Recording now available: QUAHRC Seminar: It takes time to develop interpretive depth in qualitative research

Watch the seminar recording below 

Seminar abstract

In a Commentary last November in the journal Nursing Inquiry (Birnbaum, 2022), Shira Birnbaum argued that the political economy of knowledge production in nursing today makes it increasingly difficult for students to do the kind of thoughtful, time- and labor-intensive qualitative research that produces meaningful interpretations and novel analytic insights. The editorial generated a robust response, reflecting what is evidently a widespread concern among doctoral-level educators. In this presentation, Shira elaborates on those ideas. She offers examples of concepts in qualitative inquiry which novice learners can find especially challenging, in part because they differ from the conventional patterns of thinking ingrained during clinical training. She also suggests a few instructional strategies that faculty may use to help emerging researchers build capacity for interpretative depth beyond simple code sorting and category labeling. Drawing from a book project currently in progress, this work speaks to growing interest across the health sciences in the pedagogy of qualitative inquiry. 

Speaker biography

Shira Birnbaum (PhD, RN) is a psychiatric nurse, educational theorist, and Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and the School of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. She teaches qualitative research methods to nursing science doctoral candidates, provides methodology consultations to hospital-based research teams, and mentors early-career faculty in scholarly writing development. Drawing from critical theory, psychoanalysis, and the sociology of education, her work focuses primarily on social processes of narrative-making and identity construction during teaching and learning. Her books include an ethnography of educational programming for justice-involved adolescents, a narrative analysis of the memoirs of child refugees in World War II, and a phenomenological study of gesture and intersubjectivity in nursing communication with psychiatric inpatients. The latter was American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year in 2017 in the psychiatric and mental health nursing category.