Qualitative Open Science Practices

Abstract

Starting with Qualitative Open Science Practices

As a person who was trained primarily in research using quantitative methods but needed to do qualitative research to answer the next most pressing question, I was increasingly learning about qualitative research and how to conduct it properly. However, I had not seen much information about how to conduct qualitative research using open science practices. During my PhD, I had been introduced to open science practices as a way to improve educational research, but almost everything I saw did not seem to align with qualitative research. I asked colleagues what existed with regard to open qualitative research resources. Answer: no clue.

Call to action

We thus gathered people interested in qualitative open science research in education at the Virtual Unconference on Open Scholarship Practices in Education Research sponsored by the Center for Open Science. At the conference, we brought other educational researchers and open science fans together to debate what open science qualitative research might look like, put together a list of publicly available publications and tools, and figure out what to do with this information. By the end of a few of these hackathon sessions, we had a list of videos, websites, and publications to help the community understand how to do this work. The full list is located on the Open Educational Resources website but will be expanded upon here in this blog. This blog is intended to be a soft entry into this space of qualitative open science research, not a comprehensive journey; take the thoughts below as suggestions if they align with your philosophy, project, and Institutional Review Board (IRB).