Cult of Competition?

Barry, Britten, Barber, Bradley and Stevenson (1999) mention several times the tradition of the individual researcher and the culture of completion among graduate students. While I do see some competition to progress in the program (and for AI’ships and jobs) it has been my fortunate experience to work in a very supportive and collaborative program when academic progression and research are concerned. Professors tend to encourage working on early or individual projects as small groups. With this said – there is very little support for how this early collaborative work should be structured. Without this structure and support it can be difficult for graduate students to initiate co-research projects.

I was fortunate to work collaboratively with my adviser and fellow grad student on a small research project. We were only involved in the transcription, data analysis and writing portions of the project, but it was a great introduction to the qualitative research process.

As such my experience with collaborative work and coding is reflective of Sin’s ( 2008) discussion. We worked to establish an a priori coding schema. This was done through early meetings and an initial reading of the transcripts to locate and discuss emergent themes. From here we established our main schema that was utilized through the project. Our adviser walked us through the process establishing initial coding schema (or trees) and ensuring we worked to establish and maintain intercoder reliability throughout the research process. In retrospect and understanding more about the structure of NVivo this makes perfect sense. NVivo would not have supported a more iterative process, and working collaboratively we needed to be on similar footing or the findings might not have made much sense.

Learning how to establish codes and how to interpret the findings was a valuable experience as we working together to write up the findings. However, we did not make room for reflexivity practices. I think it was assumed my graduate partner and I would simply follow in the epistemological and methodological footsteps of our adviser. Also, we really just divided and conquered the writing process, not wasn’t much collaboration with that which I would like to practice more of as I’m particularly interested in collaborative practices. (I tend to find the individual process overwhelming and find myself far more productive when I’m held accountable by the expectations of others.)