Teaching
Ester Ehiyazaryan teaches Qualitative Research Methods to students in the MA programme in Education, Innovation and Enterprise and the BA programme in Early Childhood Studies at Doncaster College. During the previous academic year she started integrating qualitative and quantitative data collections that fit into her students’ degree curricula to help them develop skills in research methodology.
Ehiyazaryan is responsible for delivering SPSS and NVivo training to students across education, sociology and criminology. With the criminology students she has used the qualitative UK Data Service data collection Doing Youth Justice: Analysing Risk and Need Assessments in Youth Justice Practice. She elaborates on how she worked with the data:
“With the youth justice study I selected a few transcripts from interviews with magistrates, a few transcripts with young offenders and a few transcripts from interviews with youth workers. So they had a range of different perspectives on the same research topic. We worked with Nvivo, the qualitative data analysis tool, and I asked students to import the transcripts to Nvivo and analyse them within a grounded theory approach. [They had to] look across the transcripts, across the different points of view, and start coding with open coding and then try to move towards axial coding.”
“This is real-world data,” she notes. “[Students] do some basic collection themselves in their research, but there is no way they could possibly collect the scope of data that you have in those datasets.”
Ehiyazaryan makes clear that using these data collections allows students to work with a large quantity of relevant information that helps them stay engaged and enthusiastic about analysing it. She observes that students are interested in the content and thus engage well when they feel they are working with relevant data. “These studies have national importance so [the module] puts students to work with data which influences policy,” she explains.
Following her positive experience reusing data collections for teaching, she now plans to integrate the UK Data Service longitudinal datasets The Millennium Cohort Study and Growing Up in Scotland into the BA in Early Childhood Studies programme. She also plans to develop module handbooks to accompany the data.