SILK took a trip to Bournemouth University to meet up with Dr Kip Jones, Reader in Qualitative Social Science.
After reading Kip’s blog we realised that a lot of the messages Kip shared were the same as those we had found here.
E.g. “organisations are about people first and that they will always work best when loosely structured and even a bit messy.”
We decided that it would be good for us to meet.
We discussed Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and SILK are now looking into getting a pack and using them in our work.
Kip also told us about how he uses Japanese sketch books to open up people’s creative sides, to encourage them to think of things in a different way. This is something that we are keen to introduce into our project work.
We went into the meeting wanting to know more about how to evaluate qualitative data especially as a lot of the time quantitative data, numbers and figures, are used to evaluate projects.
Kip reassured us that qualitative data can be evaluated and even if we only give an example of one life we have touched the implications of this one interaction can have an impact on many more than just the one person. So instead of always focussing on numbers we should look at the individual people and their stories – as that is what our work is about: people.
The meeting with Kip was fun and interesting, it was good to meet with someone from a more creative background but to realise that we are talking about the same things.
