1) “AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualise it, represent it, and respond to it.” (Crimp, 1988, p. 3). This quotation is associated with which epistemological/theoretical framework?

1. Contextualism
2. Positivism
3. Social Constructionism
4. Phenomenology

2) ‘The process of critically reflecting on the content and process of the knowledge we produce’ is a definition of which key concept in qualitative research?

1. Subjectivity
2. Epistemology
3. Reflexivity
4. Ontology

3) Which of the following key concepts are associated with qualitative research?

1. Reflexivity, objectivity and subjectivity
2. Reflexivity, subjectivity and generating meaning and understanding
3. Subjectivity, reliability and generating meaning and understanding
4. Objectivity, reliability and validity

4) Qualitative research is primarily concerned with…?

1. Generating meaning and understanding
2. Theory testing
3. Testing hypotheses
4. Predicting relationships between phenomenon

5) Qualitative research is primarily concerned with…?

1. Collecting participants’ responses to pre-determined categories
2. Representativeness in sampling
3. Participants’ language and concepts
4. Avoiding bias

6) Which is a key feature of qualitative research?

1. Seeking consensus
2. Accommodating and exploring difference
3. Valuing detachment
4. Large numbers of participants

7) Qualitative research is primarily concerned with…?

1. Generating rich data
2. Large numbers of participants
3. Generating broad data
4. Seeking relationships between variables

8) ‘The theory or philosophy of the nature of reality and being’ is a definition of which of the following concepts?

1. Epistemology
2. Reflexivity
3. Subjectivity
4. Ontology

9) A sample of 50 participants in a qualitative interview study is?

1. A relatively large sample
2. Too small to generate meaningful results
3. An average sized sample
4. Too large to generate meaningful results

10) One of the most common types of sampling used in qualitative research is?

1. Random sampling
2. Purposive sampling
3. Stratified sampling
4. Maximum heterogeneity sampling

11) A sample is saturated in an interview study when?

1. No new information is emerging from your interviews
2. You have interviewed about 30 participants
3. You have interview about 90 participants
4. You have interviewed each participant twice

12) Three types of sampling commonly used in qualitative research include:

1. Random, snowball and convenience
2. Stratified, random and convenience
3. Purpose, convenience and random
4. Snowball, purposive and convenience

13) The ‘usual suspects’ are:

1. The people least likely to be invited to participate in qualitative research
2. The white, middle class people that tend to dominate qualitative research samples
3. The people that are hard-to-engage in research
4. The population that is often least accessible to researchers

14) Hidden populations are:

1. Ones that seek to avoid participating in research
2. Ones that are less visible to researchers
3. Ones that should only be included in maximum heterogeneity samples
4. Ones that tend to dominate convenience samples

15) Hard-to-engage participant groups are:

1. Ones that perceive little value in research participation
2. Ones that will only participate in research in return for money
3. Ones that insist on being interviewed at the weekend
4. Ones that only want to participate in research that will have some tangible impact on service provision to vulnerable groups in society

16) Insider researchers are:

1. Biased
2. A member of the group they are researching
3. Not a member of the group they are researching
4. Simultaneously conducting their own research project and participating in someone else’s research

17) One of the advantages of being an insider researcher is that:

1. Participants are more likely to disclose socially undesirable behaviour
2. Interviews are quicker to conduct
3. You can join in the focus group discussions you are moderating
4. It can be easier to establish rapport and trust with the participant group

18) Participant information sheets should:

1. Be as short as possible to avoid confusing participants
2. Include technical terms, to display the accurate scientific information
3. Provide participants with an appropriate amount of information, to allow them to make an informed decision about participation
4. Conceal the true aims of the research to ensure that participants aren’t too influenced by the researcher

19) Information about possible sources of support should:

1. Be given to all participants
2. Only be given to participants who cry during an interview
3. Only be included on a debrief sheet
4. Only be given to participants who ask for it

20) People’s rights as voluntary participants include the right...:

1. To be paid for their research participation
2. To receive a copy of their interview transcript and a copy of the final research report
3. To express their views in whatever way they choose to
4. To stop data collection at any time without giving a reason

21) It’s important to collect demographic data from participants because:

1. This enables participants to be more easily identified by people who know them
2. This enables the researcher to generalise their results
3. This helps the participants to identify themselves in the report of the research
4. This enables the researcher to conduct good quality research by ‘situating their sample’

22) On demographic sheets it is common to ask for information about:

1. People’s age and race/ethnicity
2. People’s age and monthly income
3. People’s monthly income and educational level
4. People’s height and weight

