This course focuses on the benefits and practices of integrating design thinking (DT), including human-centered design, methods into qualitative inquiry. With roots in fields including architecture, visual design, engineering, and business, design thinking offers a complementary set of methods for eliciting participants’ experiences and perspectives, collaboratively making sense of qualitative data, and translating findings into accessible and actionable forms. These visual, participatory, and action-oriented methods can expand the qualitative researcher’s methodological toolkit while creating new opportunities to engage participants and research teams throughout the research process. When used intentionally—with attention to power, participation, context, and whose knowledge informs decisions—design thinking can also support culturally responsive approaches to qualitative research.

This interactive workshop begins with a brief orientation to design thinking and its relationship to qualitative inquiry. Through a combination of mini-lessons, case examples, and hands-on practice, participants will explore selected design thinking methods and consider when and how they might complement more traditional qualitative approaches. Participants will also experiment with suggested generative AI (GenAI) prompts that can support thoughtful integration of design thinking into qualitative research while considering where human interpretation and judgment remain essential.

While many approaches to design thinking exist, this course draws primarily on methods developed and popularized by IDEO. Participants will examine and practice methods that can be adapted across the qualitative research process—from participant recruitment and data collection to collaborative sensemaking, analysis, and dissemination—and consider the purpose, opportunities, and limitations of using each method in qualitative inquiry:

• Extremes and Mainstreams:Recruiting participants with a range of experiences and perspectives, including those at the edges of your intended audience, to surface needs and insights that may otherwise be overlooked
• Conversation Starters: Using prompts, images, scenarios, or other stimuli to spark discussion and elicit participants’ experiences, perspectives, reactions, and underlying reasoning
• Card Sorts: Inviting participants to organize, categorize, rank, or prioritize information to surface how they understand relationships, distinctions, and what matters most to them
• Download Your Learnings:Sharing observations and data gathered so that individual researchers’ learnings become part of the team’s collective knowledge
• Find Themes: Identifying patterns, similarities, differences, and relationships across qualitative data to begin making sense of what was learned
• Generating Insights: Moving beyond observations and themes to develop interpretations that reveal something meaningful about participants’ experiences, needs, behaviors, or motivations for future action
• Journey Maps: Visually representing an experience or process over time to illuminate key moments, decisions, emotions, interactions, and points of friction from participants’ perspectives
• Storyboards:Using a sequence of visual frames to communicate qualitative findings through concrete experiences, interactions, or scenarios

In a sea of information, how do you craft qualitative research that truly shines?

This workshop is designed for researchers who want their qualitative work to be credible, publishable, and useful to the people who need it most. Rather than relying on worn-out and often inappropriate yardsticks such as “generalizability,” we will focus on resonance: the quality that helps findings feel meaningful, trustworthy, memorable, and actionable.

Resonant qualitative research does more than report themes. It connects research design to timely concerns, uses analysis to explain rather than merely describe, and offers insights that matter to real audiences, including article reviewers, funding officers, policy makers, practitioners, community partners, and people working in health, government, nonprofit, and academic settings.

Too often, resonance is treated as part of the hidden curriculum of qualitative research. Researchers are told that powerful writing, compelling findings, and practical impact matter, but they are not always shown how to achieve them. In this workshop, we will demystify resonance and identify concrete strategies for designing, analyzing, and writing qualitative research that captures attention and supports meaningful action.

By the end of the workshop, participants will:

• Understand resonance as a key qualitative practice, including how it differs from and overlaps with generalizability, aesthetic merit, transferability, and informational power.
• Develop research designs that speak to participants’ dilemmas, concerns, and lived experiences.
• Use analytic techniques that move beyond description toward interpretation, explanation, and insight.
• Explore ethical and practical ways to use large-language AI to support resonance-oriented qualitative practices.
• Practice heuristic activities for resonant claim-making, including jeopardy research questions, conceptual cocktail parties, negative case analysis, and abduction.
• Be introduced to complementary analytic approaches, including vignette analysis, typologies, metaphor and narrative analysis, explanation and causality, discourse tracing, deconstruction, and arts-based strategies.

Participants will leave with strategies for resonance, a stronger sense of how to make their qualitative research compelling, and greater confidence in moving their analysis from data to insight to impact.

Resources for this workshop draw from Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact (3rd ed., Wiley, 2025) and Sarah’s research in innovative qualitative methods and organizational communication. Sarah has published more than 100 scholarly essays, presented her qualitative research more than 350 times to scholarly, professional, and pedagogical audiences, and is a LEGO® Serious Play® Certified Facilitator.

The course explores how theoretical concepts can serve as tools for noticing patterns, tensions, and absences in data. Drawing on some of Vagle’s methodological techniques, participants will engage with lived experience as multi-faceted, relational, and continually shifting. This approach actively preserves the integrity of dynamic, unfolding human experience throughout the analysis.

Through close reading, analytic exercises, and sustained engagement with qualitative data, participants will conduct analyses that move fluidly among theory, data, context, and researcher positioning.

The course supports the development of theoretically rich analyses that remain attentive to complexity, ambiguity, and ethical responsibility. Participants will leave having deepened their analysis of a body of work they bring to the course.

Qualitative researchers hold some of the most powerful evidence for policy change, yet too often our findings stay in journal articles that policymakers never read. In this workshop, we discuss how stories, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and observations can reveal the underlying mechanisms that define social problems and turn those mechanisms into policy solutions.

Drawing on my work on police misconduct settlements, racial disparities in COVID-19 in Detroit, and school gardens in Washington, DC, I show how decisions made across the life of a qualitative project, from research design to dissemination, can uncover local solutions that scale to the state and federal levels through briefs, testimony, and legislation. In this regard, the goal is to move beyond simply highlighting problems and build the skills that make our research matter for people's everyday lives. Data do not speak for themselves. We have to give them a voice in the rooms where decisions are made.

3 core topics we address:

• Policy-ready design: Strategies to design and collect qualitative data with policy in mind from the start, including how to identify the decision-makers, levers, and timing that matter for your issue.
• Translation tools: A framework for turning themes and narratives into briefs, op-eds, memos, and testimony that pair stories with data and end with concrete recommendations.
• Engagement strategies: Best practices for working with policymakers, journalists, and community partners, plus ways to engage in self-care to sustain the work.