TPC-Journal-V4-Issue4

The Professional Counselor \Volume 4, Issue 4 290 development concerns and career development issues related to the current economic climate. The following three items were generated based on this pilot testing process: 1. In your own work, what are the most significant career development and work issues experienced by traditionally marginalized populations? 2. Please discuss the issues you described in the previous question as they relate to the current economic climate. 3. Please provide suggestions about how career counselors and the career development profession could effectively respond to the issues you have just described. Given this new question format, question 1 provided a control to prevent confounding data collection, but also allowed the investigation of expert opinion about this topic. The data collected from these three qualitative questions were analyzed using qualitative description (QD). Sandelowski (2000, 2010) described QD as a research design that stays close to the data. Researchers cannot really divorce themselves from interpretation in the analysis process; however, in QD, researchers seek low inference interpretations and use content analysis to develop thick descriptions of participants’ experiences and perspectives. In other words, researchers analyze the data with the intent to giving voice to the research participants, as opposed to interpreting the data through the researchers’ vantage point. As opposed to other qualitative methods such as Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), the purpose of QD is not to analyze data with the goal of creating theoretical models. Rather, the goal of QD is to simply describe qualitative data in a way that is concise, rich and thorough. The authors specifically chose the QD method since their goal was to describe participants’ viewpoints rather than making theoretical inferences about their viewpoints. The authors also attempted to increase the trustworthiness of the analysis by arriving at a consensus about the results of the analysis at each stage as described below. Three researchers (the first, second, and third authors) used QD to analyze data collected by round 1 participants, all of whom possessed both privileged and marginalized identities. Of these three researchers, two were female, one was male; one identified as heterosexual, two identified as lesbian; two were first-generation college students and one was formerly homeless. Each researcher read the raw data and created codes for each discrete idea that occurred within participants’ responses to the questions. These three researchers then met as a team to discuss and reach a consensus about how to delineate complete ideas and what codes should be associated with each of the ideas. The end result was a list of codes that described each discrete idea that the respondents presented. These codes were then consolidated with other similar codes, which resulted in a list of categories. The categories represented a more complete description of the similar ideas presented across participants. Finally, these categories were organized into larger themes that better arranged the data for the purpose of review and description. No idea or category was given more or less weight in this process. Rather, the goal was to capture and describe all ideas that the participants presented with as minimal repetition of content as possible. Round two . The results from the qualitative analysis of question 3 (“Please provide suggestions about how career counselors and the career development profession could effectively respond to the issues you have just described”) were used to create a survey. The creation of such a survey is consistent with the Delphi method (Linstone & Turoff, 1975; Skulmoski et al., 2007; Vázquez-Ramos et al., 2007) and is intended to provide an avenue for experts to rate the relative importance of the issues they have put forward as a group. Questions 1 and 2 were not used to create a ranked survey because question 1 was used as a control question, and