Designing digital qualitative research workflows : enabling stakeholder participation across all research stages

Abstract

Participatory research approaches are increasingly being used by practitioners – academics, civil society organisations, and citizens – to inform decision-making processes where participants contribute to idea generation and data capture, but less often to data analysis and dissemination. This can leave participants feeling ineffectual and unrepresented in the research output as analytical decisions made on their contributions are opaque. Digital tools offer opportunities to enhance qualitative practices but are often designed for academics and primarily for data analysis, which can limit participation and adoption by other practitioners. In response, this thesis explores the design of digital tools to structure inclusive participation across all stages of qualitative research. Through synthesizing literature on the qualitative practices of practitioners, a cross-cutting qualitative workflow is defined that introduces design considerations to overcome existing barriers to participation. An action research approach was taken across three case studies that iteratively designed digital prototypes to explore how technology can augment this workflow. Design insights from this informed the development of Gabber, a digital platform that encompasses the end-to-end qualitative workflow that prioritises interactions with audio media to lower existing barriers of participation in each workflow stage. Following this, two distinct case studies configured and used Gabber across the workflow where observations of platform use, and semi-structured interviews surfaced opportunities and challenges around transparency of participation and stakeholder engagement across the workflow. This thesis’ primary contributions are a conceptualisation and real-world empirical exploration of a digital qualitative workflow across five case studies that augment and examine the qualitative practices of practitioners. Across this research, practitioners wanted to understand who and how their contributions were engaged with. This informed the secondary contribution, design implications for digital tools to leverage paradata to improve process transparency and demystify decision-making processes for stakeholders involved.