Workshops
Four half-day workshops are on offer. Each offers a less common or innovative way of researching the experiences of early career researchers. The goal of each workshop is to open up for discussion as well as practice the conceptual and methodological benefits as well as challenges of the approach. You can attend two of the four.
Once you have registered for the conference, please go to goo.gl/zhCWOb. Please enter your name and email and choose the workshops as to your preferences from 1 (top choice) to 4.
While we will do our best to give you at least one of your top two choices, given scheduling we cannot promise both. However, priority in scheduling will be given to those who choose early.
Doing cross-cultural research and analyzing cross-cultural data in researcher education
Christiane Donahue, Dartmouth University, United States of America
Transcultural research is increasingly important in the context of 21st century educational globalized challenges and goals. For those researching graduate students’ and post-PhD researchers’ development, the question of how to best approach this kind of research is a growing concern given increased expectations of international mobility. This workshop will explore how to develop research that is both sensitive to cultural differences and useful to understanding commonalities across cultural contexts.
We will address transcultural research methodology, including how it demands that we proceed differently: both differently from non-transcultural research and differently from previous decades’ approaches to cross/trans-cultural research. Topics will include the need for significant a priori thinking and preparation; the importance of methods and techniques with particular parameters, including carefully chosen appropriate measures across contexts; the value of resisting “contrast” as the first and most important focus; and the specific embedded challenge of working across languages. Finally, we will discuss cross-cultural teams as a special case of transcultural research.
After the overview of these key features of transcultural research methods, participants will have the opportunity to work in small groups through one of three scenarios provided, analyzing the possible challenges and difficulties, identifying possible appropriate methods of data collection, treatment, and analysis, and discussing actual or potential projects of their own in light of this group work. During this hands-on work, participants will be matched with others sharing interests and backgrounds, so that they might discuss future research together, developing joint (and transcultural) research projects.
Longitudinal mixed-method comparative approach
Kirsi Phyältö, University of Helsinki, Finland
Montserrat Castelló, University Ramon Llull Blanquerna, Spain
In this workshop we will explain the methodological approach adopted in our current shared project on researcher identity development: a longitudinal mixed-method approach.
This consists of developing a cross-cultural survey (cross-sectional) and follow-up interviews mediated by data-collection longitudinal tools: Journey Plots and Network Plots. We will focus on the interaction among these different types of data and research questions associated to it. We will also highlight useful procedures to make profiles of participants based on this diversity of data. We will discuss specific case-examples of different interpretations when analyzing data coming from surveys or interviews and graphic tools. This is an ongoing project, so we will present some examples coming from post-doc data and discuss some of the characteristic of the approach, strengths, weaknesses and limits. Based on data-examples we will encourage participants to discuss alternative data interpretations and to think of future proposals for joint projects.
Social media in research: conceptual and methodological benefits and challenges
Kay Guccione, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
This workshop will help participants consider the different ways in which social media can be utilised to support and enhance research study processes in the context of early career researcher experience. I will draw throughout on my own experience of using Twitter to launch and promote a research project and a study blog to generate research data in a project around experiences of research fellowship applications. I will also collate some case study examples of innovative social media use in research, around research, and around research networks, that will help participants to understand the range of tools and methodologies available and how they might fit into your future research design. We will look in depth at:
- Using Twitter to engage partners, share resources and disseminate
- Coding discussion forum threads for discourse analysis
- Using Blogs as a tool for data collection and collective awareness raising
- Using social media to create your researcher brand and raise your profile.
In the workshop, we will build on the case study examples pooling experience and expertise of tools, strategies and analyses from our own experience. We will make time for participants to discuss and plan how they may use social media tools to enhance existing or upcoming projects.
Identity and narrative in a qualitative longitudinal study: Benefits and challenges
Lynn McAlpine, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Cheryl Amundsen, Simon Fraser University, Canada
In this workshop, we will draw on our experience of longitudinal research which led us from documenting the experiences of PhD students to tracking their career trajectories after graduation. In looking back, we realize we would never have documented their experiences if they hadn’t joined the study during their doctorate and continued to participate. This is just one example of how longitudinal research provides gifts of insight into experience that may not emerge through other approaches. While there are many ways to approach longitudinal research, it is not well examined as a methodology. So, we hope that the readings provided beforehand will provide some sense of how our approach is embedded in an identity perspective and narrative methodology. In the workshop, we will put the readings into practice by providing opportunities to use example tools, strategies and analytic procedures that have emerged in our work. There will be time for you to explore ideas that lend themselves to this kind of research and discuss these ideas with those in attendance.
