Going Digital and Staying Qualitative: Some Alternative Strategies for Digitizing the Qualitative Research Process

Authors

  • David Brown University of Exeter

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-3.2.851

Keywords:

qualitative research process, digitization, digital convergence, CAQDAS, multimedia

Abstract

Qualitative research is rapidly changing as a result of the deployment of Information Technologies (IT). Practices that have taken decades to evolve are being redefined by contemporary computing power. Since the 1990s one of the buzzwords in the computing, communications and technology industries has been "Digital Convergence"—the digitizing of different media forms. Digitization is an ongoing phenomenon, constantly developing and evolving the way we communicate and interact—a product of reflexive modernity, but what does it mean for the qualitative research as a process and how might we make use of it? The paper responds to these questions by making some practical suggestions for digitized strategies and processes that qualitative researchers might draw on eclectically in order to express freely their own creative abilities, which in turn facilitates the opening up of new idiographic avenues for exploring and disseminating subjective experience. In so doing the paper juxtaposes the alternative manual nature of these strategies with other developments that are increasingly orientated towards semi-automated computerized data processing. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0202122

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Author Biography

David Brown, University of Exeter

David BROWN is a lecturer in Sport and Health Sciences. His research interests involve the qualitative sociological study of the changing body-self-society complex in the area of sport, health and exercise.

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Published

2002-05-31

How to Cite

Brown, D. (2002). Going Digital and Staying Qualitative: Some Alternative Strategies for Digitizing the Qualitative Research Process. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-3.2.851