Week 1 Topic Material Flashcards
Methods and methodology are terms which can be confused for one another even in publish articles. one way of differentiating them is?
Methods are the techniques or processes, methodologies are the theoretical principles of what makes good research which choices in methods are then based upon.
True or false the same methodological principles cannot be employed in quantitative or qualitative research?
False
A methodological principle which tends to be used in most psychological research across-the-board, including quantitative or qualitative research is?
Empiricism, the theory that knowledge should be constructed from experience.
Where experimental and qualitative research often differs however is it approach to?
Subjectivity.
Experimental theory revolves around the principal that bias should be removed as far as possible from research and that therefore the researcher should be detached from the research. Alternatively qualitative research often but not always tends to believe that?
Objectivity is not possible )for example that objectivity is itself a subjective position) and that therefore theories or subjectivity must be employed in research.
Social constructionism involves the idea that knowledge is socially constructed and does not accurately?
Reflect reality
Poststructuralism takes social constructionism even further and argues that knowledge serves purposes in our society that?
Inevitably dominant knowledge tends to serve more powerful groups and that therefore knowledge is inextricably linked to power
Positivism can be defined as a set of theories about knowledge which emerged from the age of enlightenment in the 19th century and informs much of our assumptions about what?
Makes good science
A positivist approach to knowledge assumes that there is a one-to-one relationship between things in the social world and our knowledge of them. This is an assumption embedded into lots of experimental or positivist research which tends to assume that what is observed is reality in someway, and?
That universal knowledge is possible to attain and that well designed experiments can capture truth which are the same for all who experience them.
Is the following an example of a study that is quantitative or qualitative in nature? The study lacks the numbers that are typical of a positivistic mainstream psychology study, it assumes that it’s finding are universally applicable and it presupposes the analytic categories to be employed.
Quantitative in nature
What are the five features which Denzel and Lincoln (2000) list as the major defining characteristics of qualitative research?
1: concern with the richness of description
2: capturing the individuals perspective
3: the rejection of positivism and the use of postmodern perspectives
4: Adherence to postmodern sensibility
5: Examination of the constraints of every day life
When we referred to the concern with the richness of description in qualitative research, what are we talking about?
Qualitative researchers value data which is rich in its descriptive attributes so they tend to favour data collection methods which obtain detailed descriptive data such as that produced by using in-depth interviewing methods focus groups and taking of detailed field notes. This sort of data is often referred to as thick description.
In terms of qualitative research methods, capturing the individuals perspective refers to?
Qualitative methods emphasise the perspective of the individual and their individuality. The use of rich data gathering methods such as the in-depth interview and focus groups encourages this emphasis on the individuals perspective. quantitative researchers, to the extent that they deal with individuals will tend to focus on comparisons of people..
According to the five features which Denzel and Lincoln list of major defining characteristics of qualitative research, provide an example of the rejection of positivism and use of post-modern perspectives using language as an example.
The quantitative researcher mostly uses language data as if such data directly represent reality (i.e. The data refer to some sort of reality) whereas most modern qualitative researchers take the view that language may be a window into reality but cannot represent reality. The post modernist view argues that irrespective of whether or not there is truly a real world, a researchers knowledge of that reality can only be approximate and that there are multiple versions of reality. In qualitative research, relatively few researchers believe that the purpose of research is the creation of generalisable knowledge.
According to the five features which Denzel and Lincoln list of major defining characteristics of qualitative research, the fourth characteristic is adherence to the postmodern sensibility. What is this referring to?
The postmodern sensibility for example reveals itself in the way that qualitative researchers are much more likely to use methods which get them close to the real life experiences of people (in-depth interviews etc). Quantitative researchers are often content with a degree of artificiality such as that arising from the use of laboratory studies. Qualitative researchers are often portrayed as having a caring ethic in their research and they may undertake political action conjointly with their participants as well as engaging in extensive dialogue with them. The sense of personal responsibility in the interactions with a research participants is often promoted as a feature of qualitative research, some of these features are particularly evident in feminist action research where the objectives of the research for example not merely to identify women’s experiences but to change the way things are done on the basis of this research.
