Grounded Theory and Qualitative Methods

By consequence of the success of the first two Editions in Pisa (2016 and 2017), with the participation of about 120 students coming from all around the world, as well as of the 2018 Edition hold in Lithuania, with the involvement of the School's founders as teachers, the Department of Political Science of the University of Pisa is realizing the IV International Summer School on Grounded Theory and Qualitative Methods. The Summer School is an intensive 5-day course (with morning and afternoon sessions), where exercises and work groups alternate with lectures. Qualitative researchers often experience common problems such as getting lost after collecting and coding data, overlooking possibilities for developing their ideas, and producing disjointed and mundane reports. Grounded Theory methods help you expedite analyzing data and writing a report. This Summer School focuses on improving skills in using Grounded Theory strategies to help you increase the incisiveness, clarity, and creativity of your work. These school will help you retain the flexibility of Grounded Theory while furthering the conceptual depth and scope of your analysis. We will emphasize how to (1) develop and recognize powerful codes, (2) engage in comparative analysis, (3) strengthen your emergent conceptual categories, and (4) integrate these categories into a coherent and compelling report, (5) satisfy quality in qualitative analysis, (6) communicate your findings and (7) deal with CAQDAS to improve your analyses. We will also address the fit between Grounded Theory and Symbolic Interactionism and how the method and perspective complement each other. The Summer School best serves participants who are in the midst of a qualitative research project or have engaged in qualitative coding for an earlier study, whether or not it was a Grounded Theory study.  Qualitative reportage relies on art and science – image and analysis. Yet analysis does not stop when we move to drafting our reports. We will briefly discuss how to create an artful rendering of the participants’ work that increases the power of their analysis. We will also cover strategies for developing arguments, writing literature reviews and theoretical frameworks, and constructing abstracts, titles, and introductions.The Summer School hosts the most of internationally renowned scholars in the Grounded Theory – Qualitative Research traditions (the first Edition was opened by the lectures of Kathy Charmaz and David Altheide), and national teachers whose contribution is particularly relevant in the study of qualitative methods.

AIM

By participating in the International Summer School on Grounded Theory and Qualitative Methods, it’s possible to belong to a scientific community based on the continuous exchange and comparison between knowledge and experience: it is about an international group that, over the years, chose Pisa as an international reference point around the interactionist issues. The course is mainly devoted to introducing participants to Grounded Theory and Qualitative Methods with a practical approach and with the aim to giving answer to questions such as “how to do research”, “how to collect, analyze and interpret qualitative data”, “how to write a research report” basing the results on your findings, and using CAQDAS softwares as RQDA.The University of Pisa will acknowledge to each participants 6 ECTS.