Each year UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal, and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.
Rigorous Data Analysis: Beyond “Anything Goes” is a recent release from UVic education professor Wolff-Michael Roth.
About the Book
In qualitative research, one can often hear the statement that research results are just (social) constructions. In criminal cases and in court hearings, we tend to expect that the true sequence of events has to be found rather than just any story. Here, Wolff-Michael Roth shows that qualitative social research can be conducted in the manner of police work or court proceedings. He does so by exhibiting how short pieces of transcriptions can be approached to uncover who, when, where, and how participated, what kind of social situation produced the transcription, and so on without any background knowledge other than that talk itself. Commenting on transcriptions of a researcher in the course of doing rigorous data analysis, readers learn doing ethnographically adequate accounts and critical institutional ethnography “at the elbow” of an experienced practitioners. Further topics include the role of turn sequences, the ethnomethods of knowledge-power and institutional relations, the documentary method of interpretation, and time-sensitive social analysis.
About the Author
Wolff-Michael Roth is Lansdowne Professor in Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Victoria’s faculty of education. He has contributed to numerous fields of research: learning science in learning communities, coteaching, authentic school science education, cultural-historical activity theory, social studies of science, gesture studies, qualitative research methods, embodied cognition, situated cognition, and the role of language in learning science and mathematics. Visit his website here.
