Qualitative Health Research

Qualitative research is on the rise in health and medicine. With origins in the social sciences, qualitative inquiry seeks to understand things in context rather than in controlled or experimental conditions. Qualitative researchers talk with people, watch what people do, and gather documents and images. They conduct ongoing, detailed analyses of the resulting textual and visual data. They investigate and make arguments about how things happen in the social world and how people make sense of it.

The Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine has always had a strong focus on qualitative health research. Most staff and students at the Centre are doing qualitative research, and are exploring together the epistemological and methodological issues raised by our research practice.

The next chapter in our qualitative research story is more formal: with the close collaboration and support of the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, we have commenced a coursework program in qualitative health research led by Dr Stacy M. Carter. A Graduate Certificate, Graduate Diploma and Masters program in Qualitative Health Research are now available. There are four core units of study focused on research theory and practice, and a wide range of elective units on topics including health problems and interventions, ethics, humanities, social science and health policy. A short flyer about the program can be found here.

More information about the programs, including application information, is available here:
http://www.health.usyd.edu.au/future/coursework/qualitativehealthresearch/index.php

If you are interested in or doing qualitative research yourself, we would love to hear from you. You may also be interested in joining a local network, the Qualitative Health Research Collaboration (QHeRC) which meets several times a year and operates an email list for discussion and announcements. You can see information about QHeRC events and sign up to the low volume mailing list here: http://www.health.usyd.edu.au/research/qherc/index.php.