Content uploaded by Catherine Snyder
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Catherine Snyder on Mar 01, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
A Case Study of a Case Study: Analysis of a Robust Qualitative Research Methodology
Abstract
A uniquely robust multi-part qualitative study methodology is presented from a study which tracked the transformative journeys of four career-changing women from STEM fields into secondary education. The article analyzes the study’s use of archived writing, journaling, participant-generated photography, interviews, member-checking, and reflexive analytical memos. An exploration into the interconnectedness of the methodologies used reveals a robust framework from which the first stages of grounded theory emerged. A detailed explanation of the methodological aspects of conducting the study is discussed with the purpose of making this combination of qualitative methods replicable.
... This study's ERC is a multi-institutional collaborative research community with leadership from three universities located in the New England, East North Central, and South Atlantic areas of the U.S. The three EOPMs of this study were working on REU programs at these three universities at the time of the data collection. Despite a small sample size, qualitative research with as few as four participants [37], or even fewer [38], has been conducted in previous studies, underscoring the value of capturing unique participant experiences that may not be fully represented within larger, majority groups [39]. In this study, these three participants worked in the center for five years. ...
Program managers of undergraduate research experience programs play a pivotal role in students’ learning experiences. However, their roles in this program are seldom understood and explored. One reason is that a greater focus has been put on faculty and student mentorship. Although many faculty mentors succeed in providing students with adequate support for their learning experience, students can also benefit from having access to multiple mentors, such as program managers. In this study, we employed a qualitative approach to identify the common experiences of education and outreach program managers in managing engineering undergraduate summer research experience programs and mentoring students in the United States. The findings indicate that the participants provided career and technical support that contributed to students’ success by providing general guidance, professional development opportunities, and access to resources. Also, the participants engaged in active listening and training, and supported inclusive activities to promote students’ psychosocial support. From the findings, we provide recommendations for program managers and faculty members to help reinforce students’ learning in research programs.
... By keenly observing and documenting everyday behaviours and interactions, researchers gain a deep understanding of the context and underlying dynamics. This method involves a group of participants who discuss a specific topic under the guidance of a facilitator (Snyder, 2012). ...
The aim of this research article includes the critical scrutiny of the
existing solid waste management system in developing countries to determine the potential impacts of challenges on the functionality of the system of solid waste management. The paper pinpoints corruption, departmental dishonesty, mismanagement, lawlessness and lack of reasonable policies as the major challenges that are required to be discussed and addressed for the protection of the environment and public health. With this aim, this research article conducts a qualitative study in the form of interviews with closed-end questions and filled from 175 solid waste management organizations‟ officials to highlight the challenges that are being faced by developing countries concerning the solid waste management system. Currently, the management of solid waste is not an easy task to perform, therefore, the situation of the system of solid waste management is quite dire in developing countries in comparison to developed countries. Hence, there is a need for the acknowledgment of the impact of unreasonable solid waste management systems and there is a need to change it for sustainability of the public health and environment. The betterment of the system of solid waste requires endeavours in increasing the funds, awareness in the public, recognition of new innovative technology, and development of an infrastructure. For the progress of the countries, there is a need to accept a new system for solid waste management. Along with this, there is a need to recognize the problem in the existing system.
... Individual interviews, researcher journals, and a demographic questionnaire were used, as an ICS is typically inclusive of multiple data sources (Creswell, 2012;Creswell & Poth, 2018;Mukherji & Albon, 2022). Thick, rich description that embodies contextually relevant information about the case, is furthermore common to ICS (Creswell & Poth, 2018;Snyder, 2012;Wood et al., 2020), which was applied to this research. A Social Constructivist (SC) paradigm was employed as it is rooted in an interpretivist stance whereby social interactions situated in a realworld phenomenon are investigated to capture participants lived experiences (Adom et al., 2016;Salvador, 2016). ...
Given that early childhood education and care is relationship laden, research into attachment can contribute towards our understanding of early childhood education relationships. There is, however, a lack of research in this field and available research is largely absent of the voices of early childhood professionals and directors who work in early years environments. On these grounds a qualitative instrumental case study, nested in a social constructivist paradigm, was designed in Ontario, Canada, to gain insight into how attachment is (dis)embodied in their practice. The ten interviews that informed findings suggest that although attachment merges with practice, reluctance exists to intentionally embrace attachment theorizing and terminology. Instead, attachment is cloaked in care and love discourse, with "two-sided" inclinations. Participants of this study compel pre and in-service organizations to fortify their training to ensure that pedagogical approaches espouse the cornerstones of attachment theory and terminology, most notably to counter attachment (mis)understandings. Findings furthermore point to the intersectionality between the personal attachment history of professionals who work with young children, and their capacity to nurture security in their pedagogical practice.
