The Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone podcast brings author and professor Karen O’Reilly into challenging conversations with students, academics and practitioners around the world. Together, they explore how the toolkit approach - a curated collection of expert skills, knowledge, procedures, tools and information - can help navigate the complex terrain of contemporary qualitative research methods.

My guest this week is Dr Jakub Stachowski. Jakub is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. We’ve known each other for a few years having worked together on the amazing Glarus project (Global Labour in Rural Societies). His PhD used ethnographic methods to understand the processes of integration among Polish migrants in rural areas in Norway and his research interests are in migration and mobility, urban and rural areas, prison sociology, social theory and qualitative research methods.

While chatting about Chapter 2, Developing the Design, we hear more about Jakub’s current work in war-affected border zones, in northern Norway and in Poland. We talk about how we both understand an interpretivist approach to sampling and explore the new concepts in Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone: initial, ongoing and final samples, as well as sample fitness. Jakub explains how he selected people and places for his research in an ongoing way, starting with communities, ethnicity and nationality as key ‘variables’, but adapting these choices as he learned more about the communities. He describes locating people through key informants as well as simply being there and finding different people. We hear about how ethnography can proceed through ongoing return visits to places, as well as through analysis of online forums. Jakub emphasises how sampling and other decisions must be reflexive but also rigorous and trustworthy. 

Special thanks to Bahar Celik Muller, Senior Marketing Executive and Martha Gleeson, Digital Marketing Executive, for their support, advice and expertise.

Find out more about the book: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/qualitative-research-methods-for-everyone

Intro music: Good Times Are Coming by Bohdan Kuzmin from Pixabay.

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