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Workshops

The following workshops will be held during the conference. (See Program for times)

Educing Theory from Practice

Richard Baskerville, Curtin University of Technology and Georgia State University

Action research is an empirical research method with two purposes: (1) to solve an immediate practical problem, and (2) to develop new scientific knowledge. Action research projects sometimes succeed at the first, but fail at the second. The highly practical nature of action research sometimes leads to results that have little to contribute in terms of new scholarly knowledge. Although a difficult practical problem may have been resolved, academic publications will often reject reports of the results because the theoretical value is trivial. Action research that encounters difficulties in the attempts to employ existing theory in resolving an immediate practical problem is a more promising venue for developing new or enhanced theory. The most valuable venues for action research lie in the intractable problems of practice, problems that existing knowledge cannot seem to fix. Such intractable problems provide an ideal context for the discovery of new or enhanced theory within the action research process.

Introduction to NVivo7

Fiona Wiltshier (QSR International)

This one day introductory workshop will give participants both an opportunity to learn the tools NVivo 7 provides and to work with the software using sample data.
The workshop will offer a hands-on introduction where you will meet and try out some of the tools the software offers, followed by an opportunity to practice working with the tools to develop a project with provided data. The course is designed both for those beginning in NVivo and for those who have used previous versions of our software. No previous knowledge of the software is required but essential computer (PC) skills and basic understanding of qualitative data analysis is assumed. (Cost $350 - Minimum of 6 participants, Maximum of 12)

An Overview of the Repertory Grid Technique in Information Systems Research

Felix B Tan, AUT University, New Zealand
Peter Caputi, UoW

A cognitive approach to studying information systems (IS) in organizations is not new. However, no specific methodology has taken hold. The purpose of this workshop is to describe a technique that can be used for the study of cognition in information systems – The Repertory Grid Technique. This technique offers the potential to significantly enhance our understanding of how users, managers and IS professionals make sense of IT in their organizations.

At the end of the tutorial, participants should be able to: • demonstrate a basic understanding of Kelly’s (1955) Personal Construct Theory in which the RepGrid is grounded on, • demonstrate a clear understanding of issues they need to consider when employing the RepGrid, • basic introduction to how to analyse repertory grid, • apply the RepGrid in their own research.

Assessment Innovations Using NVivo 7 (two-hour workshop)

Daniel Kaczynski (University of Wisconsin)

This workshop is designed for dissertation supervisors and staff. Supervisors, staff, and examiners are increasingly assessing postgraduate student qualitative research which incorporates the use of qualitative data analysis software. It is the goal of this session to help supervisors and staff apply the software as an assessment tool to explore the possibilities and boundaries of data collected by postgraduate students. Techniques will be demonstrated on the use of software features to enhance dissertation design transparency and promote more rigorous practice. Participants unfamiliar with qualitative data analysis software are encouraged to attend an introductory training workshop in NVivo 7 prior to this workshop. (Two-hour workshop)

Qualitative techniques for knowledge construction

John Gammack (Griffith University)

This workshop is designed for PhD students, dissertation supervisors and staff. Modelling the entities, relationships and attributes in a domain of interest is a standard activity in systems development. Often this embodies positivistic assumptions, such as that these have an objective existence, with pre-existing correspondences and meaning given by the outside world.

A constructivist viewpoint suggests that the identification of entities and relationships, and their organisation into data or knowledge structures is done on the basis of personal meanings and understandings, which may or may not correspond to generally held social beliefs.

Modelling the understanding of individuals and groups is common, whether for system development, cognitive modelling or simply for analyst orientation to new domains of knowledge. Techniques for modelling of understanding in a domain are required, particularly when such domains do not have an established structure already. Organizing content for web pages, documents or other purposes provide some example areas.

The card sort method is an appropriate technique, which fits well with theories on contructivist thought, and it complements, for example, the repertory grid method. Introducing and practicing card sorting techniques to help identify and structure perceived among domain entities in ways meaningful for groups or key individuals is the aim of this workshop. (Two-hour workshop)

Social Networking for Research

Alison Ruth (Griffith University

Emerging technologies are enhancing the ways of charing information across geographic boundaries. Web sites such as Del.icio.us and CiteULike allow groups to share bookmarks and references (academic bookmarks). This two hour workshop will allow participants to investigate a range of social applications for sharing information, both public and confidential.

