Graduate students' voice and conceptions on the challenges of undertaking qualitative research within higher education context: a grounded theory approach

Abstract

Purpose

This paper explores the challenges of conducting qualitative research from ELT (English Language Teaching) Ph.D. candidates' perspectives.

Design/methodology/approach

The participants of the study consisted of 30 Iranian Ph.D. students majoring in ELT. The semi-structured interview was employed to investigate the heart of experiences, issues and concerns of participants with regard to conducting qualitative research (QLR) challenges. To analyze the collected data, the recorded interviews were transcribed, and then the grounded theory approach was employed (Charmaz, 2006).

Findings

The results revealed that the major challenges of the participants consist of the credibility of QLR in ELT contexts, hermeneutic and fuzzy nature of QLR, qualitative data analysis and interpretation, publishing qualitative findings and the system of measuring professors' productivity.

Originality/value

The findings may help professors, mainly EFL ones, in research mentoring and developing research syllabi for graduate students. In addition, it may motivate Ph.D. candidates to employ QLR methods in their research studies. The pedagogical and theoretical implications of the study are discussed at the end of the paper.

Citation

Bakhshi, H., Weisi, H. and Yousofi, N. (2022), "Graduate students' voice and conceptions on the challenges of undertaking qualitative research within higher education context: a grounded theory approach", Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 1055-1078. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-02-2021-0049