8 - Nature of Qualitative Research

Question 1

qualitative research

Answer 1

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

Question 2

ethnography/participant observation

Answer 2

researcher is immersed in social setting, observing and listening to people

Question 3

interviewing types

Answer 3

in depth, unstructured, or structured

Question 4

focus groups

Answer 4

several people are interviewed together, often using semi-structured format

Question 5

language based approaches to qualitative research

Answer 5

discourse and conversation analysis

Question 6

main steps of qualitative research

Answer 6

1. general research question
2. selecting relevant sites and subjects
3. collection of data
4. interpretation of data
5. conceptual and theoretical work
6. writing up findings/conclusions

Question 7

unlike most quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers don’t consider ________ to be central to work.

Answer 7

measures of concepts

Question 8

elements of trustworthiness

Answer 8

credibility, tranferability, dependability, confirmability

Question 9

credibility

Answer 9

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

Question 10

respondent/member validation problems

Answer 10

may lead participants to react defensively and/or demand censorship, relationship between respondent/interviewee may be reluctant to criticize, can respondents validate scholarly material?

Question 11

transferability

Answer 11

parallels external validity, thick description provides others with database needed to assess possibly transferability

Question 12

dependability

Answer 12

parallels reliability; keep complete records of all phases of research process, ensure records are accessible

Question 13

confirmability

Answer 13

parallels objectivity, difficult (impossible?) in social research, ensure researcher was not swayed by personal values or theoretical inclinations

Question 14

goals of qualitative research

Answer 14

1. description and emphasis on content
2. process and flexibility
3. seeing through the eyes of those studied
4. limited structure

Question 15

descriptive excess

Answer 15

whereby the amount of detail overwhelms or inhibits analysis of data

Question 16

why is process and flexibility important in qualitative research?

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

critiques of qualitative

Answer 17

• too subjective
• difficult to replicate
• problems with generalization
• lack of transparency

Question 18

what does it mean that qualitative research is too subjective?

Answer 18

• 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?

Question 19

what does it mean that qualitative research too difficult to replicate?

Answer 19

• because it is unstructured and relies on researcher ingenuity
• behaviour is influenced by personality, age, gender, etc

Question 20

what does it mean that qualitative research has problems of generalization?

Answer 20

• scope of findings is too restrictive
• is the small sample size representative?
• in most cases it is not the goal to produce generalizable knowledge

Question 21

what does it mean that qualitative research lacks transparency?

Answer 21

-how were the subjects chosen? how were conclusions reached, etc?

Question 22

contrasts between qualitative & quantitative

Answer 22

• 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