The use of Q Methodology
Earlier this year, Martin Hughes, a member of the Centre for Critical Psychology and Education presented at the 33rd annual conference of the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity. The conference always attracts users of Q Methodology from across the world and participants learned about a wide range of work applied in many different contexts, which illuminated marginalised voices. Martin shared his work concerning student viewpoints of teaching and learning on the doctoral programme that he works on, the initial training of educational psychologists. The University of Sheffield is keen to explore student engagement, a theme close to the hearts of many colleagues in the School of Education. The team working on the three year Doctoral training programme (DEdCPsy) at Sheffield University have promoted an ‘Adult Learning Model’ (ALM), believing that students are in an excellent position to judge what they need and require from the course and emphasising the active construction of knowledge, providing students with opportunities to shape the curriculum, encouraging reflective analysis and self-evaluation. Over the three years, staff assume that students will experience increasing confidence and competence and construct a model of the role of the Educational Psychologist with which they are comfortable. Exploring the student perspective, Martin shared some thoughts based on findings to provide a critical consideration of the ALM in his presentation. Data gathered over four years using Q Methodology enabled five viewpoints based on the student experience, to be interpreted. More recent work has focused on views concerning the idealised view of the ALM-seeking to understand the meaning that this construct holds for staff and students. We have found that there are many similarities between a dominant view of the actual experience of students on our course and an idealised view of teaching and learning on the DEdCPsy. Our approach challenges a ‘one-size-fits-all model’ and encourages exploration of how a deeper understanding of different viewpoints might enable the student experience to be improved.
Martin has been a keen and active user of Q Methodology for more than a decade, using it in a number of studies and publishing some of this work, including the viewpoints of young researchers (the subject of his Doctoral work), school transition from (Y6 to Y7) and student viewpoints of teaching and learning. Martin secured a small grant (Curriculum Development Fund) to facilitate further work with doctoral students on the implications for engagement, of different views of teaching and learning. Sage have recently published some of this work on their new dataset collection (Hughes, M and Watts, S. 2018 Using Q Methodology as a Course Feedback System SAGE Research Methods Datasets. The Dataset collection is something that institutional universities need to subscribe to in order to have access. If you have a university affiliation but no access to Datasets, you could go to https://freetrials.sagepub.com/ where you can sign up for a trial of the platform. A general overview of Q can be found here
Martin describes Q as critical, respectful and person-centred and has developed an approach to Q-inspired card sorting with young people, illuminating their voices, in his work as an educational psychologist. He is a member of the Centre for Critical Psychology and Education.
Dr Martin Hughes
