Introduction In October, Deloitte agreed to issue a partial refund to the Australian government after serious flaws were uncovered in a $440,000 report evaluating the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR)'s compliance framework. The report,...
Introduction Strong research design isn’t just about avoiding mistakes. It’s about actively building coherence, originality, and credibility. Once you’ve addressed common pitfalls, the next step is strengthening the elements that make your project stand out. In...
Introduction Too many researchers discover problems with their research design late in the process—at the ethics stage, during peer review, or even in the viva. The most common issue is not a lack of effort or ambition, but misalignment. Coherence is the golden thread...
Once you understand what shapes your coding, your theoretical perspective, methodology, and analytic goals, the next challenge is often how to make it work in practice. Qualitative coding is about staying methodologically clear while thinking, noticing, interpreting,...
If you're doing qualitative research, you're probably coding your data. But coding isn't just a step you complete before the “real” analysis begins — it is a fundamental part of the analysis. It’s where you begin to make sense of what participants are saying, how...
In ChatGPT, each conversation is stored as a thread — a sequence of messages that you can name, revisit, and build upon. Most people treat threads as disposable: start a new chat, ask a question, close the window. This works for quick, one-off tasks, but it doesn’t...
AI tools like ChatGPT are becoming increasingly woven into the everyday workflows of qualitative researchers. From helping draft interview guides to summarising literature, structuring results, or designing reflexive questions, AI can support a wide range of...
In qualitative research, your question isn’t just a starting point—it’s a commitment.It commits you to a way of seeing, a way of asking, and a way of interpreting. It also commits you to particular layers of meaning: whether your focus is on the inner world, the...
In qualitative research, we’re not just asking what happens—we’re asking how people make sense of what happens, and how we can interpret people’s experience with respect to the broader social context. To do this well, we need to understand that meaning is not...
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