Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-24T14:53:48.569Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Qualitative Methods for Computing Education

from Part II - Foundations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2019

By
Josh Tenenberg
Edited by
Sally A. Fincher  and
Anthony V. Robins
Sally A. Fincher
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
Anthony V. Robins
Affiliation:
University of Otago, New Zealand
Get access

Summary

Qualitative research methods have developed over several decades within disciplines in which human thinking, being, consciousness and sociality are the objects of study. Qualitative methods include in-depth interviews, focus groups, observation, content analysis, and life histories among dozens of others. This chapter provides a broad overview of qualitative methods, drawing on examples from across the human sciences for describing the different parts common to qualitative research studies: title, problem formulation and research questions, context and sampling, data collection, data analysis, and reporting the results. This broad discussion is interleaved with a detailed examination of a single qualitative research study drawn from the CEd literature so as to make visible how the particulars of a qualitative study are situated within the larger space of methodological possibility available to a qualitative researcher and given coherence. Methods are elaborated not simply as technique, but as having an inherent logic, where the epistemological assumptions of the methods are discussed to provide an understanding of the kinds of inferences and claims that result from them.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research , pp. 173 - 207
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Atkinson, P., & Hammerseley, M. (1994). Ethnography and participant observation. In Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 248–261). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Barker, L., Garvin-Doxas, K., & Jackson, M. (2002). Defensive climate in the computer science classroom. In Proceedings of the 33rd SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 43–47). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Bonar, J., & Soloway, E. (1983). Uncovering principles of novice programming. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL ‘83) (pp. 10–13). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Bonar, J., & Soloway, E. (1985). Preprogramming knowledge: A major source of misconceptions in novice programmers. Human–Computer Interaction, 1, 133–161.Google Scholar
Booth, S. A. (1992). Learning to Program: A Phenomenographic Perspective (doctoral thesis). Acta Universitatis Gothobergensis.Google Scholar
Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., & Williams, J. M. (2008). The Craft of Research, 3rd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. (1992). The practice of reflexive sociology (the Paris Workshop). In Bourdieu, P. & Wacquant, L. J. D. (Eds.), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (pp. 216–260). Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Boustedt, J. (2012). Students’ different understandings of class diagrams. Computer Science Education, 22(1), 29–62.Google Scholar
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2011). Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.Google Scholar
Brennan, K., & Resnick, M. (2012). New frameworks for studying and assessing the development of computational thinking. In Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (pp 1–25). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.Google Scholar
Brown, A. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2), 141–178.Google Scholar
Budgeon, S. (2013). The dynamics of gender hegemony: Femininities, masculinities and social change. Sociology, 48(2), 317–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Busjahn, T., Schulte, C., Sharif, B., Simon, , Begel, , Hansen, A., , M., … Antropova, M. (2014). Eye tracking in computing education. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER ‘14) (pp. 3–10). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Cherrington, S., & Loveridge, J. (2014). Using video to promote early childhood teachers’ thinking and reflection. Teaching and Teacher Education, 41, 42–51.Google Scholar
Cole, E. R. (2009). Intersectionality and research in psychology. American Psychologist, 64, 170–180.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Computer History Museum (n.d.). Oral History Collection. Retrieved from www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/Google Scholar
Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (1990). Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons and evaluative criteria. Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, 19(6), 418–427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drescher, J. (2007). From bisexuality to intersexuality: Rethinking gender categories. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 43(1), 204–228.Google Scholar
Duchowski, A. (2007). Eye Tracking Methodology: Theory and Practice, 2nd edn. London, UK: Springer-Verlag London Ltd.Google Scholar
Dziallas, S., & Fincher, S. (2016). Aspects of graduateness in computing students’ narratives. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER ‘16) (pp. 181–190). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Eckerdal, A., & Thuné, M. (2005). Novice Java progammers’ conceptions of “object” and “class”, and variation theory. SIGCSE Bulletin, 37(3), 89–93.Google Scholar
Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1993). Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data (Revised edn.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Gee, J. P. (2000). Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 25, 99–125.Google Scholar
Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gee, J. P. (2018). Introducing Discourse Analysis: From Grammar to Society. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Goldman, R., Pea, R., Barron, B., & Derry, S. J. (Eds.) (2007). Video Research in the Learning Sciences. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1489–1522.Google Scholar
Goodwin, C., & Heritage, J. (1990). Conversation analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 283–307.Google Scholar
Greene, J. (2013). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. New York, NY: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Harper, D. A. (1987). Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Harper, D. A. (2002). Talking about pictures: A case for photo elicitation. Visual Studies, 17(1), 13–26.Google Scholar
Harreveld, B., Danaker, M., Lawson, C., Knight, B. A., & Busch, G. (Eds.) (2016). Constructing Methodology for Qualitative Research. London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Heath, C. (2010). Video in Qualitative Research: Analysing Social Interaction in Everyday Life. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Hennink, M., Hutter, I., & Bailey, A. (2011). Qualitative Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.Google Scholar
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., … Tracer, D. (2005). “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 795–855.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61–135.Google Scholar
Hitchens, M., & Lister, R. (2009). A focus group study of student attitudes to lectures. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Australasian Conference on Computing Education (ACE ‘09) (pp. 93–100). Darlinghurst, Australia: Australian Computer Society.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jordan, B. (1993). Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States, 4th edn. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.Google Scholar
Knobelsdorf, M. (2011). Biographische Lern- und Bildungsprozesse im Handlungskontext der Computernutzung (Biographical Learning and Educational Processes in the Context of Computer Experiences) (PhD thesis). Freie Universität Berlin.Google Scholar
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kvale, S. (1996). InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.Google Scholar
Lewis, C. (2012). The importance of students’ attention to program state: A case study of debugging behavior. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual International Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER ‘12) (pp. 127–134). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Liberman, N., Ben-David Kolikant, Y., & Beeri, C. (2009). In-service teachers learning of a new paradigm: A case study. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Computing Education Research Workshop (ICER ‘09) (pp. 43–50). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Lieberman, M. D. (2013). Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. New York: Crown Publishers.Google Scholar
Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic Inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luria, A. L. (1976). Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Madley, B. (2016). American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Margolis, J. (2008). Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Marton, F. (1981). Phenomenography – Describing conceptions of the world around us. Instructional Science, 10, 177–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marwick, A. E. (2010). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Self-branding in Web 2.0 (PhD thesis). New York University.Google Scholar
McCambridge, J., Witton, J., & Elbourne, D. R. (2014). Systematic review of the Hawthorne effect: New concepts are needed to study research participation effects. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 67(3), 267–277.Google Scholar
McDermott, R. P. (1993). The acquisition of a child by a learning disability. In Chaiklin, S. & Lave, J. (Eds.), Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context (pp. 60–70). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McDermott, R. P., Gospodinoff, K., & Aron, J. (1978). Criteria for an ethnographically adequate description of concerted activities and their contexts. Semiotica, 24(3/4), 245–275.Google Scholar
Mehan, H. (1979). Learning Lessons: Social Organization in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mishler, E. G. (1986). Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T. (Ed.) (1980). On Narrative. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 20(3), 336–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, K. M., Ivarsson, J., & Lymer, G. (2012). Embodied reasoning in architectural critique. Design Studies, 33, 530–556.Google Scholar
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods, 3rd edn. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Pew Research Center (2014). One-in-four Native Americans and Alaska Natives are living in poverty. Retrieved from www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/13/1-in-4-native-americans-and-alaska-natives-are-living-in-poverty/Google Scholar
Pink, S. (2013). Doing Visual Ethnography, 3rd edn. London, UK: SAGE.Google Scholar
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In Atkinson, J. M. & Heritage, J. (Eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 57–101). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ragin, C. C. (1987). The Comparative Method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.Google Scholar
