The Promises and Pitfalls of Using Student-Generated Data to Teach Deductive Qualitative Analysis

A specific challenge of qualitative methods teaching is including skills for both data generation and data analysis, with recent audits of political science curricula revealing that the latter is particularly neglected at the undergraduate level. There are few published discussions on the importance of teaching analytical mechanics or guidance provided on how best to find and use data for teaching. This article explains how we integrated an exercise that enabled our class of more than 100 undergraduate students to generate their own original data and then to practice deductive coding and analysis. In addition to discussing our teaching experiences, we draw on interviews with our students to reflect on the successes and challenges of our approach and to offer suggestions to other instructors who want to replicate our strategy in a large undergraduate setting.