Teaching Insight: From Classroom to Research in Practice

By Zack Zimbalist

One of the primary goals of Empirical Research Methods II is to provide students with the tools to conduct rigorous qualitative research. Students learn about four qualitative methods - interviews, focus groups, observational studies, and content and discourse analysis - and carry out applied research projects using at least three of them. These projects require careful planning and execution and thus make up 45 percent of the overall course grade.

In what follows, I share a few impressions drawn from grading hundreds of these projects over three semesters. Still, I would be remiss here not to emphasize that these are my own biased views rooted in various aspects of my positionality.

With that caveat firmly in place, away we go:

• Unsurprisingly, students enjoy choosing research questions that personally interest them; when topics are selected based on intrinsic motivation, students take them up with great enthusiasm. For me, this has been one of the most rewarding parts of teaching this course: seeing students’ passion for conducting research into the social, academic, environmental, and professional challenges that engage and captivate them.

• Students learn by doing research. Beyond coming up with a meaningful research question, it is especially gratifying to see students develop their skills in designing and implementing applied research projects. More specifically, they learn to write better interview and focus group questions; sharpen their interviewing, moderating, coding, and observational skills; and become more reflexive about their own biases and positionality.

• Students enjoy learning with and from their peers. While the research projects are individual assignments, many students choose to conduct interviews and focus groups with fellow students. This is a natural choice—our students are in the same WUPOL major, share similar interests, and have a level of comfort built through shared experiences as young adults. As a teacher, I have enjoyed seeing students readily exchange ideas, respectfully disagree, and challenge each other in their thinking.  

While it is only an introductory course, I am excited to see many students’ eagerness to further develop and apply their qualitative research skills in their personal and professional lives.

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