Pre-Conference Workshops
A programme of optional workshops (included in the conference fees) will take place on Wednesday, March 23rd, 14-16, offering participants the opportunity to enhance their knowledge in qualitative and quantitative research methods.
a) Qualitative Research: How to Begin the Journey (Dr. Katja Heim)
b) Statistics 101: Let data speak (Ferdinand Stebner, Dominik Rumlich)
Qualitative Research: How to Begin the Journey
In this workshop we will be discussing how to begin the journey of doing qualitative research. As the message can only be that there are several ways of how to start and to structure one's research, we will be looking at different kinds of approaches and rationales. The focus will be on your work; however, i.e. a considerable part of the workshop will be spent discussing your plans.
Statistics 101: Let data speak
To avoid the "tour de force" of an all-embracing workshop in the vast field of quantitative research, we opted for the de"light"ful version: On the basis of a small experiment in class, we are going to explore the pitfalls of quantitative data collection and then embark upon an analysis of our gathered data. In connection with our dataset and maybe one or two additional ones, we will cover the most important statistical measures in descriptive statistics and provide a quick overview of inductive statistics at the end. In class, we will use SPSS as it is one of the most widely employed software tools for data analyses in the humanities.
As you might have noticed, this path is meant to tame the often fearsome beast of quantitative research and render it more approachable and illustrative. That is to say that this workshop is meant to supply a first insight into quantitative research and possible ways of analyzing one's data without too strong a focus on the underlying mathematical operations. It is thus meant to serve as an introduction geared towards a sound understanding as well as demystification of basic statistics.