Every year since 2010, we have invited qualitative research practitioners, faculty, and students from around the world to join us on the NSU campus in January for The Qualitative Report (TQR) Annual Conference. The two-day event is organized around a theme and features plenary addresses by internationally recognized qualitative research experts, peer-reviewed paper and panel presentations, and interactive workshops.

The theme for TQR2015 is “Transforming Qualitative Research.”

Insights from qualitative research are having a transformative effect on how we understand and manage our world. Quantitative renderings of what happened are now regularly joined by qualitative descriptions, interpretations, and explanations of not only the what, but also the how, the why, the who, the when, and the where to produce better context-sensitive information on which important decisions can be made. This emerging practice of regularly including qualitative and quantitative perspectives in inquiries has led to changes in how we design, evaluate, access, understand, and change the world around us.

Qualitative research can also have a transformative influence on the persons conducting the inquiry. A qualitative way of knowing the world can change how we hear and see others; and how we reflect on our own participation in the world around ourselves. The skill sets and knowledge base demanded by qualitative research including technology prowess, artistic aplomb, and methodology acumen challenge us to grow continuously in order to meet the changing demands of academia and the marketplace.

This transformational effect is an interactional affair because the world around us has also influenced how we conduct and communicate our qualitative craft and product. Big data with its powerful analytics, ubiquitous technologies with immediate feedback, collaborative demands for design decisions, and mixed-methods for an array of research strategies can be seen as threats to what we understand qualitative research traditionally to be, or be accepted as a natural evolution of ethnographic, phenomenological, narrative, and discursive ways of knowing.

At TQR2015, we want to ponder transforming qualitative research by featuring works, of and on qualitative inquiry, that exemplify the agents of change we can be as qualitative researchers and how elements around such as mixed-method designs and big data can also serve as active ingredients modifying the ways in which we practice and conceive qualitative research. To this end we encourage prospective presenters to submit their paper and paper panel proposals that will inspire conference attendees to consider transformative qualitative research and researchers. In keeping with the spirit of our theme of transformation, we are also open to receiving creative presentation forms and content that can transform our conference in style and substance.

We will be accepting submissions from February 1 to April 30, 2014. Over the next few weeks we will share more details about TQR 2015. As always, please let us know your questions and comments by sending us your emails to tqr@nova.edu, posting to our Facebook page, ortweeting us!

Call for Submissions
February 1 – April 30, 2014

There will be two types of presentations at TQR2015:

• Individual Paper Presentation: Presenters share the results of their research findings or innovations for 20 minutes with an additional question and answer period following the paper presentations.
• Complete Paper Panel: Three to four presenters share the results of their research findings or innovations for 20 minutes each with an additional question and answer period following the paper presentations. There must be a theme organizing the individual paper presentations and a designated moderator.

For all presentations, submitters must provide

• A title consisting of no more than 60 characters
• A presentation summary consisting of no more than 500 characters
• Names, institutional affiliations, and email addresses for all presenters.

All presentation proposals must be submitted via the TQR2015 portal which opened February 1, 2014 and will close April 30, 2014.

The portal to submit your proposals in now open at https://www.nova.edu/webforms/tqr/submissions/.