Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the research projects I have been involved in from 2016-2017, and I am glad that the qualitative data our teams collected has left lasting impacts for the participants and the communities. Here are some examples:
 
1. “Building Trust to Facilitate Access to Dementia Care for Immigrant Older Adults” project (2016-2018): Using empowerment evaluation and framework analysis, we are working hard to bridge the trust gap between two dementia service organizations and two immigrant serving agencies. At the end of the project, these organizations are expected to have a much stronger working relationship that was previously non-existent before the research commenced. Also, the manual we produce will be our “legacy” to leave for immigrant older adults to access dementia care and services in their health region.

2. “Raising the Profile” Provincial Summit (Nov 2 & 3, 2017): This inaugural Summit brought together service providers for the elderly from across the province of British Columbia, Canada. The purpose was not to present our research findings, but rather to create networking opportunities for the representatives from these organizations to build trust that facilitates future collaborations. From the feedback we received from the delegates, this Summit was a huge success.

3. “Men on the Move” project: (2016-2018): Our research team designed a 12-14 week structured physical activity program to encourage older men to engage in regular exercise. Participants not only benefit from the program itself, but their feedback and comments also guide the modifications and future developments of the program. The program that will continue to run in the communities after the research team has left will be our “legacy” for the older men participants and the community.
 
4. “Jump Step” project (2016-2017): Similar to “Men on the Move,” our research team designed a 12-14 week structured physical activity program to encourage individuals with a mood disorder to engage in regular exercise as a form of “medicine.” From our observations, many of the participants have successfully formed a physical activity routine, which is essential in boosting their mood and building a structure back in their lives that might have been disrupted by the mood disorder. The research team is grateful that we have helped the participants as we fulfilled our research goals.    
 
It is such an honour to be able to utilize qualitative data to better the lives of our participants and the communities they live in. I feel that I am gradually living up to the tag line on the main page of this research website, to truly “Unleash the Power of Qualitative Data”!

Since the 1960s when Dr. Kathy Charmaz and others conceptualized grounded theory (see Constructing Grounded Theory 2nd edition) in a climate of “quantitative”, “scientific” research dominance to enable qualitative research to be more rigorous, transparent and established, the field has continued to grow and evolve.

Fast forward five decades to 2016, I am continually surprised, sometimes shocked, to see that in some fields where qualitative research can add so much weight and create real-world impacts still have little to no utilization of this methodology and its methods. These fields are so numerous that I almost can’t list them all, but at least include epidemiology, public health, medicine, and many others that have the word “science(s)” attached to it.

In late 2015, a letter from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that openly dismissed qualitative research in a journal article rejection letter (see this Twitter link) created outrage among qualitative researchers from around the world.  

As a social scientist trained in BOTH qualitative and quantitative research methods, on top of a pure mathematics and Geographic Information Science (GIS) background, I sometimes find it hard to interact with people from certain fields. While we are required to take statistics and modelling classes for our degrees, they could have finished graduate school and advanced way ahead in their academic, industry or government careers without ever doing one proper qualitative interview or understanding its importance (no, a five-minute patient history conversation does not qualify as an interview). Do you think some randomized controlled trials will really work without consideration of the real-world context? Do you think some double-blind experiments with a random sampling will really result in effective health promotion programs without taking account of multiple aspects of the participants’ lives? Yet, these are the people who always say such phrases as “I’ve never done qualitative research, I just don’t believe in it” or “I’m a scientist, I don’t do qualitative research.”

Qualitative methods, if done right, have the potential to significantly increase the real-world impact of research in an academic or industry setting. I sincerely hope that more and more researchers will learn about and incorporate this research tradition into their work, so that our research becomes more relevant, contextual and effective in solving problems of our contemporary world. I am glad that the little I am doing as a consultant and a researcher contributes to this goal.  
       
Notes: This post is purposefully kept short to fit with the length of a blog post and the ideas presented are solely of the author’s.

Hello readers,
You may have noticed from the “home” page that I will be offering online MAXQDA training workshops next month. I also plan on scheduling regular online MAXQDA workshops afterwards. I mostly don’t do it for the money and it is a ton of work organizing distance education courses like this to an international audience from anywhere in the world. However, I really feel the need to do this. Here’s why …
        Last week, I was invited to teach an NVivo training session for a large research institute in my hometown. About two-thirds of the participants used Windows and one-third used Mac computers. We kept running into troubles because of the very different interfaces of the two versions and the lack of capacity to coordinate work in a team that had both Windows and Mac users! It could easily take one full work week (i.e., 35 hours) to simply set up the projects so that all teammates can actually begin to analyze the data. And this was the newest version NVivo 11 released a short while ago!
         Now, let’s take a look at MAXQDA, the latest version 12 (released Sept, 2015) offers identical interfaces, identical functions and seamless transferability of files between Windows and Mac formats. Can you imagine how much less time is wasted on setting up the projects and dealing with unnecessary problems between different platforms?
         The saddest part is, institutions all over the world from world-class universities to small colleges have purchased very expensive (I mean very, very expensive) site licences for NVivo for its members. Essentially, this is forcing people to use NVivo because it is free, regardless of its functionality and inability to deliver on useful new upgrades.
         One thing MAXQDA (and other software companies) don’t do as well compared to NVivo is … guess what … marketing! I often wonder how people could say things like, “NVivo is the best qualitative data analysis tool available” when all they know is this one thing.
          This is why out of my very full research schedule, I am still offering online MAXQDA workshops. I want researchers to have an option. I want users to know that there is something more intuitive and user-friendly that creates less project management headaches out there on the market. I also want the librarians or project managers at various universities (who likely don’t conduct research themselves) who decide on what software to pay a hefty site license fee for to know that there is more than one FOR-PROFIT TOOL from a PRIVATE COMPANY for qualitative data analysis out there.

Attending the MAXQDA software booth at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM) here in Vancouver and talking to dozens of interested customers/researchers has once again deepened my understanding of the different approaches towards research methodologies in different disciplines.  

As a health researcher trained in the social sciences, qualitative methodologies are an inherent, embedded element of my field. People in my area use interviews, focus groups and maps in their research, but do not necessarily specify their research as “qualitative”. As I talked to many researchers in management, strategic management and the business field in general over the past four days and explained how MAXQDA could assist with the qualitative part of their research, I realized that “qualitative” methods did not seem to be an area built into the business curriculum. Some of them openly challenged my views on what “pure qualitative" methodologies were about, especially from those who primarily engaged in large-scale surveys or modelling.  

The whole conference experience has reinforced my previous observations that different academic disciplines have their own set of backgrounds and traditions. For example, qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods are not expressly distinguished in epidemiology, public health and most of the Faculty of Medicine (where randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews dominate the field), whereas qualitative methods are almost taken for granted in sociology, anthropology, nursing, education, language/linguistics, and human geography.

I really enjoy going to conferences and interacting with people, especially those that are not from my own discipline. It is a golden way to learn first-hand about the approaches in various fields and to become more interdisciplinary in the way I think about my own academic work.