23) You should never ask participants about their:

1. Sexuality
2. Religious beliefs
3. Genital piercings
4. None of the above

24) Which of the following statements best describes why some people choose to do qualitative research:

1. Because it’s more objective than quantitative research
2. Because it’s easier than quantitative research
3. Because they find statistics really difficult
4. Because they are interesting in language and meaning

25) Bias is not a meaningful concept when critiquing qualitative researcher because:

1. Qualitative research is objective
2. Qualitative research recognises ‘bias’ as an inevitable component of research
3. Qualitative research is the poor cousin of quantitative research
4. Qualitative research is unscientific

1) Researcher self-disclosure and the development of rapport with participants are issues particularly associated with which of the following qualitative methods?

1. Story completion tasks
2. Focus groups
3. Qualitative surveys
4. Interviews

2) Which of the following are examples of good interview questions?

1. Leading and open-ended questions
2. Open-ended and short questions
3. Multiple questions and leading questions
4. Vague and short questions

3) Which of the following qualitative methods reduces the power and control of the researcher?

1. Interviews
2. Qualitative surveys
3. Focus groups
4. Story completion tasks

4) People management is a particular consideration when using which of the following qualitative methods?

1. Qualitative surveys
2. Focus groups
3. Interviews
4. Story completion tasks

5) Which of the following are examples of ‘secondary sources’?

1. Interviews and diaries
2. Personal documents and story completion tasks
3. Diaries and surveys
4. Personal documents and the media

6) Qualitative surveys are particularly useful for?

1. Collecting individual views, opinions and experiences
2. Generating rich, detailed and ‘deep’ data
3. Generating unanticipated insights
4. Collecting data from small samples

7) One of the weaknesses of qualitative surveys is?

1. Limited flexibility
2. An emphasis on collecting individual views, opinions and experience
3. An emphasis on collecting data from small samples
4. They are less time-consuming than interviews

8) Which of the following qualitative methods is ideally suited to capturing routine and everyday processes?

1. Interviews
2. Researcher-directed diaries
3. Story completion tasks
4. Surveys

9) Which of the following methods is more commonly used in quantitative research than qualitative research?

1. Semi-structured interviewing
2. Focus groups
3. Thematic analysis
4. Story-completion tasks

10) An important design feature of story completion tasks is?

1. Being meaningful to participants
2. Being realistic to participants
3. Being artificial to participants
4. Being directive to participants

11) Which of the following methods are particularly useful for accessing assumptions and ‘hidden’ meanings?

1. Qualitative surveys
2. Conversation analysis
3. Focus groups
4. Story-completion tasks

12) What are the major design issues in using secondary sources?

1. Meaningfulness to participants
2. Sample and rationale
3. Size of sample
4. Realism

13) What is the major motivation for using secondary sources?

1. A desire to understand culture
2. A desire to understand participants’ language and concepts
3. A desire to understand relationships between phenomenon
4. A desire to understand story structures

14) Virtual interviews can encourage participants to:

1. Disclose socially undesirable information
2. Multi-task during an interview
3. Demand payment for their participation
4. Both a. and b.

15) Interviews are ideally suited to which of the following types of qualitative research:

1. Research focused on people’s experience of the world
2. Interpretative Phenomenological research
3. Research focused on general views and opinions
4. Both a. and b.

16) Ideally how many interviews should you conduct in one day:

1. As many as you can
2. One
3. Three
4. Four

17) When interviewing someone you know, such as a close friend, it’s important to:

1. Pay them for their participation
2. Talk about what they said in the interview with mutual friends
3. Not pressure them to disclose sensitive information that you know is relevant to the interview
4. Debrief them fully after the interview

18) An ideal size for a focus group is about:

1. 1-3 participants
2. 10-15 participants
3. 4-8 participants
4. 6-12 participants

19) In a focus group discussion, participants should be encouraged to:

1. Talk to each other
2. Speak whenever they want
3. Talk only to the moderator
4. Talk loudly so the audio-recorder can pick up what they say

20) Focus groups are ideally suited to research questions about:

1. Individual experiences
2. People’s opinions and values
3. Highly emotive topics
4. None of the above

1) When transcribing interview and focus group data, it’s important to:

1. Transcribe the data as soon as possible after the interview/focus group
2. Leave a gap between the interview/focus group and transcribing it
3. Clean up people’s speech
4. Only transcribe what seems relevant to the research question

2) To produce a ‘good enough’ transcript of an hour long interview it takes about:

1. An hour
2. A day
3. Three days
4. A week

3) Errors in transcription:

1. Are nothing to worry about
2. Are inevitable
3. Can change the meaning of the data
4. Can be avoided by using a transcription notation system

4) An orthographic transcript:

1. Is the correct form of transcription for discursive psychology
2. Captures how things are said as well as what is said
3. Captures spoken words and other sounds
4. Must include laughter and pauses

5) Transcription isn’t straightforward because:

1. It is boring
2. You have to choose how you translate from spoken to written speech
3. You must capture how things are said
4. It is time-consuming

6) Which of the following are examples of experiential qualitative approaches?

