Leveraging professional experience in an Ed.D. dissertation can prove useful in conducting qualitative research and yield insights into problems of practice. Students should lean into their experiences and expertise, not only help ease the dissertation process, but also to potentially yield better results. In this post, I will discuss how to leverage professional experience in the Ed.D. dissertation and the benefits this can bring to your work.
WThe desire to understand the lived experiences of people and the ways in which they make sense of their everyday lives rests at the core of qualitative research (Merriam, 2009). Unlike research studies in which settings are controlled, such as laboratory experiments, qualitative research typically occurs within natural, real-life environments such as schools, neighborhoods, and businesses. Researchers working with qualitative methods conduct naturalistic inquiry, examining real-world settings with an inductive mindset. In today’s post, I will discuss the key ideas behind qualitative research methodologies.
Coding is a central part of qualitative data analysis, yet I often find that doctoral students particularly struggle with knowing how to code their qualitative data. In today’s post, I want to share some foundational information for coding to provide a sense of the role of coding as a central function of qualitative data analysis.
In qualitative research, a researcher begins to understand and make sense of the data through coding. Thus, coding plays a critical role in the data analysis process (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014).
All researchers must deal with questions related to their unit of analysis and the related idea of unit of observation. Unit of analysis helps the researcher define what is being studied as well as what aspects are being studied. For dissertations, the importance of this concept is that it provides guardrails to know what is in the scope of your dissertation and what is outside the bounds of what you are examining. More specifically, the unit of analysis describes the level at which you are conducting your study. Are you researching states, universities, schools/colleges, departments, presidents, deans, professors, or students just to name a few levels. If you determine that you are studying universities, this leads to a different focus than if you are studying departments. In this post, I will describe unit of analysis and why it is important for qualitative dissertations.
Qualitative research’s foundation can be considered as different as the variety of approaches for engaging in this type of methods. Since the very beginning of qualitative research, the approach as been central to the study of human behavior specifically and growth of social research more generally. Even with the growth and perceived prominence of quantitative approaches to social research, qualitative research methods have remained prominent due to the limitations of quantitive work. In today’s post, I want to share some background about the theoretical orientation of qualitative research.
