Qualitative Methods and Sight-impairment: developing a toolkit for inclusive teaching.

Background
Research methods is a key component of a psychology degree and recognised as a challenging topic to learn and teach. However, students who have sight-impairments experience additional barriers to its study, which could inhibit life-long learning in this area.
Despite a growing body of literature to guide inclusive teaching practices for quantitative methods, little (if anything) is available for qualitative methods. However, these methods are traditionally taught using visual techniques (e.g. thematic maps), presenting barriers to learners with sight-impairments.
This (ongoing) project explores the experience of learning qualitative methods from the perspectives of both students and tutors, in order to develop a “toolkit” to guide inclusive teaching-practice. Developing more inclusive teaching practice would likely benefit all students and help to promote engagement and learning of research methods.

Design
This inductive qualitative research forms part of a “Students as Academic Partners” project, due to be completed by May 2018.

Methods
Students and tutors from the University of Worcester, with experience of learning/teaching qualitative methods in relation to sight-impairment will be recruited using opportunistic and snowball sampling.
Data will be collected using semi-structured interviews and analysed using thematic analysis.

Results
Barriers to learning qualitative methods and strategies adopted to manage these will be explored. In particular, it is important tutors recognise sight-impairment is not “one thing”, and that a range of strategies for adapting teaching-practice is required for diverse needs to be met.

Conclusions
The experience of learning qualitative methods for students who have sight-impairments has received little attention, making it difficult to identify inclusive teaching-practice in this area. This research outlines a toolkit with practical recommendations that tutors can draw on so their practice can better meet the needs of learners with sight-impairments.