Teaching Objectives and Requirements:

This course aims to help students understand what is qualitative research, how to conduct effective qualitative research, and how to analyze qualitative data. Go by the learning order of theory—case—application, with cases corresponding to each chapter for illustration, the course is going to help students majoring in journalism to understand and carry out qualitative research practice.

The Teaching aims to:

（1）Equip students with a comprehensive understanding Qualitative Research: Grasp the meaning of qualitative research, connect research topics to methodologies, and recognize the advantages and disadvantages of qualitative and quantitative methods.

（2）Get students’ capability of critical thinking trained in professional ways, make them capable of applying what they have learned from the course to resolving practical social problems and make up a research plan alone.

（3）Understand concerns about sample size, see the role of purposive and theoretical sampling, and recognize the importance of deviant cases. Assess the credibility of qualitative research studies, distinguish sound and unsound claims, and understand the nature of reliability and validity. 

The key points are：understand the distinguishment between qualitative studies with quantitative studies, learn about the research ethics in different methods, establish the credibility in qualitative studies, data collection and analysis, varied methods of qualitative studies, make up a research plan on your own.

Teaching Contents:

Session    1     What is Qualitative Research?

Session    2     Designing a Research Project

Session    3     Generalizing from Case Study Research

Credits：2