Qualitative Research in Music Education and the Arts

Catalog description

This course is designed to provide a basic overview of qualitative research methods for graduate students in music education or the arts. It is ideal for those who want to understand the purpose, design, and conduct of qualitative research from several traditions of qualitative inquiry including phenomenology, case study, ethnography, historical models, narrative, and grounded theory. With a focus on interviews and observations as key methods in qualitative research, this course will engage in the selection of gathered materials, the methods and practicalities of completing fieldwork, and multiple approaches to qualitative analysis. Students will develop an in-depth understanding of how to choose an appropriate approach given a specific research question and context and how to implement the approach to gather high-quality qualitative data. Students are guided through a mentored experience in which they design, conduct, analyze, and write a small-scale qualitative study.