table 1 ).

The analyses for the interest in the use of digital technology in PE and in transferring learning to the out-of-school context for primary education teachers and secondary education teachers showed no significant differences for any item (Table 2 ). Descriptive statistics showed that the highest agreed-with item was that digital technology can be a useful tool in education (M = 4.23, SD = 0.90). Two items obtained the same lowest score: perceived level of institutional support for the implementation of digital technology in your classes (M = 2.68, SD = 1.12) and perceived level of institutional support for the implementation of digital technology that facilitates the transfer of learning to the out-of-school context (M = 2.68, SD = 1.17).

Concerning the reasons to use or not to use digital technology in PE, some significant differences were found (Table 3 ). PE teachers in primary education (32.5%) agreed that their subject does not favour the use of digital technology in a higher proportion than those in secondary education (17.1%, p = 0.01). Also, significant differences for the reasons not to use digital technology were found for the item “I have colleagues who have had negative experiences when trying to incorporate digital technology into their subject”, for which secondary education teachers (37.8%) reported higher agreement than primary education teachers (21.4%, p = 0.00). Finally, significant differences were found for one reason to use digital technology in PE: “The implementation of digital technology in my classes favours the practice of physical activity outside school hours”, for which secondary education teachers (64.9%) reported higher agreement than primary education teachers (46.1%, p = 0.00).

Significant differences were found between responses to items in the categories of inquiry derived from age (Supplementary Table 1 ), years of teaching experience (Supplementary Table 2 ), average class size, type of institution (public/private -Supplementary Table 3 - and rural/urban) and perceived digital competence (Supplementary Table 4 ). The results showed no significant differences for any of the items based on gender. The summary of the significant differences found is shown in Table 4 .

The results indicated that age, years of teaching experience and perceived level of digital competence are the most influential variables on the acceptability of digital technology use in the educational context. In particular, it was found that older teachers with more years of teaching experience and a lower perceived level of digital competence had a lower acceptability of the use of digital technology. Also, some differences were found based on the type of institution (public/private and rural/urban) and the average class ratio. Significant differences between teachers in public and private schools focused on the resources available (for both teachers and students), with public school teachers having the greatest self-reported limitations. For ratio, there were significant differences only in the item "Some of my students do not have access to digital technology outside the classroom" ( p = 0.001) with 61.1% agreement for those with a ratio of less than 10, 64.3% for those with a ratio of between 10 and 24 and 39.2% for those with a ratio of more than 25. Finally, there were significant differences between the responses of urban and rural teachers on the item "RNTU7. Digital technology could require a lot of additional preparation and planning time that I do not have" ( p = 0.01) with 66.7% agreement for teachers in rural schools and 49.7% agreement for teachers in urban schools. No differences were found in any of the items related to the reasons to use digital technology for any of the sociodemographic variables.

4 Discussion

The aim of this study was to analyse PE teachers' acceptability of the use of digital technology in their classes. To this aim, two categories of inquiries were analysed based on teachers’ socio-demographic and professional variables: (I) interest in the use of digital technology in PE and in transferring learning to the out-of-school context, and (II) reasons to use or not to use digital technology in PE. Findings showed a generalised interest in the use of digital technology in the school context, with a particularly positive opinion about its usefulness in teaching, which reflects a line of thought in line with the potentialities identified in previous literature. For instance, Goodyear ( 2020 ) explained that digital technology has the potential to support, develop and extend learning in the four learning domains (physical, cognitive, social and affective) in PE. Furthermore, PE teachers showed largely willingness to explore new technological tools and/or to receive specific digital technology training. It was also observed that PE teachers considered the potential increase in student motivation to be important as one of the reasons to introduce digital technology in the class. These results are consistent with previous research on the positive impact of digital technology use on motivational variables (Jastrow et al., 2022 ; Østerlie et al., 2023 ). Remarkably, the results of our study showed two items with the lowest scores for the first category of inquiries: (I) perceived level of institutional support for the implementation of digital technology in your classes and (II) perceived level of institutional support for the implementation of digital technology that facilitates the transfer of learning to the out-of-school context . Some of the first-ever studies concerning the application of digital technology in education already showed teachers’ demands for additional support and training courses on the subject (Mohnsen & Lamaster, 1998 ; Wood et al., 2005 ). Therefore, the lack of institutional support continues to be an obstacle to the use of digital technology in education (Lai & Bower, 2019 ). Moreover, it was found to be particularly so for those who reported low perceived digital competence. Thus, more efforts by government agencies are needed for all teachers, especially considering those who are less competent in the use of digital technology.

