That Time I Met Qualitative Research
My undergraduate research was quantitative. My master’s research was quantitative. When I decided to pursue my PhD, I assumed that my research would be quantitative as well. Well, you know what happens when you assume, right?
To pursue your PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, you must take certain courses. Some of them are statistics. I took my two stats classes my first semester back. My thought process was twofold:
1. The classes go hand-in-hand, and as someone who hasn’t taken a stats class in a while, I would benefit from the reinforcement and
2. Let’s just get them over with 😊
While I studied hard, utilized my professor’s office hours and got my A and B+, I also learned that quantitative research wasn’t my heart’s passion. It was the numbers! I could run them, sure. I could understand the significance of them, and I could get excited. What I didn’t enjoy was the idea of reducing a human being’s lived experience down to a single digit. It just didn’t fit my personality. It didn’t leave my research heart feeling fulfilled.
That came a few semesters later when I had the pleasure of taking a qualitative research class. Please do understand that by this point, my advisor and I knew that qualitative research was the right path for my dissertation, and the groundwork had already been laid for my topic. Taking the course just reinforced that I was following the right path:
1. I got to ask the questions that I wanted to, and I got to listen to people talk about themselves.
2. The questions create a narrative. It’s a story. A personal story. And depending on what you’re trying to achieve through the research, it might be a personal story that has elements shared by many people. Connections.
3. I have a degree in English, and I spend the first few years of my professional life writing for a living, so this is me going back to those roots.
To me, what I love about qualitative research is also so much what I love about being an Occupational Therapist. Sure, I come in with my questions, my evaluation, my list of items that I need to check off and that we need to do. At the heart of my OT approach, though, is making connections with my patients. If we aren’t coming together as a unit—OT and patient, or researcher and participant—truly, nothing is going to happen. Success is null. It’s all about the connection.