Ritchie, D. A. (2015). Doing Oral History, 3rd edn. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In Rosch, E. & Lloyd, B. B. (Eds.), Cognition and Categorization (pp. 27–48). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Roth, W.-M. (2013). What More in/for Science Education: An Ethnomethodological Perspective. Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers.Google Scholar
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735.Google Scholar
Samuels, G. M., & Ross-Sheriff, F. (2008). Identity, oppression, and power. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, 23(1), 5–9.Google Scholar
Scanniello, G., Romano, S., Fucci, D., Turhan, B., & Juristo, N. (2016). Students’ and professionals’ perceptions of test-driven development: A focus group study. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 1422–1427). New York: ACM.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Schulte, C., & Knobelsdorf, M. (2007). Attitudes towards computer science–computing experiences as a starting point and barrier to computer science. In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Computing Education Research (ICER ‘07) (pp. 27–38). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Schutz, A. (1967). Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, R. A. (1969). The Making of Blind Men: A Study of Adult Socialization. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Searle, K. A., & Kafai, Y. B. (2015). Boys’ needlework: Understanding gendered and indigenous perspectives on computing and crafting with electronic textiles. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual International Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER ‘15) (pp. 31–39). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Shinohara, K., & Tenenberg, J. (2009). A blind person’s interactions with technology. Communications of the ACM, 52(8), 58–66.Google Scholar
Socha, D., Adams, R., Franznick, K., Roth, W.-M., Sullivan, K., Tenenberg, J., & Walter, S. (2016). Wide-field ethnography: Studying software engineering in 2025 and beyond. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE ‘16) (pp. 797–802). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
Socha, D., & Tenenberg, J. (2013). Sketching software in the wild. In Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013) (pp. 1237–1240). New York: IEEE.Google Scholar
Spohrer, J. C., & Soloway, E. (1989). Novice mistakes: Are the folk wisdoms correct? In Spohrer, J. C. & Soloway, E. (Eds.), Studying the Novice Programmer (pp. 401–416). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.Google Scholar
Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant Observation. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.Google Scholar
Stannard, D. E. (1992). American Holocaust. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stern, P. C., Dietz, T., Dolšak, N., Ostrom, E., & Stonich, S. (2002). Knowledge and questions after 15 years of research. In Ostrom, E., Dietz, T., Dolšak, N., Stern, P. C., Stonich, S., & Weber, E. U. (Eds.), The Drama of the Commons (pp. 445–489). Washington, DC: National Academy Press.Google Scholar
Stets, J. E., & Burke, P. J. (2000). Identity theory and social identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, 63(3), 224–237.Google Scholar
Stewart, D. W., Shamdasani, P. N., & Rook, D. W. (2007). Focus Groups: Theory and Practice, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.Google Scholar
Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human–Machine Communication. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tannen, D. (1989). Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tenenberg, J., Fincher, S., Blaha, K., Bouvier, D. J., Chen, T.-Y., Chinn, D., … VanDeGrift, T. (2005). Students designing software: A multi-national, multi-institutional study. Informatics in Education, 4(1), 143–162.Google Scholar
Tenenberg, J., Roth, W.-M., Chinn, D., Jornet, A., Socha, D., & Walter, S. (2018). More than the code: Learning rules of rejection in writing programs. Communications of the ACM, 61(5), 66–71.Google Scholar
Toombs, A. L., Bardzell, S., & Bardzell, J. (2015). The proper care and feeding of hackerspaces: Care ethics and cultures of making. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘15) (pp. 629–638). New York: ACM.Google Scholar
United States Census Bureau (2016). Facts for Features: American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month: November 2016. Retrieved from www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2016/cb16-ff22.htmlGoogle Scholar
United States Department of Agriculture (n.d.). National School Lunch Program. Retrieved from www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/cn/NSLPFactSheet.pdfGoogle Scholar
US Department of the Interior Indian Affairs (n.d.). Frequently Asked Questions. Retrieved from www.bia.gov/frequently-asked-questionsGoogle Scholar
Vygotsky, L., edited by Cole, M., John-Steiner, V., Scribner, S., & Souberman, E. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Vygotsky, L. (1981). The genesis of higher mental functions. In Wertsch, J. (Ed.), The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology (pp. 144–188). Armonk, NY: Sharpe.Google Scholar
Whyte, W. H. (1980). The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. New York, NY: Project for Public Spaces.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, L., edited by Hacker, P., & Schulte, J. (2009). Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition. (translated by Anscombe G., Hacker P., & Schulte J.) Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Yin, R. K. (2003). Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×