21 February 2022

HiT566 | Welcome to my “Qualitative Research Methods” class

Welcome to my “Qualitative Research Methods” class.

During your undergraduate studies, you must have taken many courses on research methodology. Regardless of the title, it is extremely likely that you took a technique course in the fall semester that covered quantitative research methods or that covered both quantitative and qualitative research methods in part. In contrast to these, we will explore qualitative research methods, patterns, and techniques in this course, which attempt to deeply comprehend and describe the world outside of quantitative data. These methods, designs and techniques have been employed more frequently in articles, books, and theses in recent years. This is what we hope to accomplish, both conceptually and practically…

We will discuss qualitative research methodologies in this course over case study, phenomenology, ground theory, and narrative patterns. We’ll talk about how to present and write a qualitative study, as well as data collection and analysis techniques in a qualitative research. Within the scope of this course, you will be able to use the MaxQDA software, evaluate qualitative data, and create a qualitative research report or an article.

My goal


In this class, I want to give the students knowledge about qualitative research techniques that they can find useful for their master’s theses research in the near future. My long-term goal is to provide them with the fundamental skills necessary to complete their academic studies by employing qualitative research methods.

When you complete this course successfully


  • You will know the differences between quantitative and qualitative research methods.
  • You will know with which methods and techniques you can conduct a research that you intend to do, and if you are to follow a qualitative method, you will know what kind of pattern and what kind of data collection and analysis technique you can conduct this research.
  • You will be able to comprehend the fundamentals of MaxQDA, one of the qualitative research programs, and utilize it to do analyses and conduct research.
  • You will be able to write a report based on your study.

It is crucial to pose the following specific question: Is Prof. Cıngı the suitable person to teach this course?


During my graduate school, I completed research techniques courses, but largely owing to our inability to grasp the relevance of the subject, our laziness, and the absence of methodologies used by our teachers who teach this course, I concluded my PhD thesis by looking at it and saying how others accomplished it.

Can you believe it, not a master’s degree, but a doctorate…

When I decided to pursue academic studies, I recognized that in order to conduct a high-quality academic study, I needed to be well-versed in methodology.

Without ontology and epistemology, there can be no technique. I consequently developed an obsession with research methods and have spent the last five years trying to study as many books and papers as I can find on the topic.

I spent as much time and effort as I could attending numerous online and old-school workshops and seminars about the methodology. In these workshops, Professor Aylin Yonca Gençoğlu contributed a lot to me. Thanks her.

Consequently, I personally saw that it was not possible and should not be possible to produce quality academic publications without knowing the right method, and I tried to improve myself in methodology. I conducted grounded theory and phenomenology studies. These studies were applauded at symposiums, appreciated by referees and published in academic journals. I supervised both qualitative and quantitative dissertations and acted as referees in qualified journals in the SSCI, Scopus and TRDizin index.

Of certainly, my activities do not demonstrate that I am an excellent academician. I regard myself as a method student. Full throttle to student education, but at least I can talk about the mixed research technique, and we can talk about it together. Of course, it would be ideal if John Creswell or Vicki Plano Clark attended your class, but I’m here, and I’ve dealt with big blunders and failures. I tell you that I will do all in my power to prevent you from making the same mistakes that I did.

How can we keep in touch?


You can contact me by sending an e-mail during our course process, via social media or by using one of the most convenient ways on the “Contact” page above. Also, I make some announcements on my Instagram profile, so you should keep an eye on that.

How will I teach the course and which studies will we read?


I will ask you to read extensively beginning with our first lesson. I will always be the one to teach the lessons. I will never assign you a topic and then expect you to present it. However, before each class, we will go over the books/sections you read.

We will complete our lesson throughout class. I will request that you write a thesis proposal. You will need to work hard outside of class hours to do this. Then I’ll ask you to defend that plan in the form of a presentation.

As we mentioned above, we will need MaxQDA software to do the analysis and a computer to run them.

You can download the software via the links below:

MaxQDA

(https://www.maxqda.com/homepage-1) (This software is paid, so we can only install a 14 days trial version.

To sum it up, you are sure to spend a lot of energy in this lesson. Keep the energy part in mind when choosing this course, if you are not sure about your energy, I definitely do not recommend you to choose this course.

What does our course contain?

You can see the course outline here.

What do we have in our reference list to read?

You can see the studies that will be our references here.

For the study proposal, we will take the Erciyes University Social Sciences Institute thesis writing guide as a basis. You can download and review the guide here.

How will we do the exam and score it?


Good news, no exams 🙂 Bad news, tough research awaits you. You will only get the final grade. The score will be determined by the quality of your study proposal. If the nature of your work is a potential recommendation for any of the following indexes, you will receive the score of that index:

SSCI: 100
ESCI: 90
TRDizin: 85
Other peer reviewed journals: 75

Featured image source: People photo created by freepik – www.freepik.com

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Mustafa Cıngı

Hi! Thank you for reading my posts. If you want to have more information about me, you can click "ABOUT ME" above, at the topmost of the site. Keep walking and enjoy the show :)

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