Introduction to Modu-transcript PDF

SPEAKER 0 Hi everyone. If you can quiet down, please. Thank you. If you can. Quiet down, please. Thank you. So I'll leave the QR code thing up there, but I'll get started with the initial bit, which is not the things will be tested on, but how we will test you. Um, so there's a little bit giving yo...

SPEAKER 0 Hi everyone. If you can quiet down, please. Thank you. If you can. Quiet down, please. Thank you. So I'll leave the QR code thing up there, but I'll get started with the initial bit, which is not the things will be tested on, but how we will test you. Um, so there's a little bit giving you some background on the module and how things are structured a little bit. So if you're an undergrad you are registered in psychology or whatever. 2032 and this is set up newly, this is the first year that it's done this way, that there's a separate module code for the autumn semester and the spring semester. You should be registered in both, but we have a different module code come back in February. So if you do see some things in Moodle or elsewhere that say psychology 2002. Don't be surprised. That's effectively just the the same module as it was last year and prior. Maybe send me an email or post something in the forum just so we can update things, but it's still relevant. Otherwise it's just we didn't change the code apparently. Um, if you are doing a master's conversion, this is a full year module. And I guess part of the thing that is there's a different person is the convenor. So I'm, I guess I should have said Doctor Christopher Bowden. I'm the convenor for the undergrad parts. If you're in conversion then Marcus is the convenor. You'll meet him in the extra workshop. Seminar things that you have bi weekly. Uh, I think that covers it for that. So in some weeks we have some time yet you will be given a practice activity. This is meant to be a practice for a part that ends up being in your exam. So the main thing we wanted to do in several years ago, and we introduced this is to give you a definite reason to attempt doing that kind of a effectively into being. Writing a results section to describe a research study obviously were to early in the, in the module for you to do that yet. So post that assignment within a few weeks and you'll be given 2 to 3 weeks before it's due. That's just marked as pass or fail and count for 5% of the module mark. Generally, everyone passes as long as you write at least a couple of sentences that showed you kind of at least made an attempt. And then in the second last, um, lecture session of the semester way in December, around what it's due, um, we will go through what, what different answers look like that basically would get partial marks and to some degree then what a complete answer would look like. So that going into the exam, you know what's expected of you. Um, but what it is given to you, it'll take some study green because it's a bit early in the module, but that was the only way we could have it be given to you a few weeks before we go through it, and then have that not be the last thing in the module at all? Um, we'll tell you more about that and have an announcement when that's when you know enough to be able to do it. Um, and just kind of a bit more broadly. So this module is called Research Methods and Analysis. And the main kind of premise then is that in psychology, depending what kind of kind of subfield and what kind of research you're doing, there's a lot of different approaches that can be used to do research within psychology. And at least the two broad categories which are both covered in this module is quantitative research. So effectively doing experiments looking at accuracy or response somewhere some sort of dependent variable. Maybe you have different groups of people. So for instance if you have some sort of clinical treatment and a control or maybe also having within subject conditions. So for instance I study memory. Maybe we look at memory for emotional things and things that are otherwise more mundane and emotionally neutral, and then those would be within subject and things that we compare memory for. In the second kind of broad category of things that are research methods, we have qualitative methods, and that's doing things like interviews or focus groups, or there's many other ways that you can cut or collect the data. And then analysing to some degree what is the content of it. So what are the type of main themes that are discussed? What types of things are brought up to varying degrees? There's a range of different qualitative methods. We'll give you some of those in this module. And that is also the topic of today's actual lecture, which Stephanie McDonald will be giving us shortly. And some other topics that are related to this are also covered that aren't clearly one or the other, such as ethics and measurement. Validity will be at least between the two semesters. Those are also covered. So as I kind of just said today, we're we're going to be starting with qualitative. Part of the reason of this is if you're in one of those module codes that's listed there, that is also what you'll be starting with in the Practical Methods module. If you are in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, you have a slightly different set of practical methods sections that are covered that are more neuroscience oriented. But we also want to make sure for what you're going to be assessed out of this module, you have what you need. And even though some things might be kind of redundant for