The first QRG meeting of 2024 was a robust discussion about the significance and challenges of collaboration in qualitative research. Three guest speakers – Maarten Derksen, Sarahanne Field, and Marieke van Gerner-Haan, shared their diverse experiences with qualitative research, and how collaboration is needed on different levels, and to different degrees, in their work.
Qualitative research projects are typically done in teams. This can be for different reasons, including the size of a project, the vastness of material to be collected and analysed (methodological reasons), or simply because more heads can achieve more together. Collaboration is therefore crucial for the project to be successful, and for the individual team members’ goal achievement. Collaboration also means that people with different expertise levels, specialisations and personal preferences must work together to find a comfortable middle ground for everyone to work in harmony, and for the research project to be successful. This is no small feat – our guests discussed the challenges of finding this middle ground, and expressed that in some projects, finding a way to work together takes a lot of time. Negotiation was a big part of the discussion: mediating different levels of experience with qualitative research and their implied power dynamics, assigning fitting roles according to expertise areas, negotiating the scope of the research, and sharing expectations about how participants influence the research. A large contributing factor to a successful negotiation is being transparent and communicating openly from the start of the project. For example, sharing one’s epistemological stances with other team members, and being open about expectations about how to code and analyse data. In turn, being open requires reflexivity: being able to reflect and share what (research) values and approaches each member brings to the team, but also what values and approaches the team represents through the project. This brought our guests to reflect on trust.
The process of collaboration can build trust and friendship between the team members of a project. One guest reflected about working with a particular colleague for many years, recalling how that longitudinal process established a shared understanding of one another’s strengths and vulnerabilities, and a foundation of trust that they can rely on each other and work through difficulties together. This dynamic naturally changed when a new colleague joined their project, as the new member brought in new values, skills, opinions, epistemological stances. The process of negotiation began anew, and new dynamics were established, as time and the project progressed. Collaboration in qualitative research is particularly prone to being fluid and flexible, because it relies so heavily of what each member of a research project contribute through their personalities, epistemological beliefs, experience, and skills.
Toward the end of the session, our guests discussed how qualitative collaboration feels compared to quantitative collaborations. Generally, the guests agreed that qualitative projects feel more personal, for example because coding choices are more complex to motivate as compared to quantitative research, as they are more based on the individual researcher’s interests. Differences between analysing and coding qualitative data inductively or deductively depend on the researchers’ preference and motivations, and affect the outcome of how data is viewed, what is considered most important to investigate, and what insights are presented as a result of the study. Working together to prevent disagreements or conflicts between researchers requires emotional work, and relies on their ability to communicate and reflect as a team. In quantitative research, there are more often computational reasons for motivating a choice in an analysis, reflecting a difference between traditions of working on a project.
We thank our guest speakers for sharing their experiences and insights, and our audience for engaging in the discussion and bringing their experiences and questions to the table. We invite you to join us for our next session about being an Insider Outsider – inside a project, yet outside the participants’ circle. Our guests for this session will be Ole Gmelin, Brenda Bartelink, Halim Albakkor and Januschka Schmidt. You can find us in Hv.0306 on March 5th, from 11:30-13:00. Everyone is welcome, and we look forward to seeing you there.