On May 6, 2024, Dr. Joyce Lee from NCCU conducted a lecture titled “Decoding Qualitative Paper” in Dr. Chen’s research methodology class. The focus was on the qualitative research process with Dr. Lee’s research papers as examples, which were related to Dr. Lee’s interests in digital innovation, digital inclusion, and the social media community.

Dr. Lee started the session by discussing the benefits and challenges of qualitative papers. The benefits of qualitative papers were mainly about developing an in-depth understanding of a research phenomenon, but the challenges were that the research process was very time consuming. Dr. Lee then continued the lecture by explaining qualitative research design. She used her paper titled “Building digital resilience against crises: The case of Taiwan’s COVID-19 pandemic management” to illustrate the process. Her approach of conducting a qualitative study was to first develop an intriguing research question, which should begin by reading many research papers to identify research gaps. It was also critical to make sure that the topic and research questions were relevant from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

Dr. Lee then went on to discuss the topical importance of digital resilience and illustrate the significance of justifying research phenomenon. She then discussed how to identify research gaps that had not been examined in the literature, a research process that might require deeper justification in qualitative research than in quantitative ones.

As she explained how she proceeded with her research, she showed how to select suitable cases, negotiate research access, and carry out data collection. Her data collection included interviews, direct observation, and archival data. She advised that interview questions be related to research questions. Upon data collection, data analysis began, which was very time consuming and might be the hardest part in qualitative research. It included detailed coding process that sought to develop novel theoretical perspectives as she did. The fact that her paper was eventually published in Information Systems Journal, one of the top ranked journals in her field, illustrated excellent hands-on qualitative endeavor after which future researchers could model.