some students, you obviously this this module needs a standalone as well. So I think that covers the main things. Please use the module forum if you have questions about kind of broader topics. If you have questions about your marks or something then do email me. But otherwise there's sometimes I guess let's say with SPSS and license things, I don't want to get ten emails from ten students saying the same same issue posted on the forum. So when I answer it for everyone, then everyone kind of benefits rather than dozens of emails. So I will turn it over to Stephanie now. Oops. SPEAKER 1 Yeah. I think. SPEAKER 2 Right. Good morning everyone. So I believe I will have met most people last year in your social psychology modules. But for those who don't know me, my name is Stephanie McDonald and it would help if I put my mic on as well. Is that coming through okay? Yeah, perfect. I'm an associate professor in the School of Psychology. I'm involved in various teaching in psychology, social psychology, research methods and analyses, and I also convened the final year project. So this is my email address. And I also have an office hour. If anybody wants to talk to me about any aspects of the content of my teaching with you, please feel free to either post it on the forum or pop in and see me in my office. B18 in psychology okay, so Some learning outcomes for today's session. By the end of this session, and with some additional reading to complement this lecture, we will be able to explain what qualitative research is and the types of questions it is best suited to answer. So what we're going to do today is give you a brief overview of some of the features and some of the assumptions of qualitative research. We will also identify some core differences between qualitative and quantitative research paradigms. So this is primarily for comparative purposes. So today I'd like you to leave with an appreciation. Not that one paradigm overall is better than the other, but one paradigm is particularly suited to answering particular types of questions, which we're going to cover in a moment. So we're going to describe how two methods of data collection are used today and some of the advantages and disadvantages of each. So we're going to cover interviews focus groups. But as Chris mentioned earlier there's a broad range of different methods. So what we're doing today is giving you a flavour of some of those methods. So I guess this is what you would need to know for the assessment. But when designing a lecture, I always like to think beyond a particular type of assessment. So hopefully with this lectures we're going to be equipping you with the tools that you need and the skills and the knowledge to go out and conduct your own interviews, focus groups and analyse that data. Okay, so starting from the basics, what is qualitative research and can I have a show of hands? Do people in the room have any experience with qualitative research either through a previous course Some people the majority know. Which is great because we are starting from the basics today. So at the most basic level, qualitative research is concerned with a collection and analysis of text based data. We're not interested in numbers here. We're not interested in SPSS and so forth. So we're looking at text based data. For example I can go out and interview people. I can conduct focus groups I can administer a survey with open ended questions. So the types of questions what people can write or type the responses. So data can be from primary sources such as those presented above. But you can have some data from secondary sources. For example you might be looking at content in online blogs or how a particular topic is discussed in specific online forums, with the right ethical considerations and approval, of course. You could be looking at newspapers articles. So, for example, I might be interested how different newspapers might be covering a particular topic. Brexit, climate change, anything else that's current. So what I could be doing is looking at how that topic might be portrayed differently as a function of the politics of newspapers. So this is where I'm drawing on secondary data. Okay. So. I'm going to highlight a contextual and historical point as a way of highlighting some of the assumptions of qualitative research. So what we think of psychology and how we do psychology, how we study Psychology has been heavily influenced by behavioural and cognitive experimentalism, which is underpinned by positivism and post positivism philosophies. So within such approaches in psychology, we seek to understand and determine an observable, objective, universal psychological reality. So as scientific researchers, what we're trying to do in, in our experiments is to observe this reality, and we're trying to isolate the cause and effects of real observable phenomena. Now, what qualitative research approaches came in and question or even rejected this idea of there's one true universal answer to a particular type of question. The there's one true universal knowledge that's there available for us to discover and observe. Instead, they tend to assume there isn't only one correct version of reality, and they come from a perspective that argues that there can be multiple version of realities, and that those are constantly linked to the context that they occur in. So what we're interested here as qualitative researchers is people's experiences, people's perceptions and the meanings of those experiences. And the focus also is how the social context influences