The results showed that there were no differences in the reasons for using digital technology based on any of the socio-demographic variables analysed in this study, but there were differences in the reasons for not using it. In other words, all participants saw the potential of digital technology in the same way, but there was one group that saw more reasons for not using it: older teachers, those with more years of teaching experience and a lower perceived level of digital competence (to a lesser extent, teachers in the public sector also saw more barriers to its use than those in the private sector). But what are the reasons to use it? The usefulness of digital technology as teaching support was one of the main ‘reasons to use’ for teachers in this study (> 76% agreement for RTU4, RTU5, RTU6 and RTU11). Similarly, the role that digital technology can play in the promotion and transfer of learning outside the school context was positively highlighted by PE teachers, who expressed particular interest in receiving specific training in educational digital technology to promote the continuity of learning outside the PE class. However, not only the learning possibilities were highlighted, but also the potential to promote physical activity outside school hours (although at a lower proportion of teachers’ agreement – 54% for RTU10 vs > 80% for RTU1 and RTU2). Remarkably, (64.9%) secondary education teachers agreed significantly more with the possibility of using technology to promote physical activity in the out-of-school context than primary education teachers (46.1%), while 24.9% believed that digital technology should not be used in class to avoid distractions from physical activity. Interestingly, the recent systematic review carried out by Gil-Espinosa et al. ( 2022 ) highlighted the usefulness of smartphone applications in physical activity promotion from PE. Hence, according to the evidence found, there is a positive connection between the views expressed by teachers and the possible positive impact. In this regard, evidence of the effectiveness of digital technology-based approaches was also one of the reasons for teachers' use (61.5% agreement). Lastly, teachers reported that the potential for student teamwork (> 71% agreement for RTU7 and RTU8), communication with families (91.3%) and class management were also reasons for the use of digital technology (Fig. 2 ).

Reasons to use digital technology

However, although the results showed a generally positive attitude towards the interest in digital technology, approximately 50% of teachers reported not having sufficient access to digital technology resources (> 56% agreement for RNTU8, RNTU18 and RNTU19) and not having received the necessary training to use digital technology effectively (52.5% agreement). Recently, the systematic review by Jastrow et al. ( 2022 ) also consistently found that lack of teacher training was a constraint. These two identified barriers, together with the lack of institutional support (61.5% agreement), could be limiting the introduction of digital technology in the PE class and, consequently, not allowing the achievement of some of the benefits evidenced in the previous literature (Koekoek & van Hilvoorde, 2019 ). In accordance with the results reported by generalist teachers (Dinc, 2019 ), lack of time to effectively introduce digital technology (54.3% agreement) and students’ data privacy (66.8% agreement) were also major reasons not to use it. Furthermore, it should be noted that these teachers' perceptions contrast with the high percentages of agreement on the reasons for using digital technology, with values of around 70–90%, which show a high level of interest among teachers in its usefulness for improving learning and assessment, physical activity , teaching support , communication with families and teamwork among students inside and outside the class. However, even though these opportunities have been supported by previous literature (Gil-Espinosa et al., 2022 ; Østerlie et al., 2023 ), it is a topic that is not without criticism, since a true and authentic integration of digital technology in the PE class requires addressing more specific aspects related to curricular learning and pedagogy (Casey et al., 2016 , 2017 ), beyond the use of digital technology solely as a tool for health promotion or motivation enhancement (Sargent & Calderón, 2022 ; Wallace et al., 2023 ) (Fig. 3 ).

Reasons not to use digital technology

Although the survey design procedure followed the established recommendations (Eysenbach, 2004 ), a mixed methods approach to data collection could help better understand the reasons for the variables studied. Thus, complementing the survey with the inclusion of open-ended questions of a qualitative nature could bring us closer to a better understanding. In any case, the exploratory, descriptive and cross-sectional nature of the study necessarily implies a cautious interpretation of the results found. Moreover, the sample was restricted to a single country and mostly in public school contexts, belonging to urban settings and with ratios between 10–24 students per classroom. Additional information on other geographical areas would be of interest to draw a more complete picture of this area of research. Certainly, replication and expansion of this research should be part of the future agenda. Finally, this study focused only on teachers. Future research is suggested to focus on students, delving deeper into their learning experiences with technology.

