Qualitative Research

Discussion

• Qualitative Research
• Semi-structured interviews
• Coding

Qualitative research is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counterdisciplinary field. It crosses the humanities and the social and physical sciences. Qualitative research is many things at the same time. It is multiparadigmatic in focus. Its practitioners are sensitive to the value of the multimethod approach. They are committed to the naturalistic perspective, and to the interpretative understanding of human experience. At the same time, the field is inherently political and shaped by multiple ethical and political positions.

Nelson et al. (1992)

‘Qualitative Research…involves finding out what people think, and how they feel - or at any rate, what they say they think and how they say they feel. This kind of information is subjective. It involves feelings and impressions, rather than numbers’

Bellenger, Bernhardt and Goldstucker

The Five moments of Qualitative Research

• Traditional Period: 1900’s-World War II Wrote objective colonising accounts of field experiences that were reflective of the positivist scientist paradigm
• Concerned with offering valid, reliable, and objective interpretations in their writings.
• The ‘subject’ who was studied was alien, foreign, and strange.

The Modernist PhasePost war-1970’s

• The modernist ethnographer and sociological participant observer attempted rigorous, qualitative studies of important social processes, including social control in the classroom and society
• Researchers were drawn to qualitative research because it allowed them to give a voice to society’s ‘underclass

Blurred Genres1970-1986

• Applied Qual research increasing stature
• Research strategies ranged from grounded theory to the case study
• New Emerging methods (interviewing)
• Social science was borrowing methods & theories from the humanities
• Researcher acknowledged as being part of the research process

Crisis of Representation Mid 1980’s-Now

• Made research and writing more reflexive and called into question the issues of gender, class and race.
• Interpretative theories as opposed to grounded theories were more common as writers challenge old models of truth and meaning

Current Day

• Theories now beginning to be read in narrative terms as ‘tales of the field’ (aka Narrative Medicine)
• Concept of an aloof researcher has finally been (almost) fully abandoned
• The search for grand narratives is being replaced by more local, small-scale theories fitted to specific problems and specific situations

Data Collection

Many Choices for Techniques

• Grounded Theory
• Ethnography
• Focus Groups
• Semi-Structured Interviews
• Case Studies
• Observational Studies
• Qualitative Review of Statistics
• and many more

Positivist Paradigm

• Emphasises that human reason is supreme and that there is a single objective truth that can be discovered by science
• Encourages us to stress the function of objects, celebrate technology and to regard the world as a rational, ordered place with a clearly defined past, present and future

Non-Positivist Paradigm

• Argues that our society places too much emphasis on science and technology and that this ordered, rational view of consumers denies the complexity of the social and cultural world we live in
• Stresses the importance of symbolic, subjective experience

Popularity

• Usually cheaper than quantitative
• A different way of understanding in-depth motivations and feelings of consumers
• Can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of quantitative research

Limitations

• Measuring successes and failures are based on smaller samples than in quantitative
• Not representative of the broad population, rather on a slice of the broad population
• Many people claim to be qualitative experts, and are not (stick with John W. Cresswell for beginner methods.)

Qualitative Research as a Process

• Theory
• Method
• Analysis
• All three of the above interconnect to define the research process

Theoretical Approachs

• Deductive: Seeks to use existing theory to shape the approach which you adopt to the qualitative research process, and to aspects of data analysis.
• Would involve attempting to build an explanation while collecting and analyzing the data rather than testing a predicted explanation

Theoretical Approaches

• Seeks to build a theory which is adequately grounded in a number of relevant cases. Also generally referred to ask Grounded Theory.

Interactivity

• Data collection, analysis and development of relationships are all interrelated and interactive as a process
• Allows research to recognize important themes and patterns as data is collected
• Allows re-categotization of data with emerging themes.

Conclusion

• It comes down to themes, patterns and relationships.
• Questions?

Kate Mercer