those experiences. For example, how I interpret things might be a function of my experiences, my background and so forth, and that offers one particular version of reality. Now, as researchers, as we'll cover next week during our thematic analysis lecture, there isn't one A simple one way of making meaning of our data. There isn't a simple right answer. So, for example, if you were to do qualitative inductive thematic analysis, you might have two independent researchers working on exactly the same data following the same analytical approach. It doesn't necessarily mean that both researchers will come up with exactly the same themes that they've developed. So one of the criticisms is anything goes in qualitative research, which is emphatically not the case. I'll give you an example that I tend to give in this lecture. So imagine you went on a holiday with some friends. You come back and I ask you, how was your holiday? You might say it was amazing. It was so relaxed. I spent a whole week on the beach. It was fantastic. I might ask your friend, so how was your holiday? It was so boring. There was a beach. There was some, but nothing else. No activities. Who is right? So both of those stories are true stories of the holiday. So any good analysis and that's important to say needs to be plausible, coherent and grounded in the data. Okay. So. I'm giving you here a few definitions of qualitative research. Just to give you a little bit of information about my background, which is in health psychology. And I'm also involved in pedagogical research around designing inclusive and effective learning experiences. So lots of the examples that I give in class tend to reflect those experiences. But that's not to say this is qualitative. Research is not just about health psychology or pedagogical Covid surge. These are just the examples that come more naturally. So as qualitative researchers, we tend to be concerned with meaning. We're interested in how do people make sense of the world. How do they experience event events. We want to understand what is it like being diagnosed with a chronic health condition, for example, what are people's experiences of assessments in higher education? How do people manage certain situations? So qualitative researchers seek a deeper truth. They study things in their natural environment and they attempt to make sense and interpret those phenomena. So when might you adopt a quantitative methodology that heavily depends on what your research question is. What is your research question? What do you want to investigate? What do you want to know? What do you want to find out? Do you want to investigate the prevalence of something? On average, how many symptoms do people report? Or do you want to talk to people and find out a little bit more about a concept, about a phenomenon that you don't know much about? Or there might not be sufficient literature in, um, in the body of literature. Do you want to look at something that was previously researched in a different way? Would you benefit from measuring something, or would you benefit from listening and observing and not assuming a priori and handing out a survey? So it heavily depends what your research question is, what you want to find out. We want to understand that particular a particular concept in greater depth. Okay. So qualitative and quantitative can be seen as different paradigms. I'm just highlighting here some of the key differences that you might see in the literature as well. So as I mentioned quantitative research we're looking at numbers and we're doing our statistical tests and we're testing our hypotheses. So we seek to identify relationships that generalise to the population. We pick a representative sample. And what we're trying to do is generalise from that sample to the population. We're qualitative research. We seek to understand and interpret in terms of local meanings. So we're not dealing with a universally assumed concept. What we're dealing with is potentially a very specific population. And we have a very specific research Question, and we interpret based on those local meanings that local contexts. With qualitative research we have narrow but quite rich data. And that's the objective. We conduct interviews, we contact focus groups. We want that richness in data to be able to understand and develop our theory about a concept. Whereas quantitative, we tend to have shallow but broad data, lots of people, less contextual detail. Quantitative tends to be theory testing, whereas qualitative tends to be theory generating and can be seen as primarily exploratory in the approaches that we use. Now one important point quantitative tends to be objective, whereas qualitative acknowledges subjectivity of the researcher. For example, this is a recognition that as researchers, we bring our subjectivity, our frameworks, our perceptions, our experiences into the research context. And this is not something that's treated as a bias in qualitative research. So what we do is tend to involve some contextual analysis which takes that subjectivity into account. And I'll bring some examples next week. Okay. So I'm putting up this slide not because you need to know in detail any of those approaches, but this is just to highlight that qualitative research is not just thematic analysis. Focus groups interviews. When we think about qualitative research is a broader cluster of different methodologies offering frameworks of how we do research, how do we interpret our findings? What type of knowledge are we generating from these