The Center for Qualitative Inquiry (CQI) opened its doors four years ago. In the “about” page I lay out particulars about the purpose of the center. In brief, the purpose for developing the Center was two fold. First, to provide high-end hardware, software, and user support to graduate students and faculty. This meant coming up with short term funding to get us started, and long term funding to sustain the Center.

The second goal was simply to bring qualitative researchers together. What we would do together is in large part always changing. If my vision is realized, the later goal will always be “under-construction” as the culture of the university changes. More importantly, “my” vision will become little more than background.

I’ll begin first by sharing the stories about how we set out to achieve the first goal.

Achieving the first goal required some interesting discussions and creativity in funding. We have many “specialty labs” located across campus that are funded by soft money or supported solely for the specific needs of a particular discipline. I wanted to create a different kind of concept for the Center if we were going to achieve our second goal of opening up dialog.

Concurrent to writing the proposal for the Center, I had developed a doctoral level qualitative research course series: Introduction to Qualitative Research and Advanced Qualitative Research Design and Analysis. I developed these courses out of a related need. All doctoral students are required to take some kind of qualitative research class as part of their program and programs offer courses specific to their discipline.

When I taught research classes offered in Reading and supervised dissertations, I noticed that when students began to develop their proposals they had a gap in their understanding of larger discussions relating to the field of qualitative research and methodologies. I felt that this was because they had spent so much time looking closely at qualitative research in the field of literacy but had not been able to spend more time getting grounded in more theoretical foundations in the field of qualitative research. After all, qualitative research is a huge field of study.

When I began to offer the research series and welcomed students from all disciplines, I began to be asked to serve on doctoral committees to mentor students in their research designs and analysis. I saw similar patterns in student’s background and understanding. Moreover, I noticed that students were shying away from using current technologies to gather, manage, and analyze their data because of the expense.

I was aware that most universities responded to graduate student’s financials need by offering competitive internal grants to help with the cost of conducting their research. This is a great idea except that the support can only respond to the needs of a few. Money to buy technology is only part of the solution. User support is absolutely critical!

related post

• Welcome!
• Journeys through ethnography
• Centers, conferences, & focus groups
• Peshkin on interpreting data