8 - Nature of Qualitative Research Flashcards
qualitative research
usually involves inductive view between research and theory
- interpretivist in that is seeks to understand social world through people’s interpretation of it
- constructivist in that social life is understood to be outcome of interactions and negotiations rather than fixed structure to which individuals conform and react
- naturalist in that disturbance to social world is minimized
ethnography/participant observation
researcher is immersed in social setting, observing and listening to people
interviewing types
in depth, unstructured, or structured
focus groups
several people are interviewed together, often using semi-structured format
language based approaches to qualitative research
discourse and conversation analysis
main steps of qualitative research
- general research question
- selecting relevant sites and subjects
- collection of data
- interpretation of data
- conceptual and theoretical work
- writing up findings/conclusions
unlike most quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers don’t consider ________ to be central to work.
measures of concepts
elements of trustworthiness
credibility, tranferability, dependability, confirmability
credibility
parallels internal validity, interpretations presented in study ring true to people observed, entails following procedures and submitting findings to people studied for confirmation aka respondent/member validation
respondent/member validation problems
may lead participants to react defensively and/or demand censorship, relationship between respondent/interviewee may be reluctant to criticize, can respondents validate scholarly material?
transferability
parallels external validity, thick description provides others with database needed to assess possibly transferability
dependability
parallels reliability; keep complete records of all phases of research process, ensure records are accessible
confirmability
parallels objectivity, difficult (impossible?) in social research, ensure researcher was not swayed by personal values or theoretical inclinations
goals of qualitative research
- description and emphasis on content
- process and flexibility
- seeing through the eyes of those studied
- limited structure
descriptive excess
whereby the amount of detail overwhelms or inhibits analysis of data
why is process and flexibility important in qualitative research?
- avoiding placing predetermined set of assumptions on social world
- keeping structure to minimum is supposed to enhance likelihood that research will reveal perspectives of people observed
- limiting areas of inquiry may prevent new/unconsidered aspects from coming to light
- researcher can change direction of investigation much more easily than in qualitative
critiques of qualitative
- too subjective
- difficult to replicate
- problems with generalization
- lack of transparency
what does it mean that qualitative research is too subjective?
- finding depend too much on researcher’s values and opinions regarding what is significant
- why did the researcher choose to narrow subject down to where they did?
what does it mean that qualitative research too difficult to replicate?
- because it is unstructured and relies on researcher ingenuity
- behaviour is influenced by personality, age, gender, etc
what does it mean that qualitative research has problems of generalization?
- scope of findings is too restrictive
- is the small sample size representative?
- in most cases it is not the goal to produce generalizable knowledge
what does it mean that qualitative research lacks transparency?
-how were the subjects chosen? how were conclusions reached, etc?
contrasts between qualitative & quantitative
- numbers vs words
- researcher’s POV vs participant POV
- researcher as distant vs close
- theory/concepts tested in research vs developed from data
- structured vs unstructured
- generalized knowledge vs contextual understanding
- hard reliable data vs rich deep data
- macro vs micro
- behaviour vs meaning
- artificial vs natural setting
