Background The field of engineering education research is adopting an increasingly diverse range of qualitative methods. These developments necessitate a coherent language and conceptual framework to critically engage with questions of qualitative research quality.Purpose/Hypothesis This article advances discussions of qualitative research quality through sharing and analyzing a methodologically diverse, practice-based exploration of research quality in the context of five engineering education research studies.Design/Method As a group of seven engineering education researchers, we drew on the collaborative inquiry method to systematically examine questions of qualitative research quality in our everyday research practice. We used a process-based, theoretical framework for research quality as the anchor for these explorations.
ResultsWe constructed five practice explorations spanning grounded theory, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and various forms of narrative inquiry. Examining the individual contributions as a whole yielded four key insights: quality challenges require examination from multiple theoretical lenses; questions of research quality are implicitly infused in research practice; research quality extends beyond the objects, procedures, and products of research to concern the human context and local research setting; and research quality lies at the heart of introducing novices to interpretive research.Conclusions This study demonstrates the potential and further need for the engineering education community to advance methodological theory through purposeful and reflective engagement in research practice across the diverse methodological approaches currently being adopted.
is an associate professor in the School of Engineering Education with affiliations with the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. She has a B.Eng. in chemical engineering (with distinction) from McGill University, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in industrial and systems engineering with a Ph.D. minor in women's studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She runs the erstwhile Research in Feminist Engineering (RIFE) group, now renamed the Feminist Research in Engineering Education (FREE) group, whose diverse projects and group members are described at the website http://feministengineering.org/.
Engineering Education Lab. Canek was brought on at Rice originally as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2017 on an NSF-funded study that investigates the efficacy of an audio-based method of learning mathematics where he now serves as Co-PI. In 2019, he began working as Co-PI on another NSF-funded study to reduce barriers in the hiring of underrepresented racial minority faculty in data science and data engineering fields.
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