SOWK*4500 - Qualitative Research Methods

Question 1

Five traditions

Answer 1

• Biographical study — life history
• Phenomenology — the lived experience
• Grounded theory
• Ethnography (including PAR)
• Qualitative case study

Question 2

Biographical Study (1)

Answer 2

• Biographical research studies the experiences of individuals in which individuals describe their
  experiences in great details. An individual’s life can reflect cultural themes of the society and the social
  contexts:
  – the social space,
  – the social structure,
  – the social situations and
  – the social relations.

Question 3

Biographical Study (2)

Answer 3

• Reasons that biographical studies are undertaken
  depend on the people being studied and on those who
  conduct the study: There exist unknown facets of the
  subject’s life and a wealth of source material must be
  available for mining.

Question 4

Biographical Study (3)

Answer 4

• The “researchers ask open-ended questions to capture how the person understands his or her own past.
• Exact accuracy in the story is less critical than the story itself.
• Researchers recognize that the person may reconstruct or add present interpretations to the past; the person may rewrite his or her story.
• The main purpose is to get at how the respondent sees or remembers the past, not just some kind of
• subjective truth (Kreuger & Neuman, 2006, p384)

Question 5

Biographical Study (4)

Answer 5

• The researcher may use a life grid and asks
  the respondent what happened at various
  dates and in several areas of life, including
  education, migration, occupation and
  experiences in major social changes.
• The researcher may use artifacts to induce
  the interview.
• The research may find an existing archive or
  create a new one of the person

Question 6

Biographical Study (5)

Answer 6

• Then the biographical writer needs to be able
  to bring himself or herself into the narrative
  and acknowledge his or her standpoint using
  an interpretive approach.

Question 7

Biographical Study (6)

Answer 7

We are already familiar with biographical study.
His excellence: George Washington
Jane Eyre
The snow of Kilimanjaro
And quiet flows the Don

Question 8

Phenomenology

Answer 8

Is a philosophy or method of inquiry based
on the assumption that reality consists of objects and events perceived or understood in human consciousness, and not of anything independent of human consciousness.
* The word phenomenon is derived from the Greek verb “to
appear” or “show”.
* In the philosophy of Kant (1724-1804), our experience is
always of the phenomenal world conveyed by our senses,
since we do not have direct access to things in themselves,
he called noumenal (“thing-in-itself”)

Question 9

Phenomenology (cont.)

Answer 9

The phenomenology movement was
initiated by Edmund Husserl (U of
Göttingen) in 1905.
* Husserl’s intention was to make
possible descriptive account of the
essential structures of the directly
given.

Question 10

Phenomenology (cont.)

Answer 10

investigates the “phenomena”, i.e.,
things as apprehended by consciousness, rather than
on the existence of anything outside of human
consciousness.
* Phenomenology restricts its attention to the “pure data”
of consciousness, which is uncontaminated by
metaphysical theories or scientific assumptions of the
researcher.
* Phenomenology studies the consciousness and
experience as experienced from the subjective or first-
person point of view.