I’m Jane Gilgun. I used to be a prof at the University of Minnnesota. Now I'm a retired prof living a wonderful life in Rhode Island where I'm enjoying the deliciousness of time to enjoy being alive. I have two horses, Ellie who is 31 and an Arab, and Finn who is 21 and a half Arab. They are mother and son. Ellie was recently diagnoses with an inflammation of her left eye, a condition called moon blindness. She may go blind in that eye. I am heartbroken.

You can read one of my articles with a click on the button above. I have many other articles and books available on Amazon and Wordpress. My topics are qualitative research in the Chicago School tradition, human development, and violence prevention. I also have more than 300 videos on YouTube.

I have done a lot of work on deductive qualitative analysis, which is a way of using theory from the start in qualitative research. We can use concepts from theory as sensitizing or we can test theory. Testing theory qualitatively requires that we conduct interviews, observations, and document analysis with an open mind, by setting our theories aside is order to give space for people and their activities to take their own courses without our undue interference through pre-formulated questions and ideas.

I recommend in-depth reflexivity statements where we express our personal experiences with the topic as well as our understandings of the situations and experiences of the persons and settings that interest us. In social work, we focus on power and resources and so much of what we do involves reflections on our own assumptions and understandings of the power/lack of power, resources/lack of resources, how people cope, and the various outcomes they experience.

Most questions that we ask are open-ended. We seek to understand the experiences of others--their accounts of their experiences. We typically do little talking ourselves.

We also write fieldnotes after each interview, observation, or document analysis. Field notes offer an opportunity to keep track of what is involved in each of these encounters as well as providing opportunity for reflections on personal meanings and on theorizing.

Analysis involves coding, or identifying and labeling chunks of meaning. Codes come from the theory we are using and from other sources, such as theory and research whose significance we had not anticipated. In addition, we draw upon our reflexivity statements. We continually challenge, revise, add to, and discard emerging ideas.