5 Conclusions

Spanish PE teachers, most of whom indicated that they teach in public schools, in urban environments and with ratios of between 10–24 students per class, showed a generalized interest in the use of digital technology in the school context and a very positive view of its usefulness in teaching. In the same way, teachers also positively highlighted the role that technology can play in promoting and transferring learning outside the school context. There is therefore a majority consensus on the reasons for deciding to use digital technology: to improve learning and assessment, physical activity, teaching support, communication with families and teamwork among students inside and outside the class. As a counterpart to these interests and attitudes, teachers identified five major barriers that might be limiting the introduction of digital technology in the PE classroom: (a) not having sufficient access to technological resources, (b) not having received the necessary training to use digital technology effectively, (c) lack of institutional support, (d) lack of time to effectively introduce digital technology and (e) students’ data privacy. In particular, one group of PE teachers found more limitations to the use of digital technology in their classes: older teachers, those with more years of teaching experience and a lower perceived level of digital competence (to a lesser extent, teachers in the public sector saw more barriers to its use than those in the private sector). Nevertheless, taking into consideration the widespread interest of teachers in integrating digital technology in the classroom and the positive evidence on the use of digital technology provided in the previous literature, the findings of this study suggest the implementation of measures that can overcome the existing barriers to facilitate the incorporation of digital technology in the PE class.

Data availability

All data collected or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its supplementary files.

Abbreviations

Physical education

Information and Communications Technology

Organization for Economy Co-operation and Development

Teachers’ Professional Digital Competence

Global Positioning System

Interest in the use of digital technology in the school (X = number)

Interest in digital technology to promote the transfer of learning to the out-of-school context (X = number)

Reasons not to use (X = number)

Reasons to use (X = number)

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Planning Qualitative Research: Design and Decision Making for New
While many books and articles guide various qualitative research methods and analyses, there is currently no concise resource that explains and differentiates among the most common qualitative approaches. We believe novice qualitative researchers, students planning the design of a qualitative study or taking an introductory qualitative research course, and faculty teaching such courses can ...
Qualitative Research: Design, Implementation and Methods
<p>Get an introduction to what qualitative research is, the types of qualitative research methods, the appropriate situations to apply qualitative methods, and how to conduct your own qualitative research. You learn to build a research protocol and use various techniques to design, conduct, analyze and present an informative research study.</p> <p>At the end of the course, you are expected to ...
Learning Interviewing for Qualitative Research: A Step-By-Step Guide
Interviews are one of the most used qualitative research methods in sociology, yet the methodology on teaching students how to design, conduct and analyze interviews in the service of a research question is largely underdeveloped. This learning technique consists of four activities adaptable to the research topic or subject area of the instructor's choice.
Structuring a qualitative findings section
The use of iPods in the classroom was partially intended to serve the social-emotional component of the model, allowing students to enjoy music and to "tune out" from other classroom activities when working on Digital X. Further, the iPods would allow stu- dents to listen to podcasts or teacher-created content at any time, in any location.
Teachers' experiences with physically inactive children and their
Often, teachers are forced to organising physical activities in the classroom, a space not designed for PA ... recent research has suggested that rather than providing resources ... Understanding the perceptions, practices, and barriers of physical activity opportunities in toddler classroom: A qualitative study in toddler childcare providers. ...
Impact of COVID-19 on early childhood educator's perspectives and
Government guidelines for relaunching early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs during the COVID-19 pandemic have required the implementation of various practices to minimize the risk of infection transmission. These directives include recommendations regarding serving and handling food, shared spaces, and physical distancing which have a direct impact on the health and development of ...
Risk Assessments
CDC's Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) applies qualitative risk assessment methods to rapidly assess the public health implications of an outbreak. ... public health professionals, and partners engaged in emergency response activities. Mpox Assessment. Mpox Rapid Risk Assessment. CDC's mpox rapid risk assessment examines ...
Exploring physical education teachers' willingness and barriers to
The use of digital technologies to support learning in physical education (PE) has grown in recent years. However, little is known about what teachers think when PE meets technology in the digital era. The purpose of this descriptive study was to use a carefully constructed, face-validated, and pilot-tested web survey to identify PE teachers' willingness and barriers to integrating digital ...

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Chapter 1. Introduction

Why an Open Access Textbook on Qualitative Research Methods?

What is Research?

What is Qualitative Research?

Examples of Qualitative Research

Example 1 : The End Game (ethnography + interviews)

Example 2: Racing for Innocence (Interviews + Content Analysis + Fictional Stories)

Example 3: Amplified Advantage (Mixed Methods: Survey Interviews + Focus Groups + Archives)

How Is This Book Organized?

Chapter Descriptions

Recommended Reading: Other Qualitative Research Textbooks

Patton’s Ten Suggestions for Doing Qualitative Research

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1 Introduction

1.1 The concept of digital competence

1.2 The concept of Teachers’ professional digital competence

1.3 Digital technology at school: Barriers and facilitators

1.4 A brief literature overview and current study

2 Research methodology

2.2 Survey development and questions

2.3 Procedure, participant recruitment and data collection

2.4 Data analysis

4 Discussion

5 Conclusions

Data availability

Abbreviations