Qualitative Research Methods: Foundations and Practices

Full course description

This course introduces you to qualitative research methods using a hands-on approaches. You will gain both knowledge and skills in a range of qualitative research methodologies, including ethnographic methods, such as observation and interview, case studies, discourse analysis, and focus groups, while delving into digital approaches for researching and analysing how digital technologies are used, created, and influence our daily lives. This course prepares you for independent qualitative research in the third year of your studies.

Qualitative research methodologies are interpretative and naturalistic. This means that researchers study people, events, and things in their everyday contexts, trying to interpret these in relation to the meanings assigned to them by their social, cultural, and temporal circumstances.

We go beyond the practicalities of doing interviews, observing people, organising focus groups or conducting discourse analysis on historical documents. Each method comes with its own assumptions about the objects in the world (ontology), and how people can know about what is in the world (epistemology). In addition to these philosophical questions, we also pay attention to the normative and ethical issues associated with qualitative research.