analyses. And here are just a few examples. So IPA interpretive Phenomenological analysis, grounded theory narrative and so forth, just to raise awareness of the broad range of quantitative methods available out there. Okay. So let's now move on. How am I doing on time. Great. Let's now move on to two types of data collection. We're going to cover what they are. And I'm going to share some tips from the literature and my own experience. So if you go out and you design or contact your interview focus group, you have a couple of things in mind to make that successful. Kind of just check is the lighting okay in the room or is that too dark. UNKNOWN But okay. Yeah. SPEAKER 2 Okay. So the most common qualitative method of data analysis is typically the interview if we're looking at primary data. So this is a professional conversation. And the goal is to get people to talk about their experiences. Depending on your research question of course, and their perspectives, we're interested in what are people saying? How are they saying it? What is the meaning behind those words behind that language? We want to explore their views. We want to gain insight. And this is quite appropriate when little is known about a topic. If I want to find out a little bit more about a topic, I go and talk to the people who might be affected by a particular condition, for example. Now, this is a very good method when people have a personal stake in the matter, For example, if I want to investigate people's perceptions and experiences with learning statistics in higher education, then it will be beneficial for my research to go out and recruit people who are undergraduate students in higher education studying statistics. It's more likely that this will generate rich, detailed responses from my participants, and it's particularly suited to experience type research. Question. So when we develop our research question, we need to think, what is it that I want to find out? What's the best method of achieving that and what resources have I got available as well, which is really, really important within the context of a specific project. So sometimes we need to think about some of the benefits and some of the challenges associated with different methods. So if we think about interviews, for example, some of the benefits you're contacting 1 to 1 interviews. It can range between an hour an hour and a half, two hours depending on the topic, depending on what it is you want to find out, so you can get some rich and quite detailed data that you otherwise wouldn't if you were to contact, for example, a survey, and send that out to people. It's also quite flexible, and I'll cover this in a couple of slides. You can probe and ask and plan questions. Typically, you would need smaller samples. That does heavily depend on the richness and the detail in data. It can be good for quite sensitive issues. If you're investigating sensitive topics, some people might be less reluctant to disclose Information and to open up about sensitive topics in a group settings such as a focus group, for example. And it's quite accessible as well. It can be used to collect data from vulnerable populations such as children. It's quite an accessible method. If we look at some of the disadvantages, though, it can be quite time consuming for researchers and participants. So if you think I've got a project that I have to complete within X amount of time, have I got that time to go out there and conduct 1 to 1 interviews? It does depend on the resources and it depends on your research question. So one of the criticisms is lack of anonymity. As a researcher I know who might participants are, but there are strict ethical protocols to maintain confidentiality and privacy. And if you're conducting interviews, you need to be getting ethical clearance with your study protocol in place to maintain those aspects. But to the sensitive topics, some people may be more comfortable disclosing sensitive information in a group setting or an anonymous survey. And it's not always empowering for participants. There's less control. There's more control. The researcher has more control of the data to increase the likelihood of generating useful data for this study. So a couple of types of interviews, which you may see in the literature. We've got the structured interview where you've got questions response categories. And this is essentially a verbally administered questionnaire. You don't deviate. You ask the questions. You provide the list of responses. And that said we don't use that in qualitative research. This is a quantitative method. You can have a completely unstructured interview schedule. You have a list of topics to discuss with the participant. You can have an opening question. Can you tell me about your experience with x, y, z? The participant initiates that conversation, and then you pick up on points and you facilitate that discussion. So it's not the most popular method, but it's quite it can be quite useful if there's no knowledge about a particular topic. Now what's more common is what we call the semi-structured interview. This is where, as researchers, we go in prepared with a list of questions that we want to cover a list of topics that are relevant to a research question. But what's important and this is good interviewing skills. There is scope for participants to discuss things that are important to them. What do I mean by that? So as researchers conducting interviews, we need to be very active in the process. And we have to be flexible and responsive to what participants