Qualitative research

Qualitative research
• Qualitative approaches to research value depth of meaning and
people’s subjective experiences and their meaning-making processes.
• These approaches allow us to build a robust understanding of a topic,
unpacking the meanings people ascribe to their lives to activities,
situations, circumstances, people, and objects.
• Methodologically, these approaches rely on inductive designs aimed
at generating meaning and producing rich, descriptive data.
• Qualitative approaches are most commonly used in exploratory or
descriptive research.
Qualitative research
• The ultimate goal of qualitative research is to portray the complex
pattern of what is being studied in sufficient depth and detail in a
particular context.
• Qualitative researchers do not seek control over their research setting
and participants.
• Qualitative researchers usually take a subjective stance, which allows
them to understand their research area meaningfully.
Ontology of qualitative research

• Qualitative research regards people as anticipatory, meaning-making

beings who actively construct their own meanings of situations and make
sense of their world and act in it through such interpretations (the
constructivist/constructionist premise).
• People are deliberate, intentional and creative in their actions, and
meaning arises out of social situations, interactions and negotiations, and
is handled through the interpretive processes of the humans involved.

• Meanings used by participants to interpret situations are culture- and

context-bound, and there are multiple realities, not single truths in
interpreting a situation. History and biography intersect – we create our
own futures but not necessarily in situations of our own choosing
Ontology of qualitative research

• Realities are multiple, constructed and holistic, capable of sustaining

multiple interpretations.
• People, situations, events and objects are unique
• Knower and known are interactive, inseparable.
Epistemology of qualitative research

• Behaviour are socially situated, context-related, context-dependent and

context-rich.
• To understand a situation researchers need to understand the context
both specifically and holistically – the whole picture – because situations
affect behavior and perspectives and vice versa.
• One task of the researcher is to understand, describe and explain the
multiple and differing interpretations of situations, their distinctiveness,
causes and consequences.
• All factors have to be taken into account in understanding a phenomenon.
• As all entities are in a state of mutual simultaneous shaping, it is difficult,
if not impossible, or inappropriate to distinguish causes from effects. The
attribution of meaning is continuous and evolving over time
Epistemology of qualitative research

• Social reality, experiences and social phenomena are capable of

multiple, sometimes contradictory interpretations and are available to
us through social interaction.
• Researchers focus on subjective accounts, views and interpretations
of a phenomenon by the participants (including the researcher): their
‘definition of the situation’, which is typically reported verbally rather
than numerically.
• Qualitative research examines situations through the eyes of the
participants
Aspects of qualitative research
• Natural setting-Qualitative researchers tend to collect data in the field
at the site where participants experience the issue or problem under
study.
• Researcher as key instrument-Qualitative researchers collect data
themselves through examining documents, observing behavior, or
interviewing participants.
• Multiple sources of data-Qualitative researchers typically gather
multiple forms of data, such as interviews, observations, and
documents, rather than rely on a single data source.
Aspects of qualitative research
• Participants' meanings-In the entire qualitative research process, the
researcher keeps a focus on learning the meaning that the
participants hold about the problem or issue.
• Emergent design-The research process for qualitative researchers is
emergent. This means that the initial plan for research cannot be
tightly prescribed, and all phases of the process may change or shift
after the researcher enters the field and begins to collect data.
Aspects of qualitative research
• Inductive data analysis---Qualitative researchers build their patterns,
categories, and themes from the bottom up, by organizing the data
into increasingly more abstract units of information.