... The researchers translated the interview transcripts from Korean to English and independently reviewed them for consistency of content. Analytic memos encompassed various tasks, including coding transcriptions, extracting key themes, and providing reflective commentary on the coding processes and theme selection (Snyder, 2012;Rogers, 2018). Throughout the data collection phase and beyond, regular meetings were convened to share analytic memos, deliberate on coding aspects that either hindered or facilitated gardeners' opportunities to learn about the environment and community building, and analyze the data. ...
Community gardens offer valuable educational and social benefits, contributing to
enhanced environmental learning and community building. To expand these opportunities and support community gardens’ objectives, we emphasize the necessity of establishing specific structures that facilitate gardeners’ practices. Investigating a Korean community as a case study, we identify the ways in which certain structures afford and limit learning opportunities and community building, shedding light on the role structures can play in the field of the community garden. Our analysis illustrates the importance of understanding the dynamic relationship between gardening practices and supporting structures. By doing so, garden participants and policymakers can more intentionally activate opportunities to learn about the environment and to build community. Our research aims to examine structures that afford and limit practices as a means of providing a valuable lens to guide community gardening program designers and policymakers in achieving the goals of promoting environmental learning and community building.
... Existen diferentes perspectivas en la literatura sobre la metodología de estudios de casos (McLeod et al., 2011;Montes-Rodríguez et al., n.d.;Sneed et al., 2020;Snyder, 2012); sin embargo, en lo que coinciden los autores, es en que su ejecución debe ser sistemática, evidenciando la integración de conocimientos y permitiendo al lector sacar sus propias conclusiones (Jónasdóttir et al., 2018;Pearson et al., 2015). Los casos de estudio se relacionan con otras metodologías de investigación, como la recolección de información por encuestas, los experimentos controlados, los cuasiexperimentos y la investigación en acción (Robson, 1993;Runeson y Höst, 2009). ...
La eco-innovación es un concepto que enfatiza el desarrollo sostenible y su medición es imprescindible para el desempeño económico y sostenible de las organizaciones. Por otro lado, el cálculo de indicadores compuestos para evaluar el progreso en diferentes ámbitos es muy útil, considerando que los tomadores de decisiones requieren de herramientas eficaces para soportar sus estrategias. En este sentido, el presente artículo propone la medición de la eco-innovación en los sitios que conforman el Clúster México-Colombia del grupo Saint-Gobain, aplicando la metodología de indicadores basados en múltiples puntos de referencia. Los principales hallazgos sugieren que la dimensión de entradas y actividades integradas a los recursos, proveen información relevante para la toma de decisiones de las partes interesadas. Se sugiere extender las líneas de investigación aplicando la misma metodología en otras empresas del grupo Saint-Gobain, así como en otras compañías.
In the 1970s, the movie Kramer versus Kramer dramatized the destructiveness of child custody disputes. It helped inspire family law reform and careers. The central problem identified was an adversarial system and hostile litigation. The proposed solution was alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Over time, these alternatives became an integral part of the family law response to child custody cases, except in cases of vulnerable parties. Today's parents are under greater legal and social pressure to resolve disputes without resorting to court. This can be welcomed and resisted by parents. This article focuses on parental resistance to dispute resolution over litigation through a return to Hollywood. The movie Marriage Story is used to show how parents might feel alienated rather than relieved by opportunity to cooperatively problem‐solve differences. Implications are explored in part through drawing from ethnographic research on parents who engaged in mediation through a U.S. family court program and through two Australian Family Relationship Centres (FRC).
Considering the vital role of college teachers' teaching engagement in guaranteeing the quality of higher education, this study aimed to reveal the behavioral mechanism of Chinese college teachers' teaching engagement through qualitative study based on the grounded theory. It is found that the behavior of Chinese college teachers' teaching engagement is the result of the corresponding intention, which is affected by the three factors of the teaching engagement values, the perceived expectations from the significant others, and the professional knowledge and ability to teach through different ways of interaction. According to the findings, the teaching engagement of college teachers needs to be promoted from three paths: improve teachers' satisfaction of values demands in teaching engagement, reform policy regimes to create a cultural atmosphere that emphasizes teaching engagement, and enhance teachers' professional knowledge and ability of teaching.