1. Thematic analysis, grounded theory and interpretative phenomenological analysis
2. Thematic analysis, discursive psychology and grounded theory
3. Discursive psychology, narrative analysis and conversation analysis
4. Conversation analysis, thematic analysis and grounded theory

7) Which of the following are examples of critical qualitative approaches?

1. Thematic analysis and conversation analysis
2. Thematic discourse analysis and discursive psychology
3. Grounded theory and interpretative phenomenological analysis
4. Interpretative phenomenological analysis and narrative analysis

8) ‘What are the main experiential features of being angry?’ Which qualitative approach would be most appropriate to answer this research question?

1. Grounded theory
2. Constructionist thematic analysis
3. Interpretative phenomenological analysis
4. Poststructuralist discourse analysis

9) ‘This method of analysis aims to understand people’s lived experience and the meanings they attach to their experiences’. Is this a definition of?

1. Interpretative phenomenological analysis
2. Discourse analysis
3. Narrative analysis
4. Grounded theory

10) Which method of analysis is concerned with the role of discourse in wider social processes of legitimation and power?

1. Poststructuralist discourse analysis
2. Thematic analysis
3. Narrative analysis
4. Discursive psychology

11) Which approach to analysis focuses on how participants use language in order to manage stake in social interactions?

1. Thematic analysis
2. Grounded theory
3. Narrative analysis
4. Discursive psychology

12) Which approach to analysis assumes that discursive constructions are implicated in the ways in which we experience ourselves?

1. Grounded theory
2. Poststructuralist discourse analysis
3. Thematic discourse analysis
4. Interpretative phenomenological analysis

13) Which approach to analysis particularly favours homogeneous samples?

1. Thematic analysis
2. Discourse analysis
3. Interpretative phenomenological analysis
4. Grounded theory

14) The use of descriptive, linguistic and conceptual codes is associated with which of the following approaches to qualitative analysis?

1. Grounded theory
2. Thematic analysis
3. Discourse analysis
4. Interpretative phenomenological analysis

15) Which of the following approaches to qualitative analysis recommend immersion in the data as a first stage of analysis?

1. Interpretative phenomenological analysis
2. Grounded theory
3. Thematic analysis
4. All of the above

16) Which qualitative approach is particularly associated with more detailed approaches to transcription?

1. Thematic analysis
2. Discursive psychology
3. Grounded theory
4. Interpretative phenomenological analysis

17) Which qualitative method is concerned with the study of talk-in-interaction?

1. Interviews
2. Thematic analysis
3. Interpretative phenomenological analysis
4. Conversation analysis

18) Conversation analysts value which of the following types of data?

1. Secondary sources
2. Interviews
3. Ordinary social interactions
4. Focus groups

19) One of the distinctive features of thematic analysis is:

1. It’s theoretical flexibility
2. It’s objectivity
3. The fact that you don’t have to transcribe interviews before you code and analyse them
4. The use of line-by-line coding

20) A good thematic analysis has:

1. Lots of themes
2. Lots of descriptive codes
3. A set of themes that work together to tell a story about the data
4. More generalisability than interpretative phenomenological analysis

21) When writing up your analysis you should:

1. Keep data extracts to an absolute minimum
2. Have more data extracts than analytic commentary
3. Have roughly equal proportions of data extracts and analytic commentary
4. Repeat key data quotes throughout the analysis

22) Things to avoid when writing up your analysis include:

1. Paraphrasing the data
2. Having lots of thin themes
3. Retaining the complexity and contradiction in the data
4. Both A and B

23) Good data extracts are:

1. Short
2. Long
3. Vivid and compelling
4. Complex

24) Good themes:

1. Overlap with other themes
2. Capture everything in the data
3. Are coherent
4. Are the ones that capture the most frequently articulated patterns in your data

25) The most important criterion for determining a theme is:

1. The frequency with which it appears in the data
2. The degree to which is captures something important in your data relevant to your research question
3. Whether it appears in most of your data items
4. How obvious it is in the data

