PAAS- Week 3 - Approaches to research Flashcards
What are the two categories?
Quantitative methods
Qualitative methods
What are Quantitative methods?
collect numbers/numerical data and use statistical tools
What are qualitative methods?
Collect words, pictures, and artifacts- (has broader approach- about meaning not numbers)
What approaches may some researchers use?
Some researchers- adopt both approaches (mixed-methods) or apply quantitative methods
qualitative style data. (e.g. interviews/surveys)
What is operationalisation?
Operationalisation means turning abstract concepts into measurable observations.
What is often the goal with quantitative methods?
The goal with quantitative methods is often to develop generalizations, or theories that are generally applicable.
Involves testing predictions that logically follow from theories (the deductive step)
What do qualitative methods involve?
Focused on meaning rather than measurement.
Instead of condensing a phenomenon down to a simple set of features or dimensions, qualitative research tries to examine many features.
Try to look at all aspects of one or a few instances of a phenomenon.
View the context (physical environment, social setting, cultural context) as a central part of the phenomenon being studied- so don’t normally happen in lab due to context.
Qualitative approaches—e.g., grounded theory and phenomenology—also emphasize the idea of following the data wherever it leads (that is, the inductive step)
What are examples of different types of qualitative methods?
Verbal protocol analysis
Ethnographic methods
Discourse analysis
Phenomenology
What is verbal protocol analysis?
Involves collecting & analyzing verbal data on cognitive processing
Participants given a task (usually a task that involves multiple steps that are chained together)and are asked to verbalize (speak aloud) what they are thinking as they go about solving the task.
Data (i.e.,recordings of what the participant said) are coded & analyzed to infer the information processing steps involved in solving the problem.
The approach was used in early Cognitive Science by Simon and Newell who were pioneering researchers in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (Computational Theory of Mind) Carries certain assumptions about the nature of human cognition/thinking, e.g., that it involves information processing in discrete sequential steps.
What is ethnography?
More a style of research than a method of data collection, ethnography involves studying people in “the field” (i.e., their naturally occurring setting), and requires the researcher to enter into the setting they are studying
Attempts to understand how the socio-cultural practices and behaviors of people are shaped by
their social, physical, and cultural contexts
Tries to make sense of events from the perspective of the participants
Could include data from interviews, or participant observation1Ethnography
What is Discourse Analysis?
Social study of language as used in talk, text, and other forms of communication.
It involves a distinctive way of thinking about talk and text where language doesn’t just represent the world but also constructs the world.
Some questions one might examine with this approach:
How does language shape social relations? For example, how might certain kinds of talk establish professional distance in doctor-patient communication?
How might language construct or open up space for particular identities. For example, how might language enforce or break down the concept of binary gender?Discourse analysis
What are the strengths and limitations of discourse analysis?
Allows you to examine how language constructs reality.
It can make use of primary data (interviews, talk in focus groups) or secondary data (books,
newspaper articles).
But it can be difficult to use discourse analysis to develop the same kind of generalizations as you might develop with other approaches.
