Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
This manual is the result of the work undertaken by a range of people. It has evolved as a result of countless e-mail exchanges, work put in over long office hours and late nights, summer days spent in rooms with no air conditioning and the benefit of having been rolled out in four countries, across two continents. We would like to thank the many workshop participants in India, Kenya, Ghana and Pakistan (the sequence in which this training was undertaken), who engaged with us, and over the course of the workshops shared our zeal for qualitative research, but more importantly, challenged us to articulate our assumptions about research and reflect on our skills.
The manual has emerged from RECOUP (the Research Consortium on Outcomes of Education for the Poor) and we acknowledge the funding by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) that has made this work possible. We are grateful to many members of the RECOUP team. In India we worked with Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD, http://www.cordindia.com/) led by Claire Noronha. In Kenya we worked with colleagues at Kenyatta University, led by Dr. Fatuma Chege. In Ghana the team at Associates for Change (http://www.associatesforchange.org/) was led by Dr. Leslie Casley-Hayford, and in Pakistan Feyza Bhatti led the team at the Mahbub Ul Haq Human Development Centre (MHHDC, http://www.mhhdc.org/). The manual has also benefited from feedback from a training programme run for SAHAYOG (http://www.sahayogindia.org/) and the Centre for Health and Social Justice, India.
We would also like to thank members of the RECOUP teams. At the University of Cambridge, Professor Madeleine Arnot played a major role in initiating the training manual and this online version has benefited greatly from her insights and experience. She developed the session on semi-structured interviews (resources from which have been used in this online version) and we used some of her material for the session on data analysis. She also played a central role in three of the workshops. Dr. Shailaja Fennell was a key member of the team, especially in Ghana and Kenya; and Professor Christopher Colclough provided overall support and guidance. At the University of Edinburgh, Professor Patricia Jeffery helped particularly with the trainings carried out in India. Professor Martyn Rouse, who is now based at the University of Aberdeen was also actively involved in the initial training in India. We would also like to acknowledge the invaluable inputs of Dr. Sharlene Swartz (now at the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa) in the session on using visual images in research.
Turning the manual from a hard copy that made sense to us (but not always to anyone else), and that we changed as we went along, into an electronic copy that tries to be clear, consistent and comprehensive, has taken more time and effort than we expected: we are immensely grateful to Björn Haßler and Arathi Sriprakash for their good humour and enthusiasm in making this possible.
Nidhi Singal, University of Cambridge
Roger Jeffery, University of Edinburgh
September 2008
Singal, N., and Jeffery, R. (2008). Qualitative Research Skills Workshop: A Facilitator's Reference Manual, http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/RECOUP, Cambridge: RECOUP (Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes and Poverty, http://recoup.educ.cam.ac.uk/). CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. (original page)
