Teaching
Graham Martin of the University of Leicester has been teaching qualitative methods to Masters students in the Applied Health Research programme since 2010. When he needed to find data for use in the classroom, he turned first to UK Data Service on the recommendation of a colleague.
He found Mildred Blaxter’s qualitative data collection Mothers and Daughters, a series including interviews on the health attitudes of Scottish grandmothers, suitable for his needs. Because students studying applied health research come from many different disciplines (his class includes doctors, nurses, medical researchers, and other health professionals), this data collection provided a broad enough topic that they could all relate to whilst still offering substantial and relevant teaching opportunities. He says the data collection was also easy for students to use quickly, an important feature for a time-limited 10-week course.
A major focus of the course is teaching grounded theory, a methodology that involves working backward from data collection to theory. Students in Martin’s class got experience in the first stage of grounded theory by selecting and coding interviews from the Mothers and Daughters data collection based on grounded theory principles. Their coding was then used later as the course introduced more advanced concepts. Martin noted that when students have to deal directly with a real data collection, it reinforces just how challenging doing this type of analysis can be.
Because of these challnges, Martin has moved from using the data in assessment to introducing it earlier in the course in order to introduce and illustrate the concepts. To facilitate this, he developed additional materials to guide students through the interviews, including a glossary of Scottish colloquialisms to help students through potentially unfamiliar language. He feels this earlier introduction helps students connect with the data more readily and eliminates problems of assessing a very subjective methodology.
He has been happy with his students’ response and plans to continue using this UK Data Service data collection in his course.