A Case Study of Qualitative Methods

In research – and many parts of life – we only see the finished product, a snapshot of calm and certainty even when the reality is chaotic. When people meet me, they might learn that I am a computer science (CS) professor. I assume they would never guess that I nearly failed data structures in college and still struggled in my second attempt. They would never imagine how many interviews I bombed and graduate schools I did not get into. They don’t see the inevitable paper and grant rejections or poor teaching evaluations. Those things aren’t on my CV, but reflecting back, I see these as some of the most influential elements for my learning. This chapter is a narrative of the actual doing of a research study, what Roth (2006) calls a praxis narrative. I hope to give you a “feel for the game” (Bourdieu, 1992) of doing one type of qualitative research. Ideally, you will gain some insights into qualitative methods, or at least recognition that if it feels chaotic, it is not necessarily wrong. Textbooks about qualitative methods have a burden of providing clarity to the methods. This chapter instead seeks to show all of the mess and ambiguity. In our current context, where computing knowledge is often perceived as only available to the intellectual elite or people with a “geek gene,” it is our responsibility to challenge these notions and help others see our humanness. I will attempt to do that while telling the backstory of this paper. In this chapter, I will share some of what I learned through writing, revising, and now reflecting on a paper that traversed a particularly rocky path. My qualitative analysis was eventually published in a paper at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) International Computing Education Research (ICER) conference (Lewis, 2012a), but the path there was a bit bumpy. The analysis came from my master’s thesis (submitted December 2009), abbreviated to submit to ICER in April of 2010. It was rejected from ICER in 2010 and again in 2011. Despite the suspicion that the manuscript was doomed, I decided to revise and resubmit it again in 2012. Only in this third submission to ICER was it accepted. I received incredibly thoughtful – and harsh – reviews of my first submission to ICER in 2010. At that time, my work was described as preliminary and that the contribution was fairly minimal.