• lnterpretive--Qualitative research is a form of interpretive inquiry in

which researchers make an interpretation of what they see, hear, and
understand. Their interpretations cannot be separated from their own
backgrounds, history, contexts, and prior understandings.
• Holistic account-Qualitative researchers try to develop a complex
picture of the problem or issue under study.
Interpretive or Constructivist
Paradigm
• This paradigm examines how people engage in processes of
constructing and reconstructing meanings through daily interactions.
• If you are working within this paradigm, you prioritize people’s
subjective understandings and multiple meanings in the research
process.
• The major theoretical schools of thought within this paradigm are
symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology.
phenomenology
• The field of phenomenology was developed by Edmund Husserl
(1913/1963), Martin Heidegger (1927/1982), Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(1945/1996), and Alfred Schutz (1967).
• Phenomenologists are “interested in human consciousness as a way
to understand social reality, particularly how one ‘thinks’ about
experience; in other words, how consciousness is experienced”
Symbolic interactionism
• Symbolic interactionism examines how individuals and small groups
use shared symbols, such as language and gestures, during
interactions in order to communicate meaning (Hesse-Biber & Leavy,
2011, p. 17).
• Symbolic interactionists believe that the meanings we attach to
interactions, people, or objects are not inherent but rather develop
out of “ongoing social interactions” (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011, p.
17).
• Shared meanings help people understand how to act “appropriately”
(HesseBiber & Leavy, 2011, p. 18).
Ethnomethodology
• The assumption is that “social life is created and re-created” as
a result of the “micro-understanding individuals bring to their
everyday social context” (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011, p. 20).
• Again, to demonstrate how researchers’ philosophical belief systems
impact their choice of methods, ethnomethodologists frequently use
ethnography and interview methods
Critical Paradigm
• Area studies such as Black studies or African American studies,
women’s studies or gender studies, Chicano/Chicana studies, and
queer studies all developed in critique of the unequal relations of
power within the broader society.
• The main theoretical schools of thought within this paradigm are
postmodernist, poststructuralist, feminist, critical race, indigenous,
and queer theoretical frameworks.
Postmodern theorists
• Postmodern theorists investigate dominant ideology. More specifically,
theorists in this perspective critique the discourses that normalize
dominant ideology— that is, those lines of thinking that become so
“taken-for-granted” that people may fail to realize that they are power-
laden discourses.
• The argument is that there is nothing accidental about dominant
ideology and the discourses that create and maintain it.
• Antonio Gramsci (1929), an early leader in the field, argued that people
partly consent to their own oppression through the internalization of
the dominant ideology, which poses as “commonsense” ways of
thinking that seem to make sense of the world.
Postmodern theorists
• This theoretical framework draws our attention to the symbolic and
discursive contexts (images, objects, language, phrasing) that have
been constructed in power-rich environments and through which
power operates and ideas of normalcy are created. (Hesse Biber &
Leavy, 2011, p. 21).
• For example, Venus Evans Winters considers the language that might
be used to describe the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014–2016
versus the incendiary and racialized language repeatedly employed by
the media:
“Protests vs. Riots”
“Citizens vs. Thugs”
“Youth vs. Black Community»
Poststructuralism
• Poststructuralism is also concerned with challenging dominant ideology.
• Jacques Derrida (1966), a pioneer in poststructuralism, promoted a strategy
of critical deconstruction as a way to break down unities to expose what
has been rendered invisible.
• Poststructuralism focuses on breaking down unified narratives to see how
dominant ideology works.
• For example, from this perspective, a qualitative researcher might conduct a
critical content analysis of media representations of the 2014–2016 Black
Lives Matter protests in order to deconstruct how the media created and re-
created a cohesive narrative using the language of riots instead of protests
and how such a narrative reinforced dominant ideologies that systematically
disadvantage people of color and serve to depoliticize their actions
Ethnography
• Field research (ethnography) is the oldest qualitative genre, with its roots
in cultural anthropology.
• The terms field research and ethnography are often used interchangeably
in the literature; however, they have slightly different meanings.
Ethnography refers to writing about culture.
• Field research takes place in natural settings, referred to as the field. The
result of field research is an ethnography.
• These approaches to research rely on the researcher engaging in direct
observations of people in their natural settings in order to understand
social life from the perspective of the participants (Bailey, 2007).
• Ethnographers use “thick descriptions” of social life (Geertz, 1973)
Interview
• Interview is a commonly used research genre across disciplines.
• There are numerous interview methods available to qualitative researchers,
including in-depth, semistructured, oral history or life history, biographic
minimalist, and focus groups (in which multiple participants are interviewed
at once in a group).
• In general, interview methods use conversation as a tool.
• People are naturally conversational, and so interview methods draw on
something people are accustomed to participating in, even if not typically in
formal settings (Brinkmann, 2012, 2013).
• Narrative approaches have increased in recent years and view “storytelling
as a communicative activity” that allow people to ascribe meanings to their
experiences (Bochner & Riggs, 2014, p. 202).
Interview
• unstructured interview
• semistructured interview
• highly structured interview
• In-depth interviews are inductive or open-ended
Content analysis
• Content analysis or document analysis is a method for systematically
investigating texts. Some refer to content analysis as a way of
studying documented human communications (Adler & Clark, 2011;
Babbie, 2013).
• Qualitative researchers use content analysis to understand the
meanings that circulate in texts. For example, this method has been
widely used to study the portrayal of gender in advertising and other
media, the representation of minority groups in history textbooks,
and the content of news and political programming, both the overt
and implied messages.
Content analysis
• Qualitative researchers analyze not only “textual content” but also
the context in which it was created. Roller and Lavrakas (2015) define
qualitative content analysis as “the systematic reduction . . . of
content, analyzed with special attention to the context in which it was
created, to identify themes and extract meaningful interpretations of
data” (p. 232).
• Because the data are nonliving, they possess two distinct features:
These data (1) are noninteractive and (2) exist independent of the
research (Reinharz, 1992, pp. 147–148).
• Qualitative content analysis allows researchers to investigate the
meanings embedded within texts.
Triangulation
• Triangulation is a commonly used strategy for using multiple methods
or sources of data to address the same question. There are multiple
types of triangulation.
Basic characteristics of qualitative
research
• 1. Qualitative research occurs in natural settings. where human behavior
and events occur.
• 2. Qualitative research is based on assumptions that are very different
from quantitative designs. Theory or hypotheses are not established a
priori.
• 3. The researcher is the primary instrument in data collection rather than
some inanimate mechanism (Eisner, 1991; Frankel & Wallen. 1990; Lincoln
& Guba. 1985; Merriam. 1988).
• 4. The data that emerge from a qualitative study are descriptive. That is,
data are reported in words (primarily the participant's words) or pictures,
rather than in numbers.
Basic characteristics of qualitative
research
• 5. The focus of qualitative research is on participants' perceptions and
experiences, and the way they make sense of their lives. The attempt
is therefore to understand not one, but multiple realities (Lincoln &
Guba, 1985).
6. Researchers are particularly interested in understanding how things
occur.
7. Idiographic interpretation is utilized. In other words, attention is paid
to particulars; and data is interpreted in regard to the particulars of a
case rather than generalizations.
Basic characteristics of qualitative
research
• 8. Qualitative research is an emergent design in its negotiated
outcomes. Meanings and interpretations are negotiated with human
data sources because It is the subjects' realities that the researcher
attempts to reconstruct (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Merriam, 1988).

• 9. This research tradition relies on the utilization of tacit knowledge

(intuitive and felt knowledge) because often the nuances of the
multiple realities can be appreciated most in this way (Lincoln &
Guba, 1985). Therefore, data are not quantifiable in the traditional
sense of the word
Basic characteristics of qualitative
research
• 10 Objectivity and truthfulness are critical to both research traditions.
However, the criteria for judging a qualitative study differ from
quantitative research. First and foremost the researcher seeks
believability, based on coherence, insight and instrumental utility
(Eisner. 1991) and trustworthiness (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) through a
process of verification rather than through traditional validity and
reliability measures