This is a Qualitative Research Fluency Blog (QRFB) created by Dr. Stuart W. Shulman for his spring 2007 PhD seminar on Qualitative Research Methods, taught in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. In this class, each student will create and post weekly to a qualitative research fluency blog. The QRFB will archive the path to qualitative research fluency that you find best suited to your needs and aspirations, and it will link together the efforts of each student with those of the others. In addition to the reading responses described below, QRFBs are places to think aloud about the ideas animating your project as well as to post responses to guest lectures by scholars visiting class.Dr. Stuart W. Shulman received a Bachelors degree from Boston University (Political Science and English) in 1989 and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon (Political Science) in 1999. He is now an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Information Sciences and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Senior Research Associate at Pitt’s University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) and in the Université de Genève-, European University Institute-, and Oxford Internet Institute-based E-Democracy Centre.
Dr. Shulman is the founder (2005) and Director of UCSUR’s Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP), which is a fee-for-service coding lab currently working on projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other U.S. funding agencies. He has been the Principal Investigator and Project Director on related National Science Foundation-funded research projects focusing on electronic rulemaking, human language technologies, digital citizenship, and service-learning efforts in the United States. In January 2007 he was named the next Director of the Sara Fine Institute at the University of Pittsburgh.
