L6 - Qualitative psychology Flashcards
What are the two approaches of methodology?
Quantitative versus qualitative approaches
- These approaches represent different methodologies in psychological research
What is mainstream psychology characterized by?
- Controlled experiments
- Measurement procedures and measurement models
- The use of statistics to analyze data
Tendency of objectifying as much as possible (tend to avoid the researcher’s presence and hopefully never alone)
What is the quantitative imperative?
The conviction that you cannot know what you cannot measure
- it makes the quantitative approach very reliable and generalisable but also limited in what it investigates since it always investigates only the variables it measures so research questions cannot go further than that
What is the framework that stems from the quantitative approach?
Positivism
This doesn’t mean that quant researchers subscribe to positivist, rather positivism arises from quant ideas
What does positivism focus on?
- Positivism via quantitative research typically focusses on a specific task: ‘discovering’ reality
- Focus on revealing causal relationships
- Experimental and correlational research
- There is a considerable distance between the data and the researcher
- Often driven as much by what we can as by what we want (some entities are unobservable but we partially solved this by including methods like factor analysis that allow us to look at the latent variables)
Kind of overview of quantitative research
What are the main assumptions/ideas in quantitative research?
- Realism: phenomena in the world have an existence outside people’s mind (realism), which can be discovered by using the scientific method
- Causality: the main aim of research is to find universal causal relationships
- Research is designed nomothetically = search for general laws
- People are considered more or less interchangeable - focus on the population rather than the individual
- Any difference between experimental condition is considered to be due to the treatment and any other difference is considered noise
- Researcher must be unbiased so they use standardised measurements and instruments - replicability
- Falscification: researchers continuously evaluate the truth of their conclusions
- This positivist view is understandable given the history of psychology - to be the natural scientists
What are the three techniques/orientations quant research is split into?
- Descriptive research
- Relational research
- Experimental research
Describe descriptive research
The focus in this orientation is on observation. Data are gathered in a numerical form, by collecting measurements or counting frequencies of occurrence. The majority of studies involve the collection of a few data points per participants from a large group of participants because:
- The larger the sample, the more representative it becomes
- Large numbers of observation yield more precise statistics
Describe relational research and name a way of investigating relations between variables
- Relational research’s aim: to find out whether 2 variables are related, done through collecting and correlating measures of both
- Calculating and using statistical correlation coefficients is important, because people are prone to illusory correlations
- Illusory correlations = perception of a correlation between events for which no independent evidence can be found
Way to investigate relations between variables: Factor analysis = a statistical technique calculating how many factors are needed to account for the correlations between the variables measured and how they relate to the factors
Why do we need experimental research? What is the drawback?
- Because correlations don’t allow certainty about cause and effect relationships
- It is important to control for confounding variables to be sure that resulting changes are due to the independent variable
- Drawback: not all issues in psych can be addressed experimentally - may be the reasn why progress in psych is harder to achieve than in sciences such as physics or chemistry
What are the strengths of quantitative research?
- application of powerful statistical techniques enables researchers to detect every pattern of association in large datasets
- can produce precise predictions that can be tested
- makes comparison (between groups or subjects) possible/easier
- easier to investigate confounds and validity threats
- good way to control variables and draw general conclusions
What are weaknesses of quantitative research?
- little interest in the perception of participants - particularly when it concerns real-life situations
- quantitative imperative - research limited by what is measurable so aspects of mental life that cannot be captured by numbers have been considered less important
- better suited to testing general theories than to finding solutions for specific situations
- If you don’t have a well-developed theory yet, quantitative methods aren’t as helpful; they are not very suitable for generating theories
- Progress can be very slow due to falscification - focus on erasing wrong theories than generating new ones
What was criticism of the quantitative approach that lead to the doubt of suitability of using just the scientific method in studying behaviour/humans?
- The traditional quantitative approach is unsuitable for grasping the richness of the mind and the experience of human beings
- Science is defined by its methods rather than by its content
- Methodolatry: emphasis on following methods at the expense of other types of considerations
- That’s why there might be need for a different (more qualitative) approach - hermeneutics
- Quantitative approach explains, hermeneutics tries to understand
What is hermeneutics?
Approach in psychology according to which the task of the psychologist is to interpret and understand persons on the basis of their personal and socio-cultural history
- It mostly coexisted with the mainstream natural-scientific approach of psychology but from time to time they criticised each other
- Experimental psychologists objected to the fact that hermeneutic approach kept questioning the status of psych as natura science and thereby couldn’t fully commit to becoming a natural science
- Hermeneutically oriented scientists criticised that by focusing on explaining how the person functions, experimental approach overlooked understanding of what the person thinks, believes, feels, wants
What is the phenomological perspective
understanding vs explaining
- The phenomological perspective is an extension of the qualitative approach
- Phenomenology is a 20th century movement that tried to develop an interpretive methodology
- Focus on intentionality, consciousness and qualia instead of behavior
- Verstehen vs. Erklären
- In the Netherlands there was a strong school of phenomenology in Utrecht until the 1970s
What does ‘Verstehen’ emphasize in psychological research?
Understanding social actions from the perspective of those engaged in them
- It involves gaining insight into the subjective meanings and interpretations that individuals attach to their actions.
- Rather than merely observing and quantifying external behaviors, “Verstehen” encourages a deeper comprehension of the social world by considering the subjective meanings that people give to their actions
- The fundamental task of psychology is not to explain human behavior, it is to understand people’s actions and their motives
- So it is not about action potentials and cognitive processes, it is about motives and intentions
- Not the behavior itself, but its meaning, should be at the center of the research
I know this feels a little out of place, I appologise but her lecture was all over the place. It just ties to qualitative approach that people started to think more about how to approach psychology from a more ‘trying to understand the person’ perspective
What was major source of inspiration for the hermeneutic approach?
