Constructing Hopes and Fears: A Discourse Analysis of Introductory Qualitative Research Texts

Graduate students often receive their first training in qualitative methods during an introductory course. The textbook that is chosen often sets the tone for how qualitative research is understood. We conducted a discourse analysis of the ways in which 11 introductory qualitative methods texts took up the relationship between technology and qualitative research. One text included virtually no mention of technology use, five discussed technology only in relation to the data collection, transcription and analysis domains of research, and the remaining five discussed technology primarily in relation to those three domains with minimal attention to how it could support the additional domains of researcher reflexivity, literature review, representation of findings, ethics, and collaboration. We contrasted texts which took up a discourse of possibility with those who took up a discourse of caution around technology use. We call for greater dialogue around how emergent technologies might inform the qualitative research process.