Make Your Research RESONATE: Crafting Claims and Building Theory in Qualitative Inquiry

If you would like to develop a toolbox of practices that can address the (earnest but inappropriate) question of, “but how is your qualitative research generalizable?” this workshop is for you.

Claim-making and theory building amplify the resonance and translation of qualitative research. This workshop introduces qualitatively focused heuristic tools that help participants craft their data into claims that have theoretical and practical impact for key stakeholders – whether these audiences are academic colleagues, grant funders, committee members, or journal article reviewers.

The following workshop exercises will enable participants to understand the heuristic tools and apply them in their own work:

• Engaging claim-making and theory building worksheets that lead to an iterative and phronetic (wise) analysis
• Practicing open coding, in vivo coding, creating a qualitative codebook, and differentiating between first- and second-level codes
• Crafting specific claims that resonate and transfer to a variety of settings
• Exploring and practicing iterative writing and a formula for being “interesting”
• Learning tips for crafting qualitative research that fully engages and connects with intended audiences

This course is designed for those new to qualitative methods as well as experienced researchers who want to deepen their analyses or refine their techniques for teaching qualitative interpretation and analysis.

Resources for this workshop will come, in part, from S. Tracy’s Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact, 2^nd Ed. (2020, Wiley-Blackwell) and from Huffman and Tracy’s “Making Claims that Matter: Heuristics for Theoretical and Social Impact in Qualitative Research” (2018), Qualitative Inquiry.