- Freud’s psychoanalysis which was aimed at understanding the contents of a person’s mind, which fit hermeneutics
He inspired development of other theories of what constitutes the core of human mind and how it develops over time:
- Carl Jung: Differentiated the personal unconscious from the collective unconscious and introduced personality types
- Alfred Adler: Identified the feeling of inferiority as a core human motive, driving the pursuit of superiority and perfection
- Erik Erikson: Proposed eight psychosocial development stages, where resolving crises led to virtues, and failure caused maladaptations
- John Bowlby: Developed attachment theory, highlighting the importance of secure bonds in infancy, influenced by caregiver sensitivity. His theory was supported by Mary Ainsworth’s “strange situation” test
How did Rogers contribute to natural-science approach vs hermeneutic approach debate?
- he came up with client-centered therapy
- he combined the hermeneutic approach with the natural-science approach when he insisted that the efficacy of his therapy was to be tested
How did Maslow contribute to natural-science approach vs hermeneutic approach debate?
- He (together with Rogers) was one of the founders of humanistic psychology, which offered an alternative to psychoanalysis and behaviorism
- He stressed the need for a new type of science, which was not exclusively based on the mechanistic world view
Humanistic psychology = movement as reaction against psychoanalysis and behaviorism that stresses that people are human, inherently positive, endowed with free will and living within a socio-cultural context
What is the focus of qualitative research?
Understanding phenomena in their historical and socio-cultural rather than explaining
- It emphasizes subjectivity and reflexivity
- Associated with hermeneutic approach based on understanding the meaning of a situation
What are assumptions of qualitative research?
- Idealism: there is little to no evidence for a reality outside people’s minds; the only reality that matters is the reality as perceived and constructed by people
- Control: attempting to control the situation, as done by quant research, makes the setting artificial and thus, doesn’t help to make the ‘real world’ visible
- Immersion: the researcher is immersed in the situation that is being studied, so that the meaning can be understood and approaches the situation open-mindedly and sees what comes out
- Ideographic approach: the conclusions of the study stay limited to the phenomenon under study; not interested in generalisable knowledge
- Induction: instead of reliance on the hypothetico-deductive model (which tests theories and hypotheses over and over so they lose the wider picture), more attentions is on inductive reasoning and bracketing (looking at the whole picture with open-mind and free oneself from preconceptions)
- Evidence-based: even though the data are typically not numbered, conclusions still need to be able to be verified by others; research is not intuition and opinion based
What is the role of the researcher in qualitative research?
- Researcher conducts (participant) observation or semi- structured interviews
- The researcher is the measurement tool (not a questionnaire or some other physical thing)
- Result: experiences of the researcher and/or interview transcripts
- Input from the researcher is crucial!
- E.g. Studying homeless people can be done by talking to these people or by living with them for a while - we wouldn’t give them a questionnaire
- Because it involves talking and input from the researcher, it’s considered unscientific but that is no longer the case since qualitative research has become more methodological
Many quant researchers criticise qual research for the heavy involevement of the researcher which leads to biases. How does qual researchers respond to this?
Qualitative researchers acknowledge that the approach they promote entails the danger of the conclusions being influenced by the researcher, but argue that:
- This danger is offset by the expected gains due to an understanding of the situation
- All conclusions, even those reached on the basis of quantitative research and falsification tests, are relative (because they depend on the prevailing paradigm)
- The most obvious biases can be avoided by being aware of them and by doing the analysis in such a way that it can be repeated and checked by others
What are the techniques used for data collection in qual research?
- Semi-structured interview - interview in which each interviewee gets a small set of core questions, but for the rest of the time is encouraged to speak freely; achieved by using open-ended, non-directive questions
- Focus group - technique in which a group of participants freely discusses a limited set of questions
According to the book
How is data processed in qual research?
-
Transcription - the raw data of interviews consist of auditory or visual recording
↪ These are transcribed in written form and numbered, so that they can easily be referred to -
Data analysis - for the analysis the written forms are rewritten as a flow chart of core ideas, based on close readings
↪ Statements are classified into a number of themes and clear ideas of how they are interconnected
In the lecture she described this as the way to process and analyse data
What is thematic analysis (TA)?
A method for systematically identifying and organizing patterns of meaning across a data set
- It was defined by Braun & Clarke (2012)
How is TA conducted?
The main idea is to collect lot of data (e.g. transcripts from interviews) and analyse it to the fullest and possibly discuss it with our research team. Through this you identify themes and patterns that together form an answer to our research question. Here are the steps:
- Becoming familiar with the data
- Generating initial codes
- Searching for themes
- Reviewing themes (quality control)
- Defining and naming themes
- Writing the report
What is the main difference between quantitative and qualitative research in the first step?
Qualitative: Investigate the data to maximum, familiarising yourself with every bit of information it provides you with
Quantitative: just make sure that our data set is appropriate for the analysis (it corrects for missing values, outliers…) and you’re not gonna investigate who scored how much because that is considered an impact on the data
Steps of TA
What is initial coding?
Paraphrasing parts of data to reduce the data to the set of themes
- It matters who the researcher is because the coding is gonna look differently and the themes generated are gonna be different with every researcher = but that’s a good thing because it shows the richness of data rather than reducing to statistics
- It can be helpful that there is someone else who has a different view - that’s why it’s recommended to work in a team
An example of how do the three methods compare and complement each other
The study involved interviews with 25 general practitioners (GPs) discussing the challenges of prostate cancer screening (PCS). GPs face a difficult decision between recommending the screening, which may cause distress, false alarms, and unnecessary treatment, or not recommending it, which risks the patient developing a potentially fatal cancer.
The researchers applied the three approaches to the same study
