Understanding Ourselves in Qualitative Research Through Collaborative Sense-making

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Shannon Crooks, Syracuse UniversityFollow
Sarah Appedu, Syracuse UniversityFollow
Abir BouaziziFollow
Chien-Yu Lin, SUNY College of Environmental Science and ForestryFollow
Qiaoyi Liu, Syracuse UniversityFollow
Isaac Meth, Syracuse UniversityFollow
Yigang Qin, Syracuse UniversityFollow

ORCID

Sarah Appedu: 0000-002-5405-7016

Qiaoyi Liu: 0000-0001-9378-6150

Yigang Qin: 0000-0001-7843-2266

Document Type

Poster

Date

10-15-2024

Keywords

students, pedagogy, research methods, curriculum, paradigms, positionality, doctoral education

Disciplines

Educational Methods | Library and Information Science

Description/Abstract

In the fall of 2023, the iSchool at Syracuse University offered a new PhD course entitled IST 800 Information Studies Seminar: Qualitative Research Methods. This course was intended to teach students about various qualitative methods. A key part of the curriculum was centered on a discussion of how researchers are implicated by their epistemological and ontological positionality and how this awareness should inform their methodological decisions and analytical interpretations. As part of the course, students were asked to keep a weekly sense-making journal, which was intended as a routine medium through which students could reflectively engage with the various author claims, arguments, and philosophical perspectives that were raised in the course readings and shared class discussions. After the course ended, several of the students from the course embarked on a collaborative autoethnographic project to examine how their respective learnings about qualitative methodologies had shaped their individual research ontologies and epistemologies. This poster provides an overview of this collective analysis.

We argue that the reflexive nature of the course acted as a generative springboard for us (i.e., the students) to explore and question our values, sensitivities, and, ultimately, our worldviews; in tandem, the assigned sense-making memos gave us a chance to proactively develop our researcher positionalities. It is our hope that sharing the insights from this autoethnographic project will support other early career researchers in understanding how to critically engage their own positionality, and will provide information science educators inspiration for their own research methodology pedagogy.

Recommended Citation

Crooks, S., Appedu, S., Bouazizi, A., Erickson, I., Lin, C.-Y., Liu, Q., Meth, I., & Qin, Y. (2024). Understanding Ourselves in Qualitative Research Through Collaborative Sense-making. Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference. https://doi.org/10.21900/j.alise.2024.1758

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.