Writing Qualitative Practice Research for Publication
Dr. Gail Simon

This workshop invites you as a counselling, psychotherapy and mental health practitioner or trainer to consider ways of writing about your work for publication. Our professions face many practical and ethical challenges on an everyday basis. There are additional ethical and practical challenges when writing about one’s work with clients, trainees or research participants. In this workshop, we will

1. address ethical matters in how one can write publicly about intimate matters and confidential relationships;
2. look at examples good qualitative research writing;

• discuss philosophical choices in writer positioning when discussing or describing one’s work;

1. explore how to maintain coherence with one’s own speaking style and professional knowledge when writing for academic journals;
2. consider how to focus on a particular audience and choose a suitable publication.
3. develop an idea you have for publishing a piece of writing.

And hopefully, you will go away with some ideas, a plan and encouragement on how you are going to get on with writing for a publication!

Qualitative Methods in Global Mental Health Research: Applications of the McGill Illness Narrative Interview
Prof. Dr. Laurence J. Kirmayer

Qualitative research methods are essential to capture illness experience, explanations, and modes of communication of distress. The McGill Illness Narrative Interview (MINI) is a theoretically informed, semi-structured research interview for eliciting illness narratives, encouraging multiple modes of narration based on contiguity, prototypes and explanatory models. The MINI has been used in diverse settings to collect rich narratives of symptom experience, cultural models of illness, and pathways to care. This workshop will discuss the origins and development of the MINI and its applications in mental health research in clinical and community settings, with examples from studies of cultural idioms of distress, explanatory models for medically unexplained symptoms, help-seeking, and coping with common mental disorders in low and middle-income countries.

Metasynthesis Workshop
Prof. Dr. Carla Willig

This workshop introduces participants to metasynthesis as a way of integrating findings from a series of qualitative studies. Metasynthesis offers a method for systematically aggregating, integrating and interpreting findings from a sample of qualitative research reports. It is an approach to research that allows the researcher to deepen their understanding of a particular phenomenon on the basis of published research. It aspires to produce “(…) a new, integrated, and more complete interpretation of findings that offers greater understanding in depth and breadth than the findings from individual studies” (Bondas and Hall, 2007a: 115).

The workshop will introduce participants to the key steps involved in carrying out a metasynthesis. It will also draw attention to differences in approach among metasynthesists including divergences in the extent to which a metasynthesis seeks to develop new theories (rather than building cumulative bodies of knowledge), variations in relation to the approach to interpretation taken by the researcher, and differences in the extent to which metasynthesists try to stay true to the primary researchers’ interpretations of their data. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to reflect on and discuss the use of metasynthesis and the extent to which its use may increase the impact of qualitative research.

Qualitative Content Analysis
Christin Schörmann, Social Worker/ Social Pedagogue (M. A.)

Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) is an approach of systematic, rule guided qualitative text analysis through the systematic classification of themes or patterns. QCA requires clear and explicit analytic strategies to be carried out properly and to carry the analysis beyond simple description. In this workshop we will focus on analyzing interview text by following an inductive category development, referring to the approach of Philipp Mayring.
This workshop is adressed to Master students and PhD candidates who have little background in QCA and would like to get an overview and some hands-on experience.
Interested participants are kindly requested to send a summary of the research for which they plan to use QCA and a five pages (or so) interview text in English language to Christin Schörmann, email: christin.schoermann@mailbox.tu-dresden.de, by September 2nd, 2018.

Systematische Metaphernanalyse
Prof. Dr. Rudolf Schmitt

Im Rahmen des interdisziplinären Workshops wird eine Einführung in die systematische Metaphernanalyse gegeben. Diese Methode der qualitativen Sozialforschung stützt sich auf die Theorie der kognitiven Linguistik (George Lakoff und Mark Johnson) und stellt eine Systematik von Analyseschritten für qualitative Forschung bereit. Zentral sind dabei das Erkennung von Metaphern, die Bündelung von Einzelmetaphern zu metaphorischen Konzepten und die interpretative Rekonstruktion von Implikationen der metaphorischen Muster. Im Workshop sollen diese Merkmale je nach Vorwissen der Teilnehmer_innen an vorbereitetem Material vorgestellt und in kleinen Übungen vertieft werden.