26) Which types of research questions can be addressed using both thematic analysis and IPA:

1. Questions about experience
2. Questions about language practice
3. Questions about representation
4. Questions about construction

27) Constructionist thematic analysis is similar to:

1. Interpretative phenomenological analysis
2. Conversation analysis
3. Narrative analysis
4. Thematic discourse analysis

28) In vivo codes in grounded theory are similar to:

1. Linguistic comments in interpretative phenomenological analysis
2. Descriptive comments in interpretative phenomenological analysis
3. Latent codes in thematic analysis
4. Selective coding in discourse analysis

29) Advanced memos in grounded theory are used to:

1. Explore initial codes
2. Direct further data collection
3. Develop and describe categories
4. Explore in vivo codes

30) Which of the following research questions are ideally suited to thematic analysis?

1. Questions about experiences
2. Questions about perceptions and understandings
3. Questions about representation
4. All of the above

1) Which three criteria are associated with the evaluation of qualitative research?

1. Reliability, validity and coherence
2. Coherence, resonating with readers and reliability
3. Situating the sample, reliability and grounding in examples
4. Coherence, resonating with readers and owning one’s perspective

2) Which are some of Lucy Yardley’s (2008) open-ended, flexible principles for judging the quality of qualitative analysis?

1. Sensitivity to context, validity and reliability
2. Sensitivity to context, commitment and rigour and transparency and coherence
3. Commitment and rigour, generalisability and transferability
4. Transferability, dependability and member checking

3) It is appropriate to use member checking as a credibility check when:

1. You have used discourse analysis to analyse your data
2. You are unsure if your analysis is correct
3. Your analysis aims to stay close to participants’ perspectives
4. You have produced a theoretical and conceptual interpretation of your data

4) You can ‘situate your sample’ by:

1. Disclosing identifying information about your participants
2. Describing what your participants were wearing during the interview
3. Providing a detailed summary of the demographic information you collected
4. Agreeing and disagreeing with your participants

5) In order to ‘ground in examples’ it is important to:

1. Discuss relevant literature
2. Support your analytic claims with illustrative data extracts
3. Provide an in-depth analysis of one, long data extract
4. Ensure there is a good fit between the data extracts and your analytic commentary

6) In a 10,000 word report, the introduction section should be about:

1. 5,000 words long
2. 2,500 words long
3. 4,000 words long
4. 1,000 words long

7) The purpose of a literature review in a qualitative research report is to:

1. Contextualise your research
2. Show how much you have read
3. Critique the methodological flaws of existing research and show how you will overcome them
4. Show how your study will relate to quantitative research

8) In the general discussion section of a qualitative report, it is always important to:

1. Introduce new material
2. Show how your research is better than quantitative research
3. Discuss the limitations of your sample
4. Evaluate the limitations of your research

9) Editing a draft of your report:

1. Is only important if you have used discourse analysis
2. Is only necessary to correct typos
3. Is an important part of good academic writing
4. Is only necessary when you are not happy with what you have written

10) One of the features of good qualitative poster design is:

1. Lots of text that tells the reader everything about the project
2. A font that can be read from 6-8 feet away
3. A really fancy font
4. A font that can be read from 2-4 feet away

11) A visually pleasing qualitative poster uses:

1. Lots of different colours
2. Lots of text
3. Lots of tables and figures
4. One or two background colours

12) Qualitative posters are easier to read when:

1. There is lighter text against a darker background
2. When text is presented in large blocks
3. There is darker text against a lighter background
4. When all the text is bullet pointed

13) Reliability is not a meaningful criteria for judging the quality of qualitative research because:

1. Qualitative research is biased
2. Qualitative research is unscientific
3. The findings of qualitative research will inevitably bear the mark of the researcher
4. Qualitative research has limited generalisability

14) One of the key quality criteria for discursive research is:

1. Member checking
2. Reader validation
3. Peer debriefing
4. Triangulation

15) Member checking assumes that:

1. Participants are the ultimate authority on their experience
2. Researchers are biased
3. Qualitative research is subjective
4. It’s difficult to produce good quality qualitative research

16) Providing a ‘thick description’ to enable another researcher to determine whether they can ‘safely’ transfer your findings to another context is Lincoln and Guba’s (1989) definition of:

1. Member checking
2. Credibility checking
3. Negative case analysis
4. Transferability

17) Elliot et al.’s (1999) guidelines for the publishability of qualitative research, include:

