MB 313

Qualitative Presentation

 


home> MB 313 > MB 313 Qualitative Presentation

 

The goal of your presentation is to give the class a sense of how your research went as well as your findings.  Because this is qualitative research, we want to understand the meaning to the respondents of your research question.  Your presentation should follow these steps:

 

Introduction

 

What is your research question or hypothesis?  Why did you pick this question?  What did you hope to find out?

 

Methods

 

What research techniques did you use?  How did you choose your subjects? How many did you choose?  Where did you observe or interview them?  Why did you pick these locations?  Did you have any problems with interviewing or observing? How did you do your freelisting, decision analysis, or other qualitative techniques?

 

How did you code or make sense of the data? Give us some details and examples, so we can understand your procedures.  Did you have any problems?

As this is an inductive, qualitative study your presentation will be more interesting if you give us examples of "progressive focusing" and "reflexivity" where you tell us how you adjusted your data collection and discovered new relationships as the research unfolded.

 

Results

 

What did you find out?  What patterns did you find? What themes?  What answers to your questions?  Give us some quotes and/or stories about your respondents to illustrate your findings. Please do not show any barcharts or other quantitative data analysis. We are interested in your understanding of the respondents' points of view, not a quantitative data analysis.

 

Conclusions

 

Now that you have done this study, how would you do it differently?  What have you learned about this research method?

 

For the Instructor:

 

A paper copy of your PowerPoint slides in handout format with four slides per page.

 

Format:

 

Presentations are 15 minutes long.

Presentations have a beginning, middle, and an end.

An outline of the presentation is displayed during the introduction to the presentation.

Audience understands the major points and sees the perspective you are taking.

Visual aids are used to reinforce major points.

A good opening and summing up.

Ends decisively, don’t just trail off or end abruptly.

Logical, smooth transitions between speakers.

Speakers don't contradict each other.  (Iron out differences before the presentation.)

 

Tips for Higher Grades:

 

Do not try and cover too much material. One indicator of this mistake is when the speakers talk too fast and rapidly display overheads in an attempt to cover all of their talk in the time allotted.

 

Try and avoid reading directly from index cards.  When presenters read from cards, they often adopt a monotone voice and sometimes read too fast. 

 

Written material on overheads should be brief and should rarely be read by the presenter.  Written “bullet points” are used to reinforce the points that the presenter is making, and the presenter should be verbally presenting an elaboration of the bullet points.  However, the presenter should refer to visual aids such as timelines and diagrams so that the audience knows where in a possibly complicated picture they should be directing their attention.

 

Make it interesting. What makes your results interesting?  What did you find out that was unexpected or surprising? How did the research process unfold and what did you learn about your research question(s) as the research unfolded?


This page last modified on 10/24/09