are telling us. It could be the case that the participant mentions an idea, mention something that's important to them and relevant to the question, but you didn't anticipate that it's not in your interview schedule. If that's relevant, you allow the participant to develop that narrative and you probe further. So there is an opportunity there to pick up on things and find out a little bit more about something that you hadn't originally anticipated. Also, if I'm conducting an interview and question number two, for example, is on teaching approach Approaches in lectures, and the participant talks about teaching approaches and then mentions assessment. If it's relevant, if there's scope. But I've got my assessment question towards the end, I can consider is that a good time to move things around a little bit and focus on the assessment at that point, so I don't have to adhere to the structure and the order of my questions. I have to be responsive and facilitate that conversation with my research participant. So what we typically do with appropriate ethical approval, you hear me saying a lot with ethics, with ethical approval is we usually audio record Interviews to help us with transcribing the data. So transcription is a process whereby we turn any audio or video recording into written text for subsequent analysis. And it's that text that we then use to analyse. That's our data. Okay. So a little bit about the structure and some tips from my previous experiences as well. Preparation is absolute key. And when you draft your interview schedule, it's likely that you're going to have a look at it. You're going to discuss it with your supervisor, the rest of the research team. You might pilot the the interview schedule. And so forth. If we want participants to open up and talk to us about their experiences and inclose disclose information, it's really, really important to build trust and report with our participants. Opening closing questions are really important and the order of the questions as well. So a couple of years back, I contacted some interviews with patients in an outpatient clinic over at the UMC. So in the research team, we were interested in people's experiences with their illness, how they were managing the illness impact and so forth. So one of the things I wanted to ask was what would be the impact for further disease progression? Now if I went in there and said, hello, my name is so-and-so, I'm a researcher, what would it mean for you if your illness was further in progress or deteriorated? That's a bit much for a first question. We need to think about our opening question in terms of something that's a bit more open, a bit easier for participants to respond to, for example. What types of assessments are you taking as part of your course? If I'm interested in experiences with assessments. Yes, I might need to ask some sensitive topics and I will have informed participants through my participant information sheet. But I need to consider how am I asking this and where does it fit in the interview schedule? Sensitive topics? Perhaps not immediately later on in the interview. Open questions. Avoiding yes or no answers. Not leading questions as well, for example. Do you think dental surgery rooms are frightening? Are we making an assumption that everyone thinks of the dentist as something that's a frightening experience. Singular questions are also better as well. I'm including here an example from Smith 2007, just to show how they've structured their interviews and cluster different topics into broader topics as well for flow. Okay, looking at how am I doing on time? Brilliant. I'd like us to do a short activity to illustrate some of those points, and I'll put it on full and I'll put lecture in spotlight spotlight centre lights. Oh no, that's probably too much. There we are. There we are. Okay, so the second type of there we are. So the second methodological Um, technique, if you like. Method of data collection that it like us to cover today is focus groups. Can I ask has anybody taken part in a focus group? I won't ask details. Couple of people. Okay, great. So a focus group is a method of collecting data from multiple people at the same time in a particular location, physical or virtual location. It's a discussion focussed on a particular topic or a set of core issues. Now, as a researcher, what I'm doing in that context is I've got my my focus group schedule. I've got a list of topics I want to cover. I have a list of questions. And what I want to do is facilitate a discussion, a conversation with my participants. So I'm not turning around to every participant asking the same question. I'm posing the question and I'm facilitating discussion and conversation. What's really great and really powerful in focus groups. And that's something that Chris and I put in our latest paper this year is a really good method because you're capturing the interaction between participants. Somebody might mention anything. It might trigger a response from somebody else, they might offer a different perspective of things. So you have more detailed elaborated accounts hopefully through the focus group. So a question is how many participants should I have in a particular focus group. And that's really, really something to consider. So you don't want too many people there because it might make it a little bit tricky to manage, but also to capture those detailed, elaborated accounts. On the other hand, too few participants. Are you really getting diversity in opinions depending on your research