3.3 Qualitative methods

Qualitative methods.

References:  We started class with a review of the (partial) list of references for qualitative methods (posted to the right).  As mentioned in discussion, Mertens provides an overview of a broad range of qualitative approaches, so there is not much room for the"how to" - practical descriptions of what you actually do in the process of collecting and analyzing data. The purpose of the reference list is to give you some places to start.  This list clearly has gaps - but it provides some widely used handbooks and theories for language analysis, interviewing, ethnographic methods, narrative analysis and taking a new literacies approach.

Defining qualitative research:

• authenticity, observation,  descriptive,representations of individual experiences
• empirical, in the real world, complex, situational
• inductive discovery for focus/theory
• in-depth look at a microcosm
• associated wordes (from Mertens): complexity, contextual, exploration, discovery, inductive logic

Some "problems" qualitative research is good for:

When the researcher does not have a thesis - for open problems

When the researcher is confronted with a "messy" problem with lots of features that do not fall clearly into categories

When exploration of context (as in social construction, phenomenology) is important

When the study needs/demands unconstrained (i.e. not already framed by the researcher) input for research participants (as in transformative research)

Paradigmatic assumptions and qualitative research. We then took a quick look at the different qualitative approaches listed in the chapter, and considered what they might look like in the different paradigms.  We noted that while the chapter did not allow that post-positivist approaches used qualitative methods, we noted that grounded theory and the idea of "discovering" theory in the data may share some assumptions with post-positivist approaches, (as might some of the counting and categorizing characteristic of analytyic moves associated with some approaches to case study, ethnography and even phenomenological work).  

My hope was that this discussion might start to open up the classification of the 4 paradigms, and put us in a position to start thinking about the significance/assumptions of different actions within a research project (as opposed to classifying the whole project within a single paradigm).  I think this discussion was fairly successful at introducing this perspective - thank you for your good questions/contributions! 

Overview of qualitative methods, short definitions.

Ethnographic –describe-analyze of social/cultural practices in terms of systematic connections among different components of the system

Case study – study of a bounded system

Phenomenological research- individual-subject's study of (reflection on) unfolding experience

Grounded theory –coding, characterizing, constant comparison of data =theory emerges from data

Participatory research – everyone is a researcher-participant

Clinical research-application of qualitative methods to biomedical problems (we will not deal with it)

Focus group-patterns of interaction within the conversational presentation become part of the data

Evaluation of qualitative studies: Although I discussed features for evaluating qualitative research as part of our discussion of Castillo & Chandler, they really belong here.  Merton's discussion is on p 255.

Terms for assessing qualitative research (as opposed to quantitative research) 

We did not go over these in class, but - as you design your research -the different systems for assessing qualitative v quantitative research are important considerations.

Credibility (internal validity)=> prolonged persistent engagement, member checks(who has authority to be representative); accounting for/acknowledging what doesn't fit; reflective analysis of researcher's perspective; triangulation

Transferability (external validity); =sufficient detail so readers can guage applicability to other contexts – multiple cases useful

Dependability (reliability)=(the idea that the concept/context understudy will remain the same)=documentation of details

Confirmability(objectivity)= evidence so that data can be tracked to their source=> good fieldnotes/transcripts etc.

Creating  + analyzing transcripts

Sample interview protocol in class.  See handouts posted to the right.

Perl + Castillo & Chandler

Thanks for your good presentations.  We used discussion of Perl to think in a little more depth about how grounded theory looks and what it can do.  Discussion of Castillo & Chandler tended toward the piece's focus, rather than its approach (participator research) - though the presentation on the paper gave a good overview of how the processes through which the research project was conducted and the way the paper was written shaped the findings.  

For next class (no class March 10 = Spring Break)

Read:  Review - ethnographic, case study + phenomenological approaches in Mertens, Ch 8  Bartholomae (1985),523 in CT ;   Heath (1983) pdf (sent to Kean email)