Liamputtong, P. (2019): QUALITATIVE INQUIRY Flashcards
Qualitative Inquiry
“a broad approach” that qualitative researchers adopt as a means to examine social circumstances
assumption of qualitative inquiry
people utilize “what they see, hear, and feel to make sense of social experiences” (Rossman and Rallis, 2017)
social inquiry
aims to interpret “the meanings of human actions” (Bradbury-Jones et al., 2017)
Features of Qualitative Inquiry
- fundamentally interpretive
- asks why, how and under what circumstance things arise
- explicitly attends to and account for the contextual conditions of the participants
- takes place in the natural settings of human life
- emphasizes holistic accounts and multiple realities
- situated within some methodological frameworks
- makes use of multiple methods
- emergent rather than rigidly predetermined
- participants are treated as active respondents rather than as subjects
- the researcher is the means through which the research is undertaken
essence of quali inquiry
the meanings and interpretations of the participants
quali researchers = constructivists
attempt to find answers in the real world; look for meanings that people have constructed
quali research is valuable in many ways:
- hear silenced voices;
- work with marginalized and vulnerable people;
- address social justice issues;
- to contribute to the person-centered healthcare and the design of clinical trials
Qualitative inquiry seeks to…
discover and describe narratively what particularly people do in their everyday lives and what their actions mean to them
“qualitative”
from the Latin word “qualitas” which pertains to a primary focus on the qualities, the features, of entities; as well as on the processes and meanings that are not experimentally examined or measured
"”quantitative”
from the Latin word “quantitas” which relates to a primary focus on the differences in amount
empiricism
the philosophical tradition which theorizes that knowledge is obtained through direct experience through the physical senses
Aristotle
He theorized that ideas that we have are concepts that are derived from our experiences with actual beings, objects, and events
connecting ideas to real experiences
qualitative researchers work closely with individuals, and they listen attentively on what the participants say, probe further, and try to make sense of what the participants tell them
qualitative approach offers a unique grounding position for researchers
for them to undertake research that “fosters particular ways of asking questions” and “provides a point of view onto the social world” which in turn help them obtain understanding of a social issue/problem that privileges subjective and multiple understandings”
people’s understanding of reality can change
- in the social world, we deal with the subjective experiences of individuals
- this makes quali research different from researching the natural world, which can be treated as “objects of things”
“the word science”
quali inquiry relies heavily on words or stories that individuals tell researchers
Dimitriadis (2016)
- suggests that the word “research” should be replaced with “inquiry”
- “research is tainted by a lingering positivism
- inquiry implies an “open-endedness, uncertainty, ambiguity, praxis, pedagogies of liberation, freedom, [and] resistance” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018)
Qualitative inquiry permits researchers to ask questions, and to find answers, that can be difficult or impossible with the quanti research
every real-world issue can be examined by the qualitative inquiry (Yin, 2016)
“stuff” (Patton, 2015) (or real-world issues)
Stuff happens everywhere. Qualitative inquiry documents the stuff that happens among real people in their own words, from their own perspectives, and within their own contexts; it then makes sense of the stuff that happens by finding patterns and themes among the seeming chaos and idiosyncrasies of lots of stuff.
“too small to become visible”
quali research is especially crucial for research involving marginalized, vulnerable, or hard-to-reach individuals and communities
side with society’s underdogs
since powerful people have many means at their disposal to present their versions of reality, we should side with the powerless (Becker, 1967)
political responsibility of social scientists
to help individuals to understand their “personal troubles”, which are also “social issues” that confronted others in the society as well
qualitative researchers are interested in learning about
“how people make sense of their world and the experiences they have in the world” (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016)
“constructivists”
who seek answers to their questions in the real world and then “interpret what they see, hear, and read in the worlds around them
SALIENT CHARACTERISTICS OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCHERS
- have a strong commitment to examining an issue from the participant’s perspective
- are sensitive to personal biography
- interact extensively with the participants
- are reflexive in the conduct and interpretation of research
- see the social world holistically
- employ multiple reasoning
craftspersons
qualitative researchers are malleable in how they carry out their research
quali researchers are social scientists inspired to be a research methodologist
who deploy a wide range of interconnected interpretive practices, hoping always to get a better understanding of the subject matter at hand
quali inquiry is personal and sensitize to personal biography
- as the researcher acts as “the instrument of inquiry”
- quali researchers tend to acknowledge who they are and how their personal biography frames their research
- they value their unique perspective as a source of understanding rather than something to be cleansed from the study”
quali research is inductive
- it adopts a logic of ‘theory generation’ rather than ‘theory testing’ as practiced in quanti research
- inductive reasoning will allow researchers to adopt particular understandings and develop a general conceptual understanding of the issue they examine
open-ended guiding questions
to permit multiple meanings to surface
how, why or what questions
rather than questions about how many or how much
despite being inductive,
often quali researchers commence their study with some conceptual frameworks that shape their decisions in undertaking their research
