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Bloomfield, Sarah; Mooney, Evelyn; Salter, Abigail; Reid, Kristen; Marshall, Helen and Smith, Maria
(2025).
Abstract
The presentation will provide a ‘warts and all’ reflection on our experience of running a World Café for data collection purposes. As an approach, the World Café (WC) aims to facilitate development of a set of socially constructed themes emerging through guided dialogue and a ‘cross pollination of ideas’ (Löhr et al 2020). Although originally intended as a method for facilitating participatory action among diverse groups, the WC methodology has more recently been used as a data collection method within academic research. As such, the WC has similarities with a focus group methodology in capturing and sharing diverse perspectives, but with the additional dimension of allowing for a larger group of participants to simultaneously take part in the discussion (Alfred, 2011). As a cross-functional, cross-functional project team, we chose to use a WC approach within a research project investigating the lived experience of the three-way work-based learning pedagogical approach employed within degree apprenticeships. During the QRS presentation we will talk through some of the challenges we faced setting up, running, and interpreting findings using our WC approach. This included issues around ethics approval, recording data, analysing outputs, and losing control, and issues around actual and perceived qualitative rigour. Alongside the challenges however we will also discuss some of the novel insight that we developed through using the WC method. We will end with a discussion of some ideas we now have about ‘how to’ do a WC for research purposes.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
