An Eclectic Mix of Challenges and Research Practice

Abstract

The eleven chapters in this volume were selected from presentations made at the 4th World Conference on Qualitative Research held in Porto in October 2019. The chapters are wide-ranging substantively, methodologically, and geographically. The authors write about their research experiences or teaching innovations in India, the United States, Portugal, the Philippines, France, Italy, Columbia and there are two chapters each from Brazil and South Africa. The 11 chapters presented in three thematic sections focus on qualitative research at work, qualitative health research, and teaching and learning qualitative research. The substantive topics are eclectic ranging from young people adjusting to a chronic kidney diagnosis, rural health inequality, intimate partner violence among adolescents, emotional labor of French sales staff to inventive ways to teach students unfamiliar with qualitative research. Methodologically these chapters adopt a diverse range of techniques as if current qualitative research practice does not use a unified methodology. It does not. Techniques included the traditional narrative research, unstructured interviews, community based participatory research to the more innovative critical incident and basic content analysis to those that used computer analysis to facilitate qualitative research.