Tag: Subjectivity

Seeing myself in pixels: What happens when GenAI becomes a co-researcher?

Author: Lynette Pretorius. I didn’t set out to write an essay about academic identity, generative AI, and publishing politics. But, as with so many qualitative journeys, the story found me first. What started as a playful experiment with image generation soon became a critical turning point in how I understand knowledge, creativity, and resistance within
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ChatGPT as a qualitative research partner

Authors: Lynette Pretorius and Chris Pretorius. The rise of generative AI has sparked new conversations about its role in academic research. While generative AI tools like ChatGPT have proven effective for summarisation, pattern recognition, and text classification, their potential in deep, interpretive qualitative data analysis remains underexplored. In our recent study, we examine the integration
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Whose story is it anyway? The transformative power of pseudonym choice

Author: Lynette Pretorius and Sweta Vijaykumar Patel. As qualitative researchers, we’ve often used pseudonyms in our work to protect the identities of participants. It’s a standard practice and one that’s meant to safeguard confidentiality while ensuring their stories remain authentic. But recently, we conducted a study that made us pause and rethink how we approach
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Psychological capital in the PhD

Author: Lynette Pretorius. Hi there! Have you ever wondered what it really takes to thrive during a PhD? For over a decade, I’ve worked closely with graduate students, helping them navigate the academic and emotional hurdles of this journey. Along the way, I’ve seen a lot—students overwhelmed by isolation, stress, and uncertainty. Many come to
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Moving beyond binaries in research: weaving the tapestry of participants’ experiences

Author: Lynette Pretorius. In today’s data-driven world, there is a lot of talk about making decisions based on so-called objective data. For example, schools and universities use information about the mix of students and staff to shape how they teach and run things. Information such as age, where people live, how much schooling they have
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Demystifying research paradigms

Author: Lynette Pretorius. Let’s talk about one of the most complex parts of research – understanding the philosophical underpinnings of your worldview and how this shapes the way your research is done. This is called a research paradigm and is one of the areas I get the most frequent questions about from graduate research students.
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Autoethnography: What is it and how do you do it?

Author: Lynette Pretorius. Autoethnography has become an increasingly popular research methodology, particularly within the humanities and social sciences. I use it regularly because of its emphasis on personal experiences, reflexivity, and storytelling which allows for a deeper exploration of complex experiences and societies. So what is autoethnography? The name autoethnography comes from three core aspects:
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Combining research and storytelling: Using personal experiences as research data

Author: Lynette Pretorius. I find it quite amusing that I would be writing this blog post to advocate for a research methodology as emotional and subjective as autoethnography. For over a decade, I was trained to conduct scientific research where objective answers were sought to solve problems. My research focused on examining a gene activated
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