Before entering this doctoral program I know almost nothing about qualitative research. Coming from a technology field, Dr. Gross’s class is the first time I know terms like “participant observation” and “focused group”, and it took me a while to figure out the term “coding” refers to an interpretive technique not programming…Until now I still didn’t have much experience using qualitative methods (although I plan to) in my research, but I’m trying to be more familiar with how qualitative research should be conducted through research project(s) which will not directly related to my dissertation topic. Now I’m conducting interview about usage practice and user intention of multilingual search queries–the topic I used for Dr. Gross’s class. Since I do not have much training about how to conduct interview, sometimes I feel I over direct the participants too much, which may hurt the objectivity of the results… It seems qualitative research requires higher level of research skills, relatively, than quantitative, since the researcher’s experience and skill sets have more chance to influence the quality of data. However, I do get many interest findings from the interviews, which I’ve never known or found from quantitative data (I collected real-time multilingual search queries directly from search engines too). And for the “why question” (not only for this study), in most cases can only be answered by qualitative research. So I will definitely employ qualitative method in my dissertation, which (probably) focuses on people’s perception of quality of collaborative knowledge creation and how they feel certain design can facilitate the knowledge creation and exchange, as well as improve the quality of the “final product”.