The Staff Ride: An Approach to Qualitative Data Generation and Analysis

Abstract

We present and illustrate the research staff ride – the recreation of a historical event for the purpose of understanding organizational phenomena through observation, reflection and discussion. Staff rides make unique contributions to research through the independent analysis of events outside of organizations by content experts who collectively and concurrently reflect upon retrospective data while experiencing context. Staff rides involve the examination of ordered sequences of contextually-bound events and, thus, promote participants’ understanding of the dependence between past and future observations. In this paper, we elaborate on the types of data, data collection procedures, and data analyses for research staff rides. Importantly, we discuss potential strengths and challenges associated with staff rides in qualitative research, along with ways to address these challenges.

Keywords: qualitative research method, context, retrospective case study