Research activities include:
- teaching,
- analysis,
- coding,
- perhaps interviewing and transcribing.
The doctoral training workshop (DTW) sessions provide some training, but not learning by doing. For example, the DTW includes a session on interviewing, but not on transcription, or on coding of qualitative data. It's up to the PG to read up. And if you don't realise the issues, then you don't deliberately read up on the skills. Until I read Kvale (1996), and then Tilley (2003), I had considered transcription a chore, not a skill that required reflection. I believed I could create an objective representation of the dialogue that had taken place. But now I'm not so sure and have questions:
- where do I punctuate?
- was that remark a query or a statement?
- which transcript is more accurate - mine or that of the paid transcriber? For example, one of us heard "certain reviews" and the other heard "similar views".
For PGs doing qualitative research, they need the chance to shadow experienced interviewers, observing how it's done. They could transcribe someone else's research, and then discuss issues arising from it, so having the experience to reflect on their own transcriptions.
I don't have enough experience to think yet what "sitting next to Nellie" experience a post grad following a quantitative approach would benefit from.
I suspect other universities not just the OU, fail their post grads on these skills, but if the PhD is really a training in research, then post grads must participate in research, and as trainees, they are peripheral. Universities that espouse learning, must legitimate that participation.
LAVE, J. & WENGER, E. (1991) Situated learning : legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing
TILLEY, S. A. (2003) "Challenging" Research Practices: Turning a Critical Lens on the Work of Transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 9.
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