Open AccessDouble, Double Toil and Trouble: Using Interactive Qualitative Analysis to Understand Non-Major Accounting Students’ Learning
Author(s) -
Sasha Padayachi,
Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
international journal of higher education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1927-6052
pISSN - 1927-6044
DOI - 10.5430/ijhe.v11n4p136
Subject(s) - facilitator , qualitative research , phenomenon , process (computing) , qualitative property , computer science , focus group , qualitative analysis , data collection , psychology , data science , mathematics education , social psychology , epistemology , sociology , anthropology , social science , philosophy , machine learning , operating system
This study investigates the implementation of the methodology, Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA) (Northcutt & McCoy, 2004) during the COVID-19 pandemic, to understand how non-major accounting students learn Accounting 101 in a threshold concepts-inspired tutorial programme. Even though IQA is a predominantly qualitative method, it incorporates quantitative data with qualitative data systematically. These data collection and data analysis procedures are a means of aiding participants in a focus group to describe their experiences with a phenomenon, to name these experiences and to then describe the relationships between these named experiences. The objective of the IQA methodology is to create a picture, a Systems Influence Diagram (SID), representative of the mind map of the focus group participants, with regard to the phenomenon outlined in the issue statements. A summary of theoretical codes used to capture the relationships between affinities named, an Inter Relationship Diagram (IRD), is used to draw the SID. IQA requires the researcher to document each step of the research process, whilst acting as a facilitator by teaching the participants the IQA process on how to generate and analyse the data that they have generated, thereby minimising the researcher influence. This study provides qualitative research conducted in the fields of education and accounting, with a qualitative methodological approach, being Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA).