From February 28, 2023, we conducted a qualitative research methods workshop. This was a 4-day intensive workshop to learn about how to conduct qualitative research. We invited Prof. Pranee Liamputtong from college of health sciences, VinUniversity, Vietnam as Kyoto University Visiting Scholar for one month in Kyoto University School of Public Health. Prof. Liamputtong has been publishing many textbooks on how to conduct qualitative research. She had also published more than 100 academic journal publications using qualitative research methods.

In this 4-day workshop, the participating students learned why qualitative research method is useful in the medical/healthcare/public health fields, and various types of qualitative research methods, with the particular focus on phenomenology as a methodological framework. We also learned about the rigor in conducting qualitative research. The workshop incorporated the lecture and the group work so that the participating students and faculty members could learn by actually conducting group exercises, such as how to come up with a qualitative research question, and interview questions, as well as how to do coding for qualitative analysis.

From March 6, we held another 4-day workshop by Prof. Liamputtong on “Qualitative Meta Synthesis”. In this workshop, participants learned how to conduct qualitative meta synthesis, which is a method to conduct systematic search of qualitative research methods papers of a specific topic and synthesize multiple papers to derive overarching themes. The lecture included such topics as what is qualitative meta synthesis, how to conduct literature search and appraisal of the selected papers using CASP qualitative studies checklist. The participants also learned how to code the data in qualitative meta synthesis.