Teaching
Alison Ledger is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds’ medical school, and is also a music therapist. Previously she held a position at the University of Limerick, Ireland where she taught the course “Qualitative Methods in Healthcare Research”. She used the qualitative data collection, ‘Being a Doctor: a Sociological Analysis’, for her course and chose this study because it “was also along the lines of my current research, so it was something that I could benefit from reading as well.”
The course participants were mostly Ph.D. students from a variety of academic backgrounds such as education, nursing and therapy.
According to Ledger, one of the objectives of the course was to use the arts in research:
“It was about using things like music, drama, dance, poetry, [and] visual arts. I was looking to prepare some sort of interactive activity for participants and an activity where participants could try out diverse research methods and try to use the arts as a form of analysis.”
Choosing a single transcript from a set of fifty in the collection, Ledger encouraged participants to respond to the original research question in an artistic way. As she explained the approach and its results were both interesting and original:
“I gave the participants original transcripts for them to read through…I also gave them the original research question and asked them to read through the question and make a sort of artistic response to that transcript. It work[ed] really well. The participants wrote poetry; one participant wrote a song in response to the transcript. I felt that participants had the experience of doing…art based research and they went away [with] a greater interest in art based research methods.”
Ledger also mentioned that because of the rich material available in the interview transcripts students found it quite easy to develop their artistic response. She noted that one of the benefits of using real data like this is that: “you get see the inflections of real speech, you can get a greater sense of some of the experience from the way that they talk, the phrases that they use, the language… I guess it’s more real.”
Among other advantages, Ledger indicated that,
“participants got a good sense of what an interview transcript might be like …it really demonstrated how in qualitative research you can have lots of different perspectives on the data. [The] different participants in the workshop could get different things that stood out to them based on their own experience and their own background which I think was a really important lesson for the doctoral students to learn.”
Ledger also mentioned that ethical concerns when reusing data are a priority. A real advantage of using the UK Data Service was that:
“there was data there that the researchers had acquired permission to use so I felt quite comfortable using that data…especially in the area of health where you might be dealing with very sensitive topics and its quite difficult to use examples if people haven’t given you permission”.