Qualitative Research Methods for Solving Workplace Problems

Thus, MacNealy’s findings mean that the wisdom of technical communicators captured in the STC annual conference Proceedings was not clearly developed in any systematic way. In brief, her analysis suggests that technical communicators rely primarily on anecdotes and intuition to answer workplace questions. Reliance on such unsystematic approaches is costly: technical communicators are continually reinventing the wheel and are often viewed as workers of “magic” rather than as professionals relying on a foundation of evidence-based knowledge. Because mastering qualitative methods like case studies is often incorrectly assumed to require little expertise, my goal here is to provide a foundation for collecting information using qualitative methods, especially (though not exclusively) targeted for those within industry. First, however, I need to establish a definition of qualitative research methods.