question? So if you have a look at the literature, typically the suggestion would be around 6 or 8 participants is a good number to have in a focus group. So participants could be pre-existing groups. So might invite a group of colleagues. And I want to facilitate a conversation about the workplace environment. Or I could bring people together specifically for the research based on shared characteristics, experiences, and so forth. So, for example, I might invite students to postgraduate students from various departments across the university to come and talk about their experiences around lectures. For example, they might not know each other, but they've got the shared characteristic of attending lectures as part of their course. It's not always a group discussion. You could have an activity in a focus group. You might ask people to respond to stimuli in a particular way. And this is where you might find it helpful depending on resources, to have an additional person taking notes there or yourself, because you might not capture everything in the audio recording. If somebody says, oh, I much prefer this, you're not going to capture this in the audio recording. Typically recorded and transcribed as well. And it's that transcript that we use as data. So a couple of advantages and disadvantages. Again, if we're thinking about what method might be best. That does depend on your research question, but also resources as well. There's flexibility in focus groups to explore unanticipated issues. And it's a lot more naturalistic than other types of data collection. It resembles everyday conversations that people have. It's a conversation is a discussion that people have in the focus group. It can facilitate personal disclosure. They can provide an open, supportive environment where people with shared experiences come together and talk about those experiences, and it enables people to respond to to offer different perspectives, challenge appropriately, and add to each other, providing rich data. A couple of disadvantages to think about. They can be, believe me, logistically difficult. You are trying to schedule, for example, six people to all come in at the same time in a particular physical location. Is everybody going to turn up? What do I do if they don't? Do I over recruit? What happens if they all show up so it can have its challenges with recruiting and organising can be quite easy to get off topic, and this is where we, as researchers, try to steer back the conversation to what's relevant for our research. Question. If people go off talking about their pets, that's not relevant to my research question. Let's appropriately steer back to the conversation. You might have somebody who dominates. That's where we have some ground rules that we want everybody to have an opportunity to share their experiences. Right at the start of the focus group, a couple of ethical issues. Everyone in the group knows who was there, who said what. But again, there's an ethical protocol, strategies in place to maintain people's privacy, confidentiality and setting those ground rules at the start with information shared concerned form and, if appropriate, verbally as well, that you can't go off saying, gee, you know who was in that focus group and what they've said. Not appropriate. And transcription can be time consuming as well. Okay. So you can have mixed methods. You can have projects that primarily that only adopt a qualitative approach or quantitative, or you can have both. For example, I might run an interview or some interviews or focus groups to find out a little bit more about a particular phenomenon, and that will help inform the design of my questionnaire to send it out to more people. That's an example. Another example I send out a survey to a larger group of people. I pick up on a couple of key points, and I invite some people in for an interview or focus group to probe those key ideas, those points a little bit more. So this is a different way of using mixed methods. Now a little bit about sampling. And that brings us to the end of our lecture. So one way is convenient sample. So you select the most accessible participants which may not be the most rigorous sampling method in qualitative research. What's more common is what we call purposive sample. You select data cases participants texts on the basis that they will be able to provide information rich data to analyse. If, for example, I want to find out what's the impact of a public engagement event on children and families, then I would recruit individuals who have attended that event, who have engaged with that event rather than a random sample across the board, depending on my research question. You can also have theoretical sampling, which is common in grounded theory. So this is where you start to identify the most relevant people to your research question. You interview them, then you start your data analysis process and you observe what people are telling you in their interviews, for example. And on that basis, you identify more participants or populations that you might find relevant to interview in order to develop a complete and more comprehensive understanding. So data analysis leading to theory development that shapes the selection of subsequent participants. And my final slide around how many people do I need for my interviews. What's the sample size? So there isn't any rule to generate required sample size. There isn't a statistical procedure. In qualitative research, this heavily depends on your research question. What do you want to find out? