On May 8th, 2018, FED and Institute of Macau Education Development were honored to invite Prof. Li Jun, Professor in the college of Education at Western University and Former Chairman of Hong Kong Education Research Association, attended to CityU Education Forum from his busy schedule! As the 17th guest speaker of the forum, Prof. Li entitled “Design Qualitative Research: Fundamentals, Steps and Examples”, and discussed about his research experience to all participants.

At the beginning, Prof. Li first introduced his research career and shared his writing experience in academic journals and dissertations. He pointed out that communication between people plays an important role in the research process. Therefore, people need to be careful when writing the dissertations. He thought that research methods are the most important parts for postgraduates to learn in their studying process. If the research methods go wrong, energy and time will be wasted. In the meantime, Prof. Li denoted that postgraduates should know their research capabilities and maintain a tough heart in order to carry out the research. Next, he defined the definition of qualitative research and indicated that people who could make good use of critical thinking can do their research more smoothly, and taught all participants how to make their research become more meaningful. Moreover, he pointed out that it is not necessary to use multiple instances and methods in qualitative research when he classified the differences between quantitative research and qualitative research, and emphasized on subjectivity of knowledge construction with the detail explanations of three patterns of qualitative methods. He believes that it is more meaningful to increase the level of the research rather than research for the research. Finally, Prof. Li used his works as example to explain how to conduct case studies in each research process.

After the speech, postgraduates raised their doubts to Prof. Li, such as the origin of transformative paradigm and the representation of qualitative method. Prof. Li answered all their questions in detail. Besides, Dr. Sean Li, Academic Registrar and Dean of FED of City University of Macau made a summary of the forum, and proposed that the objective of research is not only for solving problems but in order to have a deeper understanding on the relationship between people and how to get along well. Education is not just a natural science, it is also a humanities science.