Workshop description: Testing the CAQDAS trail: using QSR software to support literature review and project scoping

Megan Woods (UTas)

This workshop focuses upon undertaking analysis of academic literature using QSR software to explore and define research opportunities and topics. The workshop will demonstrate how to use software features and functions to support various stages of the literature analysis process from developing a bibliographic database to reporting final conclusions. Application of these principles will be demonstrated with reference to N6, NVivo 2 and NVivo 7 to compare and contrast method implications of software program selection and highlight the issues for consideration when undertaking software-supported literature analysis.

Using Critical Discourse Analysis

Sue Nielsen (Griffith)

Much of the data collected in qualitative Information Systems research is in the form of discourse - written or spoken texts. However, the process of textual analysis and interpretation remains difficult to explain and justify. How do we get from the written or spoken word to a reasonable interpretation? Most approaches take our understanding of language for granted and pay little attention to the features of the text. Linguistic approaches on the other hand can be criticised for inadequacies in social analysis.

IS research is also increasingly interested in the role which discourse plays in shaping the activities and context of information systems development and use. This workshop will explore these two areas - how discourse relates to information systems work, and how we can analyse discourse, utilising Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to strike a balance between social analysis and linguistic analysis. Although any linguistic based approach may be viewed as off putting because of the complexity of the analytical frameworks, this workshop will show how the use of selected concepts can reveal interesting understandings of discourse and also provide a clear justification for the analysis and interpretation of textual data.

Participants can bring their own data for analysis or use examples provided in the workshop. The workshop leader has used CDA in an analysis of medical writing, a longitudinal study of IT work, and more recently in the Women in IT (WinIT) project.

Applying Conceptual Mapping Technique in Interpretive Studies

Dr. Shafiz Affendi Mohd Yusof (Universiti Utara Malaysia) shafiz@uum.edu.my

Conceptual mapping is an effective research technique in conducting interpretive studies as it facilitates the researchers to visualize the relationships between different concepts (Novak, 1991). Primarily, this technique offers a strategy to deal with the methodological challenges of qualitative research. For example, it can be applied when researchers need to take voluminous amounts of text based data and reduces that data to a manageable form without loosing the embedded meaning. By using concept map as knowledge graphs, it helps to present networks of concepts. Networks consist of nodes (points/vertices) and links (arcs/edges). Nodes represent concepts and links represent the relations between concepts. Researchers often use this technique when conducting qualitative data analysis by introducing multi-level concepts that helps to understand complex ideas.

In this workshop, first I plan to provide an overview of ‘Conceptual Mapping’ technique. I will also provide some examples of the applications that use this technique in Information System research. Then, I will also introduce a qualitative method called ‘interpretive studies.’ Finally, I will discuss the use of conceptual mapping when conducting analysis in interpretive studies. By learning this technique, participants will be provided with knowledge such as: • How to generate ideas (i.e. brain storming) • How to understand new concepts (i.e. building the concepts inductively from data) • How to design a complex structure (i.e. based on long texts/transcripts) • How to communicate complex ideas (i.e. writing the result)

Content Analysis and Atlas Ti

Dr. Norhayati Zakaria (Universiti Utara Malaysia) nzakar01@gmail.com

This workshop contains two parts. First, I intend to provide the participants with a basic introduction to content analysis as a qualitative research method. Content analysis is the manifest and latent content of a body of communicated material through classification, tabulation, and evaluation of its key symbols and themes to ascertain its meaning and probable effect (Krippendorf, 2004). Second, this workshop will also offer a first-hand experience through a demonstration on how to use a computer assisted qualitative data analysis software tool called Atlas Ti (version 7) to conduct content analysis. Some of the skills that will be taught are how to create a project –Hermeneutic unit (HU), assign primary documents (PDs) and upload PDs, create quotations and assign codes, retrieve coded data segments, write memos, and display all objects based on hierarchy

At the end of the CONTENT ANALYSIS workshop, participants will benefit from such knowledge: • Understand the use and rationale of using content analysis as a research method • Understand and familiar with the basic functions of Atlas Ti • Apply Atlas Ti to their own data set • Train coders to use Atlas Ti