Marianne Woodside

“I Tell You, It’s a Journey, Isn’t It?” Understanding Collaborative Meaning Making in Qualitative Research

While collaboration is common in qualitative inquiry, few studies examine the collaborative process in detail. In our study, we adopt an interpretive, reflexive stance to explore our process as a collaborative qualitative research team. We analyzed transcripts of eight research meetings for aspects and assumptions underlying our collaboration. Three overarching aspects of our process emerged from the analysis: position-taking, meaning making, and producing. We adopt a learning stance in our work together and make meaning through an iterative, dialogic process that foregrounds and backgrounds key elements of the research process. While some scholars have questioned whether truly collaborative research ever occurs among peers, we illustrate through our findings what such a process can look like.

This Course is Helping Us All Arrive at New Viewpoints, Isn't It? Making Meaning Through Dialogue in a Blended Environment

This qualitative study explores how individuals made meaning of their life history experiences while in dialogue with others in an online learning group that was part of a graduate course on adult development. All online discussion forum postings exchanged by the group over the 3-week assignment period were downloaded and analyzed through phenomenological thematic analysis and discourse analysis. Our goal was to better understand both what happened in this online dialogue and how it took place. Four aspects of how the participants made meaning through dialogue emerged: noticing, reinterpreting, theorizing, and questioning assumptions, each with specific speech acts. These findings expand our understandings of how individuals transform meaning through narrative and dialogue. The identification of specific aspects of meaning making and their related speech acts make a contribution to the literature on online dialogue, the power of restorying, critical reflection in public meaning making, and transformative group learning.

Understanding Informal Group Learning in Online Communities Through Discourse Analysis

Since informal learning occurs outside of formal learning environments, describing informal learning and how it takes place can be a challenge for researchers. Past studies have typically oriented to informal learning as an individual, reflective process that can best be understood through the learners’ retrospective accounts about their experiences. Although reports on the individual lived experience represent the privileged way of understanding social reality (including informal learning), the linguistic/discursive turn of the 1980s proposed a shift in our view of the function of language as creating rather than representing versions of the world. Accordingly, we propose resituating informal learning from a reflective process occurring in an individual mind to the meaning making that occurs in group conversations. We present an exploratory analysis of a single thread from an online hiking community to introduce discourse analysis as a framework to study informal learning as a group meaning-making process.

Resilience in Adult Children of Divorce: A Multiple Case Study

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the experiences of resilience following parental divorce for university freshmen. Five participants were interviewed using a multiple case study methodology to examine how the three needs of Self-Determination theory contributed to resilience. Data were collected through demographic surveys, divorce artwork, resilience artwork, and interview transcriptions. The findings suggested that autonomy, competence, and relatedness contributed to resilience of adult children of divorce, and support the relevance of self-determination theory to describe resilience with these participants. Implications for counselors and recommendations for future research on resilience in children of divorce were provided.

The Meaning of African American College Women's Experiences Attending a Predominantly White Institution: A Phenomenological Study

Abstract:Because both race and gender are important to the development of African American women, student affairs professionals need to understand the unique experiences of African American women within the context of the college environment. In this phenomenological study, we examined African American women’s lived experiences as college students at a predominantly White institution with a purpose of exploring what meaning African American women ascribe to those experiences. Findings describe the experiences of these women, including themes of multiple worlds, belonging, expectations, awareness of their surroundings, and coping. We suggest implications for college administrators, student affairs professionals, and faculty, as well as offer ideas for future research.