Hoofdstuk 11 Treadwell (samenvatting Flow) - Watching and listening: qualitative research for in-depth understanding Flashcards
Focus groups:
small groups of people brought together to discuss a topic of interest to the
researcher.
Interviews:
asking questions of a respondent, face-to-face or by phone or video, to elicit
information the researcher is interested in.
Wat is een risico bij het selecteren van participanten voor interviews of discussies?
Participants in interviews or discussion are often selected using judgmental sampling.
Wat zijn positieve en negatieve aspecten van kwalitatief onderzoek?
Positief:
1. Inzicht
2. Validiteit
negatief:
1. niet generaliseerbaar
2. of betrouwbaar
Worldview I:
humans are similar and their behaviour can be predicted. Research approach
with emphasis on making generalizations about human behaviour.
Worldview II:
humans are individual and unpredictable. Research approach on understanding
subjectivity and individuality of human communication.
Quantitative researches
look for relationships among phenomena; qualitative researches
look to understand how phenomena are seen through the eyes of their research participants
Which different kind of participants does exist in qualitative studies?
- Informants
- Respondents
- Interviewees
- Subjects
What type of participants are informants?
people selected because they can talk about or on behalf of others as well
as themselves.
What type of participants are Respondents
people who are speaking for themselves
What type of participants are Interviewees:
people who are interviewed; can be informants or respondents.
What type of participants are subjects?
individuals who participate in an experiment
What are the benefits of unstructured interviews?
- Allow interviewer to establish a relationship with interviewee
- Allow interviewer to deal with any questions or anxieties the interviewee may have
- Give the interviewer a sense of the agenda the interviewee may have
- The opportunity to begin snowball-sampling
- When research is done to obtain new insights
What are Semi-structured interviews?
a broad set of questions, but the interviewer has discretion in
how the questions will be asked. Semi-structured interviews keep the interviews keep the
interview focused but allow both interviewer and interviewee room to move.
drie eigenschappen van fully structured interviews:
- Questions could be asked by mail, phone, e-mail or even by someone else than you
- Questions may be formatted as Likert, semantic differential or multiple-choice
- Needs to be pretested before use
Uses and gratifications theory:
theory of media use that proposes that individuals are
proactive and selective in choosing media content to which they expose themselves, for a
verity of reasons like e.g. escape from routine and problems or substituting the media for
companionship and personal relationships.
Effective interviews require practice, preparation and attention to (5 criteria)
- Interview setting: can affect the nature of the interview.
-
Interview sensitivities: consider religious, cultural and technology sensitivities when
arranging interview. E.g. sometimes women cannot be interviewed by men because of
their religion. -
Interview sequence: in which order do questions occur (funnel or inverted funnel).
Sensitive questions can be placed in the middle of a survey. -
Interview question types: you need different kind of questions to fully interpret
informants’ understandings of the phenomena you are interested in. If you use all
three types of questions*, you can have some confidence that you have thoroughly
explored your interviewees’ view of their worlds and you have an in-depthunderstanding
of them. -
Interview question prompts: prompts are simply the follow-up questions that elicit
more information and keep the interview progressing. Classic prompts are ‘tell me
more’ or ‘5W’s + H’ ** of journalism. Interviews don’t need to be 100% talk, people can
also demonstrate something.
What is meant with Descriptive questions:
ask informants to describe the phenomena, like ‘mini-tour questions’.
E.g. ‘in a typical semester, how do you use your social networking sites?’
What is meant with structural questions?
explore the relationship among the terms informants use. E.g. ‘would
you describe an online job search as part of you social networking?’
What is meant with contrast questions?
help the researcher understand similarities, differences and relative
importance of informants’ concepts. E.g. ‘you talk about job search and career search, could
you explain the difference between these two?’
5W + H
Who, what, when, where, why, how
focus group
often 6 – 12 persons led by a moderator to discuss a
topic of interest. Focus groups are often used to pretest survey questions or after a survey to
help researchers understand the results. Participants of a focus group are often selected by
judgmental sampling, sampling based on a group of persons that match the criteria the
researcher may have. They are selected to represent a defined demographic group, such as
middle-aged married males.
Weakness of interviews and focus groups:
human communication is not observed in its
natural setting.
Level at which we engage with the people whose communication behavior we seek to
understand:
- Too remote: you may not discern important details and subtleties
- Too close: you may develop biases toward participants, which will affect the
observation and reporting and possibly even the answers
Ethnography:
the study of human social behavior or cultures. Suggest that we are observing,
describing, and interpreting people’s behavior.
