Qualitative Interviewing: Key Tensions, Decisions, and Strategies
Event Date(s): June 26-27, 2012
Time: 9:30 am-4:30 pm
Location: 919 Thompson Hall, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Description: Researchers across the social sciences use qualitative interviews to generate knowledge. At every step in the research process, we confront tensions, make critical decisions, and develop creative strategies. In this workshop, three researchers with extensive experience in qualitative interviewing will discuss these challenges and opportunities as they arise in:
- research design;
- constructing and conducting the interview;
- analyzing and interpreting data; and
- crafting books and articles (including for non-academic audiences).
There will also be opportunities for attendees to engage in exercises such as practice interviewing. This workshop will provide a foundation for researchers who are new to qualitative interviewing as well as an arena for exchange among those who have prior experiences.
Workshop Leaders:
Tom Juravich is Professor of Labor Studies and Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Over the past 25 years he has conducted a wide variety of qualitative research, primarily on work and labor. This includes his book Chaos on the Shop Floor (Temple University Press), based on his 10½-month employment in a New England wool mill; Ravenswood, with Kate Brofrenbrenner (Cornell University Press), an ethnography of a labor struggle in West Virginia; and At the Altar of the Bottom Line: The Degradation of Work in the 21st Century (University of Massachusetts Press), based on four workplace ethnographies of call center representatives, operating room nurses, undocumented immigrant workers, and dislocated factory workers. He is currently completing Maybe I’m Not Canadian Enough: Racialized Workers Confront a Factory Shut-Down (with Teresa Healy), which utilizes participatory action research. He has taught qualitative research methods in a variety of academic and community-based settings and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts.
Amy Schalet is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an expert on adolescent sexuality and culture in comparative perspective. Her interview-based research has appeared in journals across the social sciences, including Gender & Society, Body & Society, and Perspectives in Sexual and Reproductive Health, and a book entitled Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex(University of Chicago Press). In addition, she has published articles, using qualitative interviews, in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Huffington Post. Schalet has served on the boards of health organizations, consulted with community groups, and collaborated on clinical and educational materials. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.
Fees: Faculty: $150/Graduate Students: $75 (Lunch will be provided both days.)