Qualitative Inquiry in Daily Life David Dwayne Williams Version: 1.3 Built on: 05/28/2020 04:10pm This book is provided freely to you by CC BY: This work is released under a CC BY license, which means that you are free to do with it as you please as long as you properly attribute it. Table of Contents Preface .............................................................................................. 7 Overview of qualitative inquiry and general texts on this topic ............................................................................................................. 9 A School Story of Qualitative Inquiry .................................. 10 An Analysis of the Story ........................................................ 18 Qualitative Inquiry Process ................................................... 20 The Reality about the Process .............................................. 22 Organization of this Book ...................................................... 31 Conclusion ................................................................................ 32 Assumptions we make in doing qualitative inquiry ................. 34 Some Common Assumptions ................................................. 35 An Analysis of Assumptions .................................................. 38 Common Questions about Qualitative Inquiry ................... 42 Some Additional Beliefs and Assumptions Regarding Human Inquiry .................................................................. 45 Conclusion ................................................................................ 52 Keeping a record, writing fieldnotes .......................................... 55 A Story ...................................................................................... 56 An Analysis .............................................................................. 59 Kinds of Fieldnotes ................................................................. 61 Example .................................................................................... 67 Some Ideas about Record Keeping ...................................... 73 Mechanics of Fieldnotes ........................................................ 74 Conclusion ................................................................................ 78 Relationship building to enhance inquiry .................................. 80 An Article-Based Story ........................................................... 81 The Process ............................................................................. 84 Results and Conclusion .......................................................... 90 An Analysis of KL's Experience ............................................. 95 Conclusion .............................................................................. 103 Qualitative Inquiry in Daily Life 4 Standards and quality in qualitative inquiry .......................... 106 A Self-Critique Story ............................................................ 107 An Analysis ............................................................................ 108 Credibility .............................................................................. 110 Transferability ....................................................................... 114 Dependability ........................................................................ 115 Confirmability ........................................................................ 116 Other Criteria ........................................................................ 117 A Checklist ............................................................................. 119 Audit Trail .............................................................................. 121 Conclusion .............................................................................. 123 Focusing the inquiry ................................................................... 125 A School's Superintendent's Story .................................... 126 An Analysis ............................................................................ 129 Conclusion .............................................................................. 141 Data collection ............................................................................. 144 Gathering Through Observations, Interviews and Documents ...................................................................... 145 An Assistant Principal's Story ............................................ 148 General Lessons .................................................................... 149 Observing Lessons ............................................................... 154 Interviewing Lessons ........................................................... 156 Document Review Lessons .................................................. 160 Conclusion .............................................................................. 163 Data interpretation ..................................................................... 171 A Graduate Student Story ................................................... 172 Story Reading Through Analysis, Synthesis and Interpretation ................................................................. 173 An Analysis ............................................................................ 177 Spradley's Approach to Interpretation ............................. 183 Domain Analysis ................................................................... 186 Conclusion .............................................................................. 207 Sharing and reporting ................................................................. 213 Sharing through Story Telling ............................................ 214 Qualitative Inquiry in Daily Life 5 Revisiting Three Stories ...................................................... 218 An Analysis of Three Stories ............................................... 221 Conclusion .............................................................................. 229 Appendices ................................................................................... 231 Appendix A.1 - A Sample Study from BYU-Public School Partnership ..................................................................... 232 Appendix A.2 - What Have We Learned? .......................... 240 Appendix A.3 - Patterns of Experience ............................. 260 Appendix B.1 - Allowing Space for Not-Knowing: What My Journal Teaches Me, Part 1 .......................................... 275 Appendix B.2 - Allowing Space for Not-Knowing: What My Journal Teaches Me, Part 2 .......................................... 290 Appendix B.3 - Allowing Space for Not-Knowing: What My Journal Teaches Me, Part 3 .......................................... 308 Appendix B.4 - Allowing Space for Not-Knowing: What My Journal Teaches Me, Part 4 .......................................... 323 Appendix B.5 - Marne's critique of her own study .......... 335 Appendix C - An Elementary School Example: My Observations of Jimmy .................................................. 344 Appendix D - Reflecting on Reflection .............................. 350 Appendix E - A Study of Educational Change in Alberta ........................................................................................... 356 Appendix F - Moving Ahead: A Naturalistic Study of Retention Reversal of Five Elementary School Children ........................................................................................... 377 Appendix G.1 - An Examination of Teacher Reflection ........................................................................................... 409 Appendix G.2 - Themes of Reflection ................................ 430 Appendix H - Spradley's theme synthesis and report writing ............................................................................. 438 Back Matter .................................................................................. 457 Author Information ............................................................... 458 Citation Information ............................................................. 459 Qualitative Inquiry in Daily Life 6 Preface Teacher as researcher, action research, school-based research– these ideas have been discussed and proposed in education for many years. Some of the earliest efforts to encourage educators to gather information to enhance their work came out of Great Britain (e.g., Lawrence Stenhouse). The notion is logical. It makes sense that people who teach or administer teachers in schools would want to learn from their personal experiences, evaluations, and research and would then make improvements based on what they learned. However, although action research and internal evaluation may be more frequently practiced in some schools, the predominant focus of inquiry in education continues to be by people from outside of schools– by professional researchers and external evaluators who use schools as their data sources and write to one another about what they find. Though they sometimes share the results with school people in abbreviated form, external evaluators and researchers usually focus on testing theories, building models, or completing evaluation studies for external funders. For research and evaluation to have a lasting influence on educational practice, educators have to be involved in doing studies too. They have to be asking questions and completing a variety of tasks to answer those questions. Although a few authors