Week 10 - qualitative research 1 Flashcards
What is qualitative research?
The word qualitative implies an emphasis on the qualities of entities and on processes and meanings that are not experimentally examined or measured (if measured at all) in terms of quantity, amount, intensity, or frequency. Qualitative researchers … seek answers to questions that stress how social experience is created and given meaning
**Qualitative research involves collecting and analyzing non-numerical data (e.g., text, video, or audio) to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. It can be used to gather in-depth insights into a problem or generate new ideas for research.
Overview of Qualatative
paradigm Constructionism
design - Flexible and responds to context
data - unstructured or semi-structured interviews, observations or artefacts (photos)
Analysis - non-numerical analysis, focuses on underlying meanings and patterns of relationships
sample - depth of understanding rather than generalisability
What is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research?
Research about anything that impacts or would be particularly significant to Aboriginal or Torres Strait people.
Includes the planning, collection and analysis or information which is about or may affect Indigenous peoples lives collectively or individually
What are the characteristics of Indigenous research?
- Recognition of Indigenous worldviews
- Honouring social protocols in which Indigenous people can live, learn and situate themselves on their lands
- Emphasising social and political context which shapes their experience
- Indigenous research will privilege indigenous voices
- Identifies and addresses issues of importance to Indigenous people
How do you approach qualitative Indigenous research?
Theoretical framework
Research methodology
Research framework
What are some of the theoretical frameworks?
Interpretive approaches
Critical approaches
What is the interpretive theoretical framework?
Interested in the in-depth investigation of subjective
meanings and experiences
Examples: phenomenology, narrative approaches, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
What is the critical theoretical framework?
- Interested in how social, cultural, political, ideological
and historical discourses shape (and are shaped by)
subjective meanings and experience
Examples: Feminism, Marxist analysis, critical discourse
analysis, Indigenous standpoint theory
What are qualitative research methodologies?
People as research subjects
People as research informative
People as research partners
SIP!
What does people as research subjects mean?
- Many human experiences are communicated
or displayed in some way - This conduct is available for social research
What does people as research informants mean?
- Many human experiences are subjective, private, and
therefore hidden from view - To access many subjective experiences, researchers must:
- Treat people as informants
- Find ways to facilitate communication of
subjective experience
What does people as research partners mean?
- Many human experiences cannot be understood by researchers alone
- Ongoing engagement with people as active research partners is necessary to make sense of their experiences
- Participatory action research developed to decolonize research practice and can be particularly useful for research with certain groups
- E.g., Aboriginal Participatory Action Research
What are qualitative research methods
- Selecting participants
- Generating data
- Analysing data
- How do you sample participants?
- Convenience/ pragmatic
- Snowball
- Purposeful
- Theoretical
How do you select sample size when selecting participants
- Analytic determination
- Information redundancy/ saturation
- Depth vs breadth
- How do you generate data
Interact
Observe
Gather
How do you ‘interact’ when generating data
- Individual interviews which can be integrated with other data generation methods
- Focus groups
- Yanning circles
What are focus groups (interacting to generate data)
- Led by an (experienced) moderator
- Usually up to approximately 12 participants in each group
- Useful when interaction is important (e.g., identify convergent and divergent perspectives)
- Challenges
- ‘Group think’
- ‘Group-shy’
What are individual interviews? (interacting to generate data)
- Different types
- Unstructured conversation
- Semi-structured (through use of topic guide)
- Unstructured interviews may not be comparable
- Semi-structured interviews may sacrifice some depth
** Can be integrated with other data generation methods
* Video-stimulated interviews
* Photo elicitation interviews
* Walking interviews
* Ethnographic interviews
What are yarning circles (interacting to generate data)
- Emphasise story telling and deep listening
- Begin by acknowledging country, demonstrating connectedness and telling the story of the research
- Circle participants may speak clockwise or counterclockwise and pass around a message stick
- Relaxed but purposeful – not structured
How do you ‘observe’ when generating data
- Associated with ‘field research’, especially in ethnography
- Focuses on what people do rather than what they say they do
- Observing human conduct in its ‘natural environment’ to
gain insight into social processes and practices
Different methods for recording observations
- Field notes
- Video/ audio recordings
- Can be integrated with other data generation methods
- Ethnographic interviews
- Video-stimulated interviews
How do you ‘gather’ when generating data
- Human ‘artefacts’
- Documents
- Visual objects
- Sources
- Publicly available
- Archival
- Private
- How do you analyese data? analyse
- Some general trends
- Analysis is ongoing and iterative – time intensive
- Guided by an attitude of strangeness
- Disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions
- Make the ordinary extraordinary
- Make the extraordinary ordinary
What are the three ways to analyse data?
Inductive
* ‘Bottom-up’, data-driven
* Observable → abstract
* Theory building
Deductive
* ‘Top down’, theory-driven
* Abstract → observable
* Theory confirming
Abductive
* Use surprising evidence to question
assumptions
What is inductive?
- ‘Bottom-up’, data-driven
- Observable → abstract (Tries to induce understanding from what you see)
- Theory building (takes the concept you have observed and turns it into something more abstract)
What is deductive?
- ‘Top down’, theory-driven
- Abstract → observable (start with a theory or assumption and then you use that theory to see things in the data)
- Theory confirming
opposite to inductive
Normally used in quantitative data but can be used in qualitative
What is abductive?
- Use surprising evidence to question assumptions
The deliberate search for data that surprises you and then using that to challenge assumptions you have made when using the data
