NUR 608 Module 4 Final Individual Reflection Example

From Insider to Instrument: A Final Reflection on My Role and Learning in a Qualitative Methods Seminar

Student Name

Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, Arizona State University

NUR 608: Qualitative Research Design and Methods

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

From Insider to Instrument: A Final Reflection on My Role and Learning in a Qualitative Methods Seminar

My Role in the Seminar

I came to this seminar as the only student in my cohort planning a qualitative dissertation, and I expected to be a listener. Instead, my role became that of a translator between clinical and methodological language. When I led the week on interpretive description, I brought a case from my own practice, a night when I escalated care for a patient by calling a tele-ICU nurse, and asked the group how each methodology we had read would study it. The discussion that followed was the most useful of the term for me, because classmates from public health and education saw questions in the case that I, as the nurse involved, could not.

In other weeks my contributions were uneven. I spoke readily when readings touched clinical settings and less when we discussed philosophy of science, where I felt underprepared. I prepared for those weeks by writing one question in advance, which got me into the conversation even when I was unsure.

Individual Learning

The assignments built on one another in a way I did not expect. The foundations paper forced me to state ontological and epistemological assumptions that I had been using without naming, the groundwork our text treats as the start of any design (Green & Thorogood, 2018). The observation exercise showed me what those assumptions do in practice: my nursing training decided what I wrote down. The final paper asked me to design for that, with a reflexive journal, a peer debriefer and an audit trail. Across the three, my understanding of rigor changed from a checklist of procedures to an account of how I, as the instrument of the research, will make my influence visible, much as interpretive description asks (Thorne, 2016).

Group Learning

Our small group met five times to compare observation notes and plans. The most important lesson came from comparison: three of us observed similar public settings and produced accounts so different that we could each predict the others' professions from their notes. Group work also improved my writing. A classmate's comment that my research question read like a hypothesis led me to rewrite it around experience rather than factors, which became the central revision in my final paper.

An Area for Improvement

I need to read more widely in qualitative traditions beyond the one I chose. I reached for interpretive description early, partly because it was designed by a nurse for nursing questions, and I read less deeply in grounded theory and phenomenology. Understanding why I rejected them, and not only why I chose my approach, would make my methodological argument stronger.

Areas of Great Growth

First, writing description. My observation draft was full of interpretation, and learning to separate what I saw from what I concluded was the hardest and most useful skill I practiced. Second, arguing for a sample size. I began the term believing that qualitative studies "interview until saturation," and I end it able to justify a number with a concept such as information power and to explain why it may change (Malterud et al., 2016).

Areas for Future Focus or Study

I want to study three things next: interview techniques that elicit accounts of specific events, especially in clinical work where people default to general statements; ways to analyze data from small professional communities without exposing participants; and qualitative work within mixed methods designs, since my research on rural escalation may eventually need both.

Closing

I entered the seminar thinking of my clinical background as an advantage to protect. I leave thinking of it as a lens to examine, and I expect that habit to shape my dissertation and my teaching.

References

Green, J., & Thorogood, N. (2018). Qualitative methods for health research (4th ed.). SAGE.

Malterud, K., Siersma, V. D., & Guassora, A. D. (2016). Sample size in qualitative interview studies: Guided by information power. Qualitative Health Research, 26(13), 1753-1760. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732315617444

Thorne, S. (2016). Interpretive description: Qualitative research for applied practice (2nd ed.). Routledge.