Qualitative Research Methods

Outcomes for Qualitative Research:

• You will be able to critically distinguish qualitative research as a research paradigm from other research paradigms.
• You will locate the emerging debates in qualitative research within a new emerging world view.
• You will formulate your perspective based on ontological and epistemological considerations when using a qualitative research approach.
• You will conceptually describe a number of qualitative research approaches.

Introduction

• Research methods define the tools that researchers use to collect data.
• Research is concerned with truth and how to find it.
• Ontology defines what truth is.
• Epistemology defines how to find or get to know the truth.
• Conceptualizations are different strands of qualitative research that identify how the research defines and comes to know the truth.
• People give things such as words, pictures, or symbols, meaning, which means these things can differ by culture, age, gender, and context.
• This creates difficulty in developing one universally agreed meaning for things.

Methods, Methodology and Paradigms

• Qualitative researchers use theories e.t.c. through the process of methodology to develop a research method.

Towards a Definition of Qualitative Research

• Qualitative Research uses words or pictures rather than numerical data.
• Qualitative Research is meaning-based rather than statistical forms of data analysis.
• Qualitative Research takes place in Naturalistic settings where human interactions occur.
• Qualitative Research focuses on how humans arrange themselves and their settings.
• Qualitative Research focuses on how inhabitants of these settings make sense of their surroundings through symbols, rituals, social structures, and roles etc.
• Qualitative Research asks open-ended as opposed to closed-ended questions.
• Qualitative Research is attentive to all aspects of the research process.
• Qualitative Research is inductive in nature, meaning it starts from specific cases or observations to develop broader generalizations for the population.

Types of Research Approach in Qualitative Research

• Descriptive research describes a group of people or phenomena.
• Descriptive research poses "What?" research questions.
• Exploratory research explores a topic when there isn't a lot known about a phenomenon, group, process, activity, or situation.
• Exploratory research does not always depart from a fixed theoretical framework, but can work towards developing a theory based on the data (grounded theory).
• Philosophical/theoretical research uses theories to attempt to explain the cause and effect of human behavior, which traditionally was thought to facilitate control over people.
• Researchers now understand that human life is complex and interdependent and based on mutual causality.
• So no developed theory is universal, meaning it can only be valid for specific situations and populations

Understanding the Philosophical Grounding of Qualitative Research

• Ontology refers to what is reality?

Postpositivism

• All knowledge is fallible, but not equally fallible.
• Reality is multifaceted, subjective, and mentally constructed by individuals

Interpretivism

• Human life can only be understood from within.
• Social life is a distinctively human product.
• The human mind is the purposive source or origin of meaning.
• Human behavior is affected by knowledge of the social world.
• The social world does not "exist" independently of human knowledge

Symbolic interactionism

• Overlaps with interpretivism.
• Meaning is attached to an object or phenomenon.
• This meaning affects our interactions with such objects, but can set a motion of change in progress (such as self-fulfilling prophecy).

Critical Theory

• Social reality is created on an ongoing basis.
• Identity is formed within the political and power field of knowledge.
• Every historical period creates rules about what counts as scientific fact.
• There is no neutrality in traditional data gathering, and only supports the ideology of the time.
• Valid knowledge arises from a critique of the social structure and systems in society.

Postmodernism

• Postmodernism rejects the emphasis on rational discovery through the scientific method.
• Views "facts" and "values" as interactive.
• Postmodernism rejects the notion of objective knowledge.
• Rejects the idea of a fixed, universal and eternal foundation of reality.
• A research method doesn't just uncover reality, but constructs it in the process.