European Chapter - Qualitative methods, , QDA, Research Methods, research methodologies

Advisory Board Members - European Chapter

Alberto Crescentini	Alberto Crescentini, PhD is Professor of Educational Sciences at the Alta Scuola Pedagogica (ASP) of Locarno and visiting professor at the Università Cattolica S.C. of Milan. He teaches Educational Search Methodology since 2004 and from 2008 he coordinates the research activities of Alta Scuola Pedagogica. His research interests lie in research design topics and in interviews with “special” subjects (e.g. militants, dirty workers, child) remembering that, in any case, all the subjects are special. As for software, he usually work with Atlas.ti and T-LAB. For for both of them he gives courses to PhD students at different universities.

Brigitte Smit	Brigitte Smit (PhD) is Professor in the Department of Further Teacher Education, at the University of South Africa. She coordinates research courses, teaches Qualitative Research, and CAQDAS - Atlas.ti, serves on national and international editorials boards and has published in national and international journals. Her current research focuses on female leadership in disadvantaged schools. Scholars from various universities in South Africa, as well as the Vrije University in the Netherlands, participate in this project. In 2007, she was invited as visiting scholar to the University of Alberta, in Canada. She is the recipient of the 2009 Outstanding Reviewer Award: American Educational Research Journal: Social and Institutional Analysis – American Educational Research Association. Brigitte also teaches qualitative research in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Mozambique.

Silvana di Gregorio	Dr. di Gregorio is a sociologist who founded SdG Associates after 20 years in academia. She consults and runs training courses in a variety of software packages supporting qualitative analysis in the UK, Europe and USA. She is particularly interested in integrating the teaching of qualitative analysis software within qualitative analysis courses and has recently designed such an online course. She takes a meta-brand perspective on the methodological issues that need to be considered when conducting qualitative analysis using software as elaborated upon in the book – di Gregorio, S. and Davidson, J. (2008) Qualitative Research Design for Software Users.

Susanne Friese	Dr Susanne Friese is a Lecturer at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Hanover, Germany, and has her own consulting firm. She teaches qualitative and quantitative methodologies to graduate and undergraduate students, offers workshops to train people in using CAQDAS and provides project consultation. She has a master degree in family resource management and marketing from Oregon State University (USA) and a PhD in Social Science from the University of Hohenheim, Germany. She is also an editor of FQS and a member of the Association for Qualitative Research.

Jeanine Evers	Jeanine Evers is a lecturer in qualitative methods at the University for Humanistics in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and an active member of the Dutch Working Group for Qualitative Research, KWALON. She manages the training department of this platform and gives workshops for the platform in Atlas.ti, qualitative interviewing, focusgroups and qualitative analysis. She obtained a Master degree in Cultural Anthropology (University of Leiden, 1990) and in Public Administration (Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2001). From 1990 onwards she has been doing mostly qualitative research in several policy domains concerning norms and values, health care and discrimination in the Netherlands and Curaçao.

Brit-Helle Aarskog	Brit Helle Aarskog is the Chief Scientific Officer of TextUrgy, which is a company that delivers semantic search technology. Her main research areas are within the fields of information access technology, digital asset management, methods and techniques for content analysis, classification principles, and design of software solutions supporting thematic/semantic text exploration. She is the holder of one Norwegian patent and one PCT patent pending application in EPO, USA and Canada. Since 2000, she has trained researchers and students at the University of Bergen (Norway) in using software like WordSmith and ATLASti in analysis projects, including how to benefit from a mixed used of various analytical approaches.

Silvia A. Silva	Sílvia Silva (Phd) is a Professor and Principal Researcher in ISCTE-IUL and CIS (Lisbon, Portugal) in the field of organizational psychology applied to occupational safety and well-being. She has been the coordinator of several projects, as for instance: "Coding, analysis and prevention of occupational accidents“, “Safety culture research and diagnosis in the Portuguese air control”, “Impacts of work accidents”. In her research, she use Atlas.ti for content analysis and grounded theory for studying Organizational Culture and Safety Culture. Since 2003, she has been training Master and PhD students, in qualitative research and using software’s like ATLAS.ti in content analysis and grounded theory.

Joan F. Fondevila	Dr. Fondevila Gascón is professor in the University Abat Oliba (UAO), University Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and University Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), and director of the Cable Studies Center (CECABLE). He is research leader of groups about technology and education, broadband, communication and information sciences, journalism and digital journalism (new formats, new genres), cable and telecommunications, technology, politics and sociology, solidary economy and Broadband Society. The main goal is to discover and preview the digital society effects, taking account the bandwidth evolution (process of universalization, guaranteed flow by means of SLA and CIR) and the telecommunications and cable networks.

Christina Silver	Dr Christina Silver has worked with the CAQDAS Networking Project for over 10 years and contributes to the project’s training and capacity building activities. The CAQDAS Networking Project provides platforms for debate concerning the use of CAQDAS in qualitative research and has trained over 6000 researchers in the use of several different packages. The project now also encompasses a new stream of research and development, Qualitative Innovations in CAQDAS (QUIC) which explores three new developments in the use of CAQDAS alongside the training and capacity building activities.


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