2025 Virtual Conference

Managing Your Academic Journey: Confronting Everyday Challenges

In this workshop, Dr. Gustafson will walk you through some of the everyday challenges graduate students encounter in their academic journey. Her goal is to create a virtual space where you can reflect on the many factors shaping your experience. That means strategies for managing factors that are within your control and contextualizing those factors that may derail you.

Dr. Gustafson will offer practical tools that support productivity and enhance writing practices, strategies such as nurturing the student-advisor relationship, preparing for when things go sideways (because they will) and changing your relationship with publication rejection. She will invite you to shift your mindset when dealing with internal challenges, such as crises of confidence, creative anxiety (AKA writer’s block) and safeguarding your well-being. Because your time is valuable, the conversation will focus on issues participants consider most important.

Approaches and Tools for Qualitative Data Coding

This workshop aims to provide participants with some basic tools for approaching their qualitative data analysis (and/or understanding how published analyses have come about).

The first half is an introduction to the logic of coding and will take the participants through the key steps of the coding process (pre-analysis, construction of a coding scheme, coding and categorising, pattern-seeking and interpretation, writing-up). We will also discuss different ways how this process is typically implemented (formalised vs less formalised ; inductive vs deductive, etc.), as well as different layers of this process, moving from rather descriptive to more analytical levels.

The second part of the workshop consists in a short introduction to software-assisted coding, with the example of MaxQDA. We will look at the basic functions of MaxQDA and what the software can (and cannot) assist us with. We will then very briefly discuss other available softwares (such as Nvivo, Atlas.ti or Dedoose), as well as the use of AI-tools (that are starting to be included in some softwares) for qualitative data analysis.

This workshop is designed for participants who are beginning to analyze data and want to learn how to get started.