OMG!!! Lyn Richards…Rock Goddess of Qual Research Says Hello to QRIP!!!!

Here’s her Bio!!!

Lyn Richards (B.A. Hon., political science; M.A., sociology) is a qualitative research writer and consultant and Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Business at RMIT University in Melbourne. As a family sociologist, she published four books and many papers on Australian families and women’s roles. As a methodologist, she taught graduate and undergraduate qualitative research at La Trobe University and went on to write for and teach the teachers. Her most recent book is Handling Qualitative Data, Second Edition (SAGE, 2009). In university research with Tom Richards, she developed the NUD*IST software and founded QSR International, Melbourne. In interaction with the researchers using the software, and later development teams at QSR, she worked on the design of the subsequent versions (to N6) and then NVivo, as a principal member of the QSR software-development teams and author of the software’s documentation. She was an invited speaker at all of the conferences in the first decade of qualitative computing and a leading teacher and trainer internationally in qualitative computing and the handling of qualitative data. Richards has taught qualitative methods and qualitative software to some 4,000 researchers in 15 countries, and learned from them all.

Here’s Lyn talking to QRIP exclusively about her work over many decades!!!!

For me it’s a self indulgence – I really like being useful.  I’ve learned an awful lot about the challenges of novice qualitative researchers and the difficulties of doing justice to qualitative data, but I learned it all a weird way. I’ve been out of academia ‘proper’ for a long time – a very long time since I thought of myself as a family sociologist and my last family sociology book was Intermission, in 1997. Tom Richards and I left La Trobe after he wrote the NUDIST software for my family sociology work, and the university was totally unable to deal with us trying to give it to them. So for the next decade I taught the researchers and the professors – round the world, as we found to our horror we were leading this field – and I learned hugely from that. We founded QSR back in 1995, said we’d give it a decade and did – that was hard work but we met a lot of marvellous people and I did a lot of thinking about what qualitative researchers are trying to do with data, and how software could help (and hinder). Escaped the corporate cage in 2006 – and dropped into an adjunct position.

My writing is now purely practical – trying to spill all methods ideas I’ve learned and developed during these years of methods teaching and talking directly with amazing people like Strauss and Huberman. I’ve just managed to finish the third ed of Readme First –http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book236735 - launched this month at AERA which I had great pleasure in not attending! Sage wants a third ed of Handling Qualitative Data next year. Both are out in Japanese and Italian now and RF in Korean.

QIG meets monthly. I launched it as an informal discussion group, emphatically not a lecture series, and I ban any attempt to turn it into an NVivo advice session! (I actually don’t have the current rev of NVivo – decided the only way to stop people coming to me for training and help  was to cut myself off from software teaching and advice entirely. QIG’s base rules are no papers, no pressures, bring your problems and feel able to talk about them.  I used to run such a group at La Trobe (it was nicknamed the Gourmet Group because they all brought food and a very international cuisine resulted!) QIG changes constantly in membership as folks shift jobs and finish projects or theses. They come in from all over Melbourne and all over the spectrum of qualitative areas.

Here’s Lyn saying how brilliant our Blog is !!!

Love your blog – and your openness and practical de-mystifying approach. Qualitative research needs so much more such input – and an ability to laugh at itself.

Lyn welcomes visitors to her own meetings.......if your interested contact me and Ill post the topics