Advanced Analytic Techniques for Theorizing from Qualitative Research

About

Contents and objectives:

Qualitative research plays a vital role in our field’s knowledge generation cycle by offering theoretical advancements via theory development, refinement, and refutation. In order to achieve these strong theoretical contributions, qualitative researchers need to employ advanced analytic techniques that facilitate theorizing from their empirically grounded insights, contributing to a novel understanding and explanation of the theoretical meaning of their observations and interpretations (Klag & Langley, 2013; Locke, 2007; Richards, 2020). Advanced qualitative analysis includes the steps employed to generate theory from data, i.e., activities that are aimed at seeing, understanding, interpreting, refuting, challenging, integrating, and explaining patterns in data. They are the kind of qualitative analytic techniques that bring about a “conceptual leap” (Klag & Langley, 2013, p. 150)

It is this last step of deriving theoretical insight via employing advanced analytic techniques, though, that is the least well understood and rarely covered in methods textbooks. In the current workshop, we will explore and elaborate on the link between advanced analytic techniques for qualitative research and theorizing from qualitative research. The workshop is built around practical examples to demonstrate specific forms of advanced analytic techniques and how they support challenging, seeing, and articulating to derive the subsequent theoretical insights.

Key topics covered:

What is theorizing?
What is the role of abduction in theorizing?
What are different forms of theorizing?
How does theorizing differ across different epistemological and ontological foundations?
What are advanced qualitative analytic techniques and how do they differ from more common qualitative analytic techniques targeted at getting to know one’s data?
Introduction of different qualitative advanced analytic techniques across different qualitative methods, such as grounded theory, process research, case research, ethnography, and others
How does the application of advanced analytic techniques facilitate theorizing from qualitative research?
How to demonstrate the link between method and theory for the writing up of qualitative research for publication?

Lecture plan:

Day 1: Theorizing and the abductive process

Day 2: Different forms of theorizing; theorizing within different epistemologies and ontologies

Day 3: Advanced qualitative analytic techniques and their link to theorizing

Day 4: Advanced qualitative analytic techniques and their link to theorizing

Day 5: How to write methods and findings for publications that demonstrate the link between advanced qualitative techniques, abduction, and theorizing

Course leader

Tine Köhler University of Melbourne, Australia. Tine’s substantive research areas are in international management, organizational behavior, and industrial and organizational psychology. Her methodological expertise is in qualitative research methods (predominantly grounded theory and ethnography), quantitative research methods (predominantly regression techniques, replication, and meta-analysis), and research design

Target group

primarily graduate researchers, PhD researchers, early career researchers

Prerequisites and course level:

This course works best for participants who are already familiar with standard qualitative methods and analysis. We will focus exclusively on those techniques that facilitate theorizing from qualitative research and will thus not cover any standard coding or thematic analytic processes. Participants are encouraged to bring their own datasets and projects from which they wish to theorize to apply the course content to their own work.

**The Summer School cannot grant credits. We only deliver a Certificate of Participation, i.e. we certify your attendance.**

If you consider using Summer School workshops to obtain credits (ECTS), you will have to investigate at your home institution (contact the person/institute responsible for your degree) to find out whether they recognise the Summer School, how many credits can be earned from a workshop/course with roughly 35 hours of teaching, no graded work, and no exams.

Make sure to investigate this matter before registering if this is important to you

Fee info