Coyle- INTRODUCTION TO QUALITATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH Flashcards
What is meant by qualitative research?
At its most basic, qualitative psychological research may be regarded as involving the collection and analysis of non-numerical data through a psychological lens (however we define that) in order to provide rich descriptions and possibly explanations of people’s meaning-making how they make sense of the world and how they experience particular events.
What is meant by epistemology? How is this related to qualitative research?
Qualitative research is bound up with particular sets of assumptions about the bases or possibilities for knowledge, in other words epistemology. The term ‘epistemology’ refers to a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the theory of knowledge and that tries to answer questions about how we can know and what we can know. All research approaches and methods are based on a set of epistemological assumptions that specify what kinds of things can be discovered by research which uses those approaches and methods. Different research approaches and methods are associated with different epistemologies.
What branch of philosophy is epistemology often discussed alongside?
ontology, which refers to the assumptions we make about the nature of being, existence or reality
What kind of factors can affect which epistemology is adopted by a particular study? (2)
A researcher may have a favoured epistemological outlook or position and may locate their research within this, choosing methods that accord with that position (or that can be made to accord with it). Alternatively, the researcher may be keen to use a particular qualitative method in their research and so they frame their study according to the epistemology that is usually associated with that method
How does the epistemological position picked for the study affect the rest of the report?
Whatever epistemological position is adopted in a study, it is usually desirable to ensure that you maintain this position (with its assumptions about the sort of knowledge that the research is producing) consistently throughout the write-up to help produce a coherent research report. Sometimes a more flexible position on this is needed for example, when using methods
experimental approaches or other research approaches adopt an epistemology that is often taken for granted both in research and in life more generally. What is epistemology? (2 names)
positivist-empiricist and hypothetico-deductive (although positivist and empiricism are slightly different)
What is meant by positivism?
Positivism holds that the relationship between the world (that is events, objects and other phenomena) and our sense perception of the world is straightforward: there is a direct correspond between things in the world and our perception of them provided that our perception is not skewed by factors that might damage that correspondence, such as our vested interests in the things we are perceiving.
What is meant by empiricism?
The related domain of empiricism holds that our knowledge of the world must arise from the collection and categorisation of our sense perceptions/observations of the world.
Why do scientist rarely adopt an unqualified view of positivism or empiricism?
observations and perceptions do not provide pure and direct ‘facts’ about the world.
Despite this, what fundamental claim from empiricism is central in research today?
the idea that the development of knowledge requires the collection and analysis of data.
“Researchers and students who have been exposed to a traditional methodological socialisation within psychology (especially experimental psychology) will be very familiar with the theory of knowledge that developed in response to the shortcomings of positivism and empiricism “
Name and describe this theory
hypothetico-deductivism; The figure most closely associated with the development of hypothetico-deductivism, Karl Popper (1969), believed that no scientific theory could be definitively verified. Hence, the aim is not to obtain evidence that supports a theory but rather to identify theoretical claims (hypotheses) that are false and ultimately theories that are false. Research that adopts a hypothetico-deductive stance therefore operates by developing hypotheses from theories and testing these hypotheses. The assumption is that by identifying false claims, we can develop a clearer sense of the truth.
This approach involves deductive reasoning. In research, this means reasoning which begins with theories, which are refined into hypotheses, which are tested through observations of some sort, which leads to a confirmation or rejection of the hypotheses.
What method encapsulates positivism, empiricism and hypothetico-deductivism? What ontological assumption does this employ?
the ‘scientific method’.This assumed that a reality exists independent of the observer (the ontological assumption of realism) and that we can access this reality through research.
How does this approach affect how people write up reports?
the.researcher was usually erased from the research process by the use of the passive voice rather than personal pronouns. Hence, rather than saying ‘I developed a questionnaire’ researchers would write ‘A questionnaire was developed’, erasing the agent in the process and creating the impression that the work was ‘untainted’ by human involvement on the researchers side.
What assumptions are made in this scientific method in psychology regarding measurement? (2)
Precision measurement was assumed to be possible for any psychological dimension that existed. It was assumed that, through the development of progressively refined tests and measures, any psychological dimension that actually existed could be measured with precision.
When is qualitative work used under the scientific method? (2)
As a prerequisite to the “real” research (e.g constructing questionnaires)
Other methods such as content analysis
What is content analysis an example of?
small q qualitative research (Kidder and Fine, I987). This is research that uses qualitative tools and techniques but within a hypothetico-deductive framework. In contrast ‘Big Q’ qualitative research refers to the use of qualitative techniques within a qualitative paradigm which rejects notions of objective reality or universal truth and emphasises contextualised understandings.
Distinguish nomothetic research and idiographic research
Nomothetic research approaches seek generalisable findings that uncover laws to explain objective phenomena
idiographic research approaches seek to examine individual cases in detail to understand an outcome.
in their 1972 book The Explanation of Social Behaviour, what concerns did Harre and Secord express regarding quantitative research methods in psychology?
They saw this as reflecting a limited, mechanistic understanding of human beings whose complex humanity could never be captured by such an approach to research
Why did many women turn to phenominological methods in feminist psychology? What is meant by this?
In a desire to explore women’s experiences on their own terms and to allow women’s voices to be presented without imposing pre-existent, ill-fitting frameworks of meaning, many feminist psychologists turned to qualitative methods that had a phenomenological ) emphasis. Such methods focus on obtaining detailed descriptions of experience as under-stood by
Such methods focus on obtaining detailed descriptions of experience as understood by those who have that experience in order to discern its essence. These methods arc not concerned with producing an objective statement of an experience but rather with obtaining an individual’s personal perception or account of the experience on their own terms.
Name and describe an example of this phenomenological form of research
One explicitly feminist qualitative method that was developed was the voice relational method, which has as one of its aims the hearing of voices that have often been suppressed and silenced such as those of adolescent girls (McLean Taylor et al., 1996). It does this through a careful, guided ‘listening’ to transcripts of interviews with those whose voices are not usually listened to and hence who have played no meaningful role within public debate.
What form of reasoning do these methods employ?
Inductive; this means reasoning that begins with data, which are examined in light of a study’s research questions. Patterns in the data are discerned and labelled. Some approaches link these patterns to existing theory or use them to create new theory.
What name is given to any type of qualitative research that seeks to uncover people’s meanings ? Does this method employ realism?
Any type of qualitative research that seeks to uncover people’s meanings and experiences in an inductive way has been described as embodying an ‘experiential’ approach (Braun and Clarke, 2013). Most of these forms of qualitative research have retained the realist commitment of the scientific method to some degree. They assume that a reality exists independent of the observer which can be accessed in some way through research and that participants’ language provides us with a ‘window’ to that reality. This is not a straightforward, unqualified realism: many of these methods have adopted a critical realist outlook which assumes that, while a reality exists independent of the observer, we cannot know that reality with certainty.
Both the voice-relational method and IPA permit this critical realism but the major focus for those who wanted to undertake thoroughly critical work was research methods that had a radically different epistemology- what was this epistemology?
Social constructionism- adopts a critical stance towards the taken-for-granted ways in which we understand the world and ourselves, such as the assumption that the categories we use to interpret the world correspond to ‘real’, ‘objective’ entities. From a social constructionist perspective, the ways in which we understand the world and ourselves are built up through social processes, especially through linguistic interactions, and so there is nothing fixed or necessary about them:
What form of ontological stance is this?
This is a relativist stance in which ‘reality’ is seen as dependent on the ways we come to know it.
