Researchers use qualitative methods to study the everyday interactions, experiences, and meanings that contribute to, challenge, and sustain ideas, institutions, and inequalities. Qualitative researchers consider gender, race, class, and sexuality in public street behaviour; play during children's recess; support groups for women with post-partum depression; drag king and queen competitions; and survival strategies among the homeless. In these studies, researchers interview people, watch their behavior, participate in groups' activities, look at the documents and other texts that people produce, and try to immerse themselves in people's everyday experiences and meanings. The aim is usually to explore the relationship between the day-to-day and broader social structures and ideologies. The course may include: 1) data gathered through archival research, interviewing, and participant observation, 2) emotion as a source insight in qualitative research, and 3) writing as a means to record information, develop analyses, and share ideas.

Seminar discussions, in-class writing workshops, readings, and assignments may engage canonical, Chicago School, community-engaged, critical race, feminist, intersectional, and queer qualitative research. Readings will come primarily from sociology, and many appear on the Sociology Department's Qualitative Methods comprehensive exam list. Like qualitative methods, we will reach across disciplines and fields and types of authors. We will discuss readings, share work in progress, practice data collection and analysis, and apply ideas from the readings to our research projects and goals. We'll pay special attention to writing, thinking about how we can best use writing 1) to record the information we gather through observation or interviews, 2) to develop our analyses, and 3) to present our ideas to others. We’ll also grapple with the challenges of relying on writing to generate and convey our analyses. Throughout the semester we will consider how field methods illuminate, challenge, and sometimes reinforce social conditions; we'll also think about the influence of social conditions, including inequalities, on people's experiences as researchers and as research subjects.