It All Works Out in the End

Qualitative research enables flexible designs unlike quantitative research, but those designs can be modified up to a point. It sometimes happens that the study at hand takes an unexpected turn of events and the researchers have then to find ways to cope with the changes. When the matter being investigated involves online surveys, there is even more leeway for uncertainty, as difficulties such as finding participants and time constraints may arise. This chapter presents a study conducted by two researchers in an American midwestern university and the challenges they encountered after answering a call for papers about technology and language learner psychology. They used an online survey to inquire about students' experience in an online language course. However, the lack of time intertwined with unexpected events involved readjustments and a need for more research and training. In the current article, the researchers share their project timeline, the issues they encountered, and offer some solutions.

Handling Research Challenges

This chapter explores some of the challenging issues that were raised for the author while conducting her first biggest research project as an international doctoral student at one of the United States universities. The main challenge that the author faced was the difficulty of having access to a language center to examine her technology professional development model on language teachers to explore its effectiveness in understanding the teachers' adoption and rejection decision of using education technology and to collect data for her dissertation. After choosing an alternative venue and planning to travel to the United Arab Emirates to conduct the practical part of her research at one of the UAE's universities, an academic networking event changed the course of the latest plans and had a gatekeeper assisting her in experimenting her model and conducting the rest of her study in an American university. The chapter explores some of the challenges and how the author tackled each one of them. The chapter ends with some general recommendations for graduate students and novice researchers.

Multiplayer Online Game Research

This chapter explains the process of collecting data for an ethnographic case study in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMOG) called Stronghold Kingdoms, describing the methodological aspects of the study such as the research site, participants, data collection sources, and analysis. Further, the chapter explains the challenges encountered while conducting the study, including entering and becoming a member of the game community, data collection and analysis in an ever-changing world, being a participant-observer and the risk of going native, and participant attrition. Finally, the chapter provides some solutions and recommendations for researchers interested in conducting studies in MMOG settings.

Reflections of Challenges and Resolutions in Fieldwork Research on Quality of Life of Cancer Patients

Challenges and resolutions in fieldwork have become a dominant focus of interest for academicians and researchers conducting researches in social sciences. The objective of the chapter is to describe and reflect the researcher's experience in conducting a research study on anxiety, depression, and quality of life of the cancer patients that could be beneficial to novice researchers in the field of cancer studies. The author encountered these experiences in 2016 as part of her doctoral thesis that she had conducted in a tertiary care hospital based in Delhi. The chapter discusses the context of study with respect to the challenges faced in selecting a field site and acquiring access, recruiting, and building trust and rapport with the research participants, concern of confidentiality and emotional and psychological wellbeing of the researcher. Further, the chapter focuses on the resolutions and recommendations to deal with compassion fatigue, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress to avoid and manage great amount of emotional demands on the researchers.

When Participants' Trauma Becomes Mine

This chapter is a reflection on the author's work in the context of trauma-focused qualitative research entitled “Risk and protective factors for the mental health consequences of childhood political trauma (Argentina 1976-1983) among adult Jewish Argentinian immigrants to Israel.” By examining the author's emotional reactions during the process of the data collection and analysis of her doctoral study, the author will explore the challenges that she faced, as well as the solutions she employed (both the effective and ineffective). More specifically, using the lens of the psychoanalytical term “countertransference”, she will discuss the manifestations of her positionality as a qualitative researcher and its impact on her engagement with her study. The author will elaborate on different strategies that she used for her study, and propose qualitative researchers to use “countertransference” as a way to understand and address the complexity of a researcher's positionality in narrative research.

Data Collection as a Journey

The journey approach for data collection may enable the novice researcher to reflect on their data collection processes, and it aims to point to potential creative solutions that can help create a coherent study deeply rooted in its social environment. Fieldwork becomes a part of the project, rather than an isolated element that needs to be done. Through this approach, even a novice researcher can demonstrate connected insights that are not only relevant to the study itself but also the subject of study. A creative, multi-layered approach to resources and created opportunities may help increase the feasibility of a study by reacting to and interacting with the social context of the field. This chapter reflects on the author's data collection progress during her PhD program and invites readers to discover actionable steps that can be used to overcome the inertia due to inability to secure access to a field site.

Meaning Making Change

This chapter describes how an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) study generated perceived risk for stakeholders and for participants. Here, perceived risk was interpreted through discourses and practices specific to intimate partner violence contexts that influenced intimate partner violence professionals' subjective experiences. These risk-responses were a fundamental threat to the purpose of the research: to contribute to meaningful change for the participants in their contexts. The clash between the research aim and the risk-responses opened a theoretical space for reflection about power and knowledge relationships in lived experience and meaning-making in IPA research. Specifically, this chapter addresses the question of whether the current epistemological stance grounding IPA research leads to meaning-making that reproduces knowledge in a form that overlooks the omnipresent influence of power and knowledge dynamics. Butler's philosophies of power, knowledge, subjectivity, and performativity are explored as means of expanding the epistemological foundation of IPA.

Learning Amidst Mayhem

The purpose of this chapter is to describe issues with conducting field studies on technology use in elementary schools. The chapter first provides a brief overview of the study that was conducted with two teachers and their 46 second grade students, and then it presents some of the challenges that the researchers faced. These challenges include everything from securing permissions and scheduling to having sufficient personpower to collect all the data and using technology both in the study and as a topic of study. Solutions for future research are included, along with implications for all stakeholders.

Reflections on Post-Disaster University Research in the Aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria

This chapter offered a reflection on a research study conducted at the University of the Virgin Islands, a historically black college and university (HBCU), in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. The research study examined student perceptions of authentic university academic care (AUAC) in a post-disaster setting. AUAC can be viewed as genuine humanistic concern and disciplined nurturing in higher education. AUAC is also an important element of examining the quality of academic services. Thus, this chapter shares the experiences of the researchers, their investigative processes, the challenges faced, solutions used, and recommendations.

On the Way to Researching Universities

This chapter aims to shed light on the significant experiences and challenges that have occurred during a university-funded project, exploring the dynamics of academic employment in the light of gender roles. The data for this mixed methods study comes from a research on Turkish universities, including 505 questionnaires and 46 in-depth interviews with academics from 39 different universities, located in 20 different cities of Turkey. The stratified sample of quantitative research represents the distribution of gender, department, managerial experience, position, and development level of the city, where the universities are located. In-depth interviews are used along with the survey to better understand the nature of academic employment and the implications of quantitative data. This chapter addresses the challenges, such as accessing the universities, ethical and emotional considerations, the effect of Turkish culture, censorship, and the ways that they affect the research process itself and the researchers.