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ResearchTalk, Inc.

ResearchTalk, Inc., provides consultation and professional development for qualitative researchers throughout the United States and Canada, with emphases in the areas of research plans, fieldwork, analysis strategies, results presentation, and software skills integration. The company is based on Long Island, New York, and was founded in 1996 by Raymond C. Maietta, the company's president.

Research Plans

ResearchTalk helps clients to design data collection and analysis strategies that provide insight about the processes that guide decision making and daily activities. By introducing more involved, open-ended discussions with respondents, researchers begin to understand better how and why people develop attitudes and engage in behaviors.

In the Field

Fieldwork should yield rich descriptions and explanations of behaviors and attitudes via thoughtful discussion and observation strategies with respondents. ResearchTalk works with clients to establish a window into the day-to-day lives of participants. In-person sessions, such as face-to-face interviews, focus groups, and on-site evaluations of a phenomenon typical of ethnographic fieldwork, can provide this window.

Analysis Strategies

Maietta created the “Sort and Sift, Think and Shift” qualitative analysis method. Sort and Sift emphasizes strategies to attain deep familiarization with data as an initial step in data analysis. This phase defines the creation of document and case profiles, codebooks, and memo-writing strategies. ResearchTalk works with clients from the beginning of, or deep into, a project to compare early project goals with emergent issues that arise during analysis. Some researchers apply techniques included in the Sort and Sift method, whereas others use methods familiar to qualitative researchers, including grounded theory, phenomenology, and ethnographic methods.

Results Presentation

Communication of key findings presents unique challenges to qualitative researchers. Frequently researchers wait to “finish” analysis before working on final presentation of qualitative information. Alternatively, building memos and visual diagrams throughout the life of a qualitative analysis project can result in an evolving presentation of materials in sync with data analysis. ResearchTalk works with clients to develop tools with qualitative software, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that provide opportunities to think out loud and refine ideas that emerge throughout an analysis.

Software Skills Integration

ResearchTalk's software integration strategies introduce users to software via necessary components of any qualitative analysis project. This approach ensures that software does not redefine how analysis proceeds but instead serves as a complementary tool for data organization and access. The focus, then, remains on the substance of the data and the analyst's responses to it.

  • qualitative analysis
  • software
  • memos
  • data analysis
  • fieldwork
  • qualitative methods
  • clients
Raymond C.Maietta
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412963909.n400
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