Summary Week 7

This week students have been transcribing and coding their qualitative data. It is interesting to see how they approach this task for the first time. Even though we provided instructions, some have had a hard time understanding that you must have every word the person utters in the transcript. You need everything there in order to begin understanding the meaning of what they have said. It is not what the researcher thinks they mean – you want to get at what they actually said.

We made the offer for any students that are interested, of preparing a poster using some of the data for the Walden winter research symposium. So far, five students have expressed an interest. I think it is terrific opportunity to put together some data and see what the process is like.

I would like to publically thank Dr. Sickel for her help in the last two weeks! Dr. Giles and I have been teaching at Walden’s new virtual residency – which required considerably more time than we anticipated. Dr. Sickel kindly handled a lot of the classroom work for us, thus reducing our stress considerably. I think the virtual residency has a lot of potential, but doing anything for the first time ever – can be frustrating. We found many bugs and it required some modification in teaching techniques from the original plan. We are scheduled to teach at the next virtual residency in two weeks, hopefully this one will go smoother.

Lee Stadtlander