1. Respect of participants
2. Appropriate discussion
3. Owning one’s perspective
4. Appropriate methods

18) Credibility checks such as member checking are problematic in discourse analytic research because:

1. It takes too long
2. Participants will disagree with the findings
3. The analyst has the best insight into the data
4. The analysis does not aim to capture participants’ perspectives on their experiences

19) Some of the problems with member checking include:

1. Participants’ reluctance to disagree with the researcher’s interpretations
2. The difficulty of engaging participants in the process
3. Participants’ comments on the interpretations may be motivated by something other than helping the researcher best understand their experiences
4. All of the above

20) When giving an oral presentation of qualitative research you should:

1. Include as much information as possible on your PowerPoint slides
2. Use PowerPoint selectively to highlight key points and show data extracts
3. Not include any data quotes
4. Only discuss one theme

Scenario 1: Researching overseas students

A 3rd year undergraduate psychology student wants to do a qualitative project on how overseas students adjust to the higher educational system in Britain and asks for your advice. She is from Poland and moved to the UK to study. She has decided to use thematic analysis but has not made up her mind about whether to use interviews or qualitative surveys to collect the data.

1) The fact that she is Polish…

1. Is certainly going to give her a biased perspective, and she has to be very careful not to let it contaminate her reading and interpretation of the interviews
2. Means that she is going to be more empathetic to her participants
3. Means she needs to think about how her experiences as an overseas student have informed her perspective and analysis and account for how that has influenced her research in her write up of the research
4. She can only speak to Polish students because she can only understand their perspective

2) If she conducted interviews...

1. She should develop an interview schedule in advance and stick to it completely
2. She should try and respond to what the interviewee says to create more information
3. She should ignore any signs of participant distress
4. She should conduct at least 50 interviews

3) What would be one of the practical advantages of using qualitative surveys rather than interviews?

1. It would provide her with richer data
2. It would allow her to collect a much larger sample
3. She could conduct the survey online and not have to transcribe her data
4. It would be great for controlling extraneous variables

4) When using thematic analysis to analyse her data at first she identified mainly ‘semantic’ codes. Semantic codes...

1. Capture the surface meaning of the data
2. Capture a more conceptual/researcher-driven interpretation of the data
3. Are more objective than other types of codes
4. Are the most difficult codes to construct

5) If she is successful in her research, she should be able to...

1. Provide us with a rich detailed description, showing us the different facets and complexity of the participants’ experience
2. Repeat the research at another time in another setting and get precisely the same outcome
3. Generalise her findings to the wider population of overseas students
4. Predict which type of overseas students is likely to succeed in their studies

Scenario 2: Researching people’s perceptions of transgender parenting

A researcher has collected story completion data about people’s perceptions of transgender parenting. She has collected 50 stories – 25 from men and 25 from women – and is unsure whether to use thematic analysis or interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to analyse the data and she asks for your advice...
1) You advise her to use thematic analysis...

1. Because thematic analysis is a more objective method
2. Because IPA can only be used to analyse data about people’s experiences and the meanings they attach to their experiences
3. Because IPA can only be used to analyse interview data
4. Because the sample is too small to use IPA

2) The researcher chose to use story completion tasks to collect her data...

1. Because story completion tasks are ideally suited to exploring people’s assumptions about a topic
2. Because they are the most accurate way of measuring people’s perceptions of a topic
3. Because they are easier to analyse than qualitative interviews
4. Because it’s really important to set every participate the same task in qualitative research

3) When the researcher has completed her analysis she will be able to...

1. Predict which groups in the population will hold the most negative attitude towards transgender parents
2. Understand the effects of transgender parenting on children
3. Understand why teenagers hold more negative attitudes to their parent undergoing a sex change than younger children
4. Discuss key themes in the ways in which people make sense of transgender parenting

4) The researcher is worried that interviews would have been a better method to use, so you reassure her that story completion tasks are an appropriate method because...

1. Interviews can only be used with small samples
2. Interviews are not ideal for researching sensitive topics
3. Researchers require years of research experience before they can conduct interviews successfully and ethically
4. Interviews are better used to examine people’s experiences

5) The researcher wants to compare male and female participants’ responses to the story completion task but she is worried that this would be inappropriate. You reassure her that this would be appropriate because...

1. Because it’s important that her analysis shows whether men or women hold more negative attitudes to transgender parenting
2. Story completion tasks are one of the few qualitative methods ideally suited to comparative designs
3. It’s really important for qualitative studies to generate hypotheses that can be tested in quantitative research
4. Because her study will lack validity if she doesn’t compare male and female responses