Discussion 1

 

Select one of the two topics about which you have been writing.  Assume it is your DHA project topic.

Topics:   Ensuring Healthy Births and Promoting Proper Prenatal Care 

• Assume you will use general qualitative inquiry to answer your research question.
• Using the slides as a guide, develop an aligned series for the following elements

  Specific Problem
  Gap in Practice
  Purpose
  Project Question

Rev0

1

Qualitative Project Technique Refresher

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Let’s Refresh………

All About the Qualitative Inquiry (QI) Technique:

Appropriateness of the QI technique;

Characteristics of a QI project;

Alignment of foundation elements of a QI project;

Procedures for conducting a QI project.

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2

Picture This………

You have a Capstone project and topic to address stakeholder issues and opportunities related to:
 
Attitudes, opinions, perceptions, or feelings about a current workplace issue or experience;
Thoughts and feelings about future events or changes;
Reflections of occurrences in the past;
Descriptions of critical incidents and outcomes at a single-point in time.

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Now What Do I Do?
The unique considerations you face for conducting a manageable and feasible Capstone business project:
You have knowledge of the topic and wish to inform the business problem and gap in practice in a straight-forward manner;
You have time and resource limitations for project completion;
You desire efficient and effective data collection approaches (semi-structured interviews);
Your intent is to produce findings “close” (who, what, where) to the gap/problem, with rich description in easy to understand language;
You desire outcomes, which are particularly relevant to practitioners and policy makers.

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What You Are Attempting to Do
Why is Qualitative Inquiry (QI) appropriate for a Capstone Project?
Describe participants subjective take on events, happenings, and characteristics of a phenomena;
Summarize, in everyday terms, specific events experienced by individuals or groups of individuals;
Capture a broad range of rich, detailed set of opinions, perceptions, and attitudes from a small and informed group of participants;
Study the topic in its natural state to the extent possible within the context of real-world applicability to informing a business problem.
Think – Manageable and Feasible!

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5

What Are You Not Attempting to Do?
For a Capstone Project you are not attempting to prepare a highly abstract rendering of the data to explore a phenomena:
NOT – Inner structures and cognitive processes of experiencing a phenomena;
NOT – How and why the phenomena or problem occurs;
NOT – Evidence the creation of theory;
NOT – Extended observational field research to describe a culture.
Think – Relevance to a practitioner audience and manageability!

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Let’s Review: Foundational Elements

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Let’s Recap: Foundational Elements of a Project

Business Problem:
Current State
Gap in Practice
Desired State
Project Need
Project Purpose, Project Questions, Project Technique

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Alignment Reminders and Checklist
Here are several key questions you can use to self-check your understanding of the alignment of the foundational elements of your project:
Is your project topic aligned with your specialization?
Did you identify a problem, evidenced (cited) with adversity?
Is the purpose of your project appropriate to and consistent with the specific problem you’ve identified that drives the need for your project, and gap in practice that you intend to address?
Are your project questions appropriate to and consistent with the purpose of your project?
Is your project technique appropriate to and consistent with the purpose of your project and the nature of your project questions?
Will the data you plan to collect be consistent with the project technique and be manageable and feasible to secure?

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Project Topic for Qualitative Inquiry

Wyler wants to do a project in which he explores the reasons why women engineers are leaving the profession.

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Alignment: Qualitative Inquiry
Specific Problem: The specific problem is that the percentage of women in the engineering workforce remains low and there is a net drain on female talent as more women choose to leave than are entering (citation). With women making up just 18% of the engineering workforce (citation) and 15% of the leadership ranks (citation), their departures incur significant costs for engineering companies from talent discontinuity and unrealized business revenues (citation).
Gap in Practice: Despite the emphasis placed on hiring women into engineering (STEM) professions, the underrepresentation of women in the engineering workforce continues (citation), and the need for practitioners to fully understand and address the causes of the phenomenon continues (citation).

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative inquiry project is to explore the reasons why a nationwide group of former American women engineers chose to leave the profession.
PQ1: What are the reasons women engineers choose to leave the profession?

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Data Collection: Qualitative Inquiry
 

Sources of Data When Appropriate Sample Size & Other Requirements
Interviews
  Generic qualitative descriptive
 
To explore the attitudes, opinions or perceptions of (who) as to (what). Purposive Sampling
Approximately 7-10 (suggestion: recruit for at least 12-15 to account for attrition).
 
Interviews must be a minimum of 30 minutes and a maximum of 60 minutes.
Inclusion criteria: typically those who successfully addressed the problem.

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Data Analysis: Qualitative Inquiry
Protocols to consider for QI data analysis:
Thematic analysis is the common process that is used to conduct an analysis of QI data;
Answer PQs with procedures to find patterns and aggregate data from codes (concepts) to categories to themes which emerge;
Rich/robust outputs to allow for in-depth analysis and rendering of the participant experiences or phenomenon to be studied.
Initial coding can be developed deductively, or a priori, from concepts found in the applied framework and literature review;
A second inductive cycle of coding the data is involved to identify the most frequent words and phrases from the participant’s response.

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Conducting a Qualitative Inquiry Project
Let’s take another look at the important resources found in Updates and Handouts to guide the completion of a modified QI project:
Data Collection and Instrumentation;
Expert Panel Review;
Conducting the Field Test;
Data Analysis Procedures;
Establishing Trustworthiness.

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Establishing Trustworthiness

Strategies to ensure trustworthiness are clearly and correctly described:
Credibility: Confidence in results (transcript review, thick description);
Transferability: Transfer results to other contexts (generalizability is constrained; select transferability may be possible);
Dependability: Findings are repeatable (rich description of procedures; audit trail);
Confirmability: Results confirmed by others (coding details; reflexivity).

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It’s a Wrap!

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