Decentralized study at NIH.
Making sense of peoples’ ways of moving, acting, interacting, and experiencing in friluftsliv-contexts necessitates theoretical and practical tools for generating, systematizing and analyzing research data.
This course focuses on qualitative methods (such as interviews, fieldwork, texts, and visual expressions) as means to get an understanding of participation patterns and motifs, experiences, and meaning-making, and the sociocultural and geographical (material) structures that influence these motifs, experiences - exemplified through examples from the research projects in the Nordic countries.
The course introduces the students to theoretical and philosophical foundations of qualitative methodology: How it is legitimized, the role of the researcher and what kind of knowledge these research methods can produce. Further, the course focuses on developing practical skills in selective qualitative methods. The two main methods explored are qualitative interviewing and ethnographic fieldwork. During the course, the students will work extensively to acquire hands-on experiences of and reflections on both approaches, discussing their theoretical underpinnings, the knowledge constructed, and the practical preparation for and designing of a qualitative research project. The students will explore how to organize and analyze qualitative data. Academic writing and ethical issues will be discussed throughout the course. |