Prior research declared that increased job satisfaction among faculty can explicitly influence behaviors and attitudes in faculty within institutions of higher education: retention, job performance, institutional commitment, engagement, among others. It is important that universities monitor the satisfaction levels of their faculty to secure increased levels of their performance. The qualitative, explanatory single case study was to explore how job satisfaction influence faculty retention and turnover in a private university in Monrovia, Liberia, West Africa. The need for qualified and committed faculty in Liberia continues to increase. To meet this need for high numbers of faculty, retention of qualified faculty has become a priority. The implication of this study is the importance of having effective leadership and healthy organizational culture to improve faculty morale and job satisfaction by developing strategies to retain quality faculty and reduce turnover.
Our purpose in this article is to identify and suggest resolution for two core problematics of grounded theory. First, while grounded theory provides transparency to one part of the conceptualization process, where codes emerge directly from the data, it provides no such systematic or transparent way for gaining insight into the conceptual relationships between discovered codes. Producing a grounded theory depends not only on the definition of conceptual pieces, but the delineation of a relationship between at least two of those pieces. Second, the conceptualization process of grounded theory is done in hierarchical fashion, where individual codes emerge from the data but then are used to generate insight into more general concepts and thematic statements. But various works on grounded theory have failed to provide any systematic way of using data specific levels of scale (the codes) to gain insight into more macro levels of scale (concepts and themes). We offer fractal concept analysis as a means of resolving both of these issues. By using a logic structure generator, fractal concept analysis delineates self-similar conceptual frameworks at various levels of abstraction, yielding a method for linking concepts together within and between levels of scale encountered in the grounded theory coding and categorization process. We conclude that this fractal analytic technique can bolster the aims of grounded theory as a formalized and systematic process for generating theory from empirical data.
This article discusses some of the dilemmas still surrounding researcher subjectivity and reflexivity in qualitative research. It explores the example of qualitative research into British migration to Tenerife, which involved ethnographic data collection in two principal employment areas: lap dancing and timeshare sales. It explains the setting and methodology of the research project, exploring the especially thorny ground of researching into a group whose ‘otherness’ on some levels manifests in ‘good’ data, partly because the group’s opinions and discourses jar with one’s own political ideology. Exploring the British migrants’ reasons for moving to Tenerife was central to the research, and the data showed that these migration motives were couched in ideas about class, gender, and race identity. Collecting data of that nature brought to the fore ideas about inequality, othering and difference and these ‘outed’ notions became pivotal to my relationships with the migrants in the field. The article considers the dynamics of reflexivity of this particular empirical situation, exploring how and why certain groups become ‘unloveable’ and how this affects the research in terms of ethics, epistemology and ultimately data.
The problems of representation in qualitative research have been widely documented and multiple means of addressing them have been offered. The purpose of this article is to illustrate ways in which employing collaborative visual methods may present one way to address such problems. While this approach is not without complications, a recent pilot study application suggests that the complexity of participant data is well-handled by integrating the graphic novel as a collaborative visual text in data collection, analysis and presentation.
This article suggests that the Pensieve — a magical instrument featured prominently in the Harry Potter books — is a useful metaphor for teaching qualitative researchers about reflexivity. Teaching naturalistic forms of inquiry poses many challenges. Drawing upon their experiences as teachers and students of qualitative research, the authors examine how a reflexive journal can serve as a much needed repository for a qualitative researcher's memories and reflections. The authors suggest that by documenting the researcher's perspective over time, the Pensieve can aid in the development of reflexivity by providing a space for metacognitive reflection on the research process, and creating an opportunity to engage others in the interpretation of data.
The article discusses the findings of interviews with researchers who use qualitative methods in social research contracts with public sector clients. Issues arising in research projects in relation to understandings of, and implementation of, qualitative methods are discussed. Researchers’ reasons for choosing qualitative methods, conceptions of quality in qualitative research, and how they believe qualitative methods are perceived and used by commissioners are considered. There is great diversity between researchers in their level of confidence in using qualitative methods and their commitment to particular philosophical positions in social science. There is widespread disillusionment with the processes whereby qualitative work is reduced in quality by pressures towards quasi-quantification and superficiality. Particularly where a previous occupational identity instils greater confidence, there is also evidence of hidden resistances of researchers committed to a view of qualitative work as emancipatory and requiring of epistemological integrity.
Applied visual anthropology implies the creation of new methodologies and practices specific to projects that entail some form of social intervention and that are guided by the needs of clients. This article introduces the historical and contemporary development of this subdiscipline and argues that it can make substantive contributions to academic visual anthropology method and theory.
In this project, the author explores a novel variation on an established social science research method, photo-elicitation. The author photographed eight school principals during a two-year period and asked the principals to respond to the photographs by writing narratives below each. The author uses photography, reflections, and her own memories to construct descriptive narrative snapshots of the eight principals. Further, the author argues that this approach underscores how photographs are both technically and socially constructed and through the use of photo-elicitation new ways of understanding self and others in relation can be explored.