Four classic relationships between researcher and informant”
-
Complete observer: no interaction with informants, they are not aware that they are
being observed. -
Observer as participant: used in one-visit scenarios, researcher has to decide what to
observe or ask because he is now interacting with the informant. -
Participant as observer: occurs typically in studies of communities, where researcher
may spend some time. Mutual trust may develop between researcher and
participants. Disadvantage: if relationship becomes more like a friendship, participant
may not want to answer certain questions that can hurt that friendship which may bias
the observations. -
Complete participant: researcher participates really close in informants’ lives; his
research role may even be unknown to them. The pretend to be something other what
they really are.
Some principles of ethnographic research:
- Conduct research primarily in natural settings
- Combine direct observation with interviews
- Focus on local, subjective knowledge and categories
- Engage directly with the community’s members
Decisions that must precede ethnographic research:
- Selecting informants
- Deciding whether to interview people individually or in groups
- Choosing between structured and unstructured interviews
- Deciding how to analyse the data from the research
(Formal and informal) gatekeepers:
those who make access to a community or culture
possible.
Formal gatekeepers:
those individuals whose permission makes the access officially possible.
Access to a work team, for example, will probably require approval from management.
Key informants:
The individuals who are part of the study community and who introduce and
legitimize the researcher’s work to their community.
Generally, ethnographers record at least three different kinds of notes:
-
Descriptive notes: the primary, detailed records of the human interactions, language,
and settings that are the focus of ethnography.
-
Descriptive notes: the primary, detailed records of the human interactions, language,
-
Method notes: records of the specific methods researchers use to gather data, for
example direct observation and interviews. Individuals are likely to behave and speak
differently in one-on-one interviews than they are in a group setting.
-
Method notes: records of the specific methods researchers use to gather data, for
-
Analytic notes: notes a researcher writes as a way to make sense of or interpret the
raw data or descriptive notes.
-
Analytic notes: notes a researcher writes as a way to make sense of or interpret the
Ethnography of communication
(Dell Hymes, 1974): communication could be examined as a
social and cultural practice and was therefore open to study by ethnographic methods.
Six basic units as a framework for research according to Dell Hymes:
-
Speech community: a group of people who share common signs, a language that
differentiates them from other groups, and rules governing their speech. Example: a
group of communication majors -
speech situation: the occasions within a speech community when people talk.
Example: an introductory class on research methods or an annual awards dinner. -
speech event: the specific speech activity that takes place. Example: a student
presentation or an awards speech. - Communicative act: the smaller units of speech within a speech event. Example: asking a question or telling a joke.
-
Communicative style:the speech-style that is characteristic of someone. Example:
being habitually ironic or using ‘geek’ jargon. -
Ways of speaking:the styles of speech that may be used in specific situations and
events or that are characteristic of a culture. Example: at the beginning of a class, the
instructor speaks before students do.
After choosing one of the basic units as a framework for research according Dell Hymes, to study, you would analyse it by asking a set of
questions that helps a researcher document the language and meanings in a speech
community. This is called SPEAKING:
* Situation: the setting where the activities take place and the overall scene of which
they are a part. Example: a college room.
* Participants: the people present and their roles and relationships within the speech
situation. Example: students and faculty.
* Ends: the ends or goals of the communication being studied. Example: mastering the
language of communication research.
* Acts: the language and behaviors that convey meaning to the participants. Example:
instructors demonstrating a specific research method.
* Key: the tone of speech. How the speech sounds. Example: formal or friendly.
* Instrumentality: the channels or methods used to communicate. Example: an online
discussion group.
* Norms: the rules governing speech and its interpretation. Example: students cannot
ask questions until after the instructor has spoken.
* Genres: the traditional types of speech found in most cultures. Examples:
commencement speeches, election “stump” speeches and lectures.
Observational studies:
record and interpret individual and group behaviors in their natural
setting. Ethnography depends upon observation, but not every observational study is an
ethnography. For example: you could observe behavior of people at a rock concert without
doing any in-depth interviews that an ethnography requires.
Conversation analysis:
analysing how people negotiate understanding and the rules for
understanding. For example: if a question is posed during a conversation or discussion, what
are the rules that determine whether it gets an answer or not.
Categorization in sampling:
identifying each piece of data as belonging to a particular category
predetermined by the researcher or generated from the data themselves.
Three types of coding
-
Fixed coding: assign items to specific non-changing pre-assigned categories and count
the frequencies -
Flexible coding: start with theoretically informed categories that may change as new
data come in -
Grounded-in-data-coding: start with no pre-conceived categories to allow categories
and theories to emerge as data analysis progresses.
Grounded theory:
a research approach that argues that theories should emerge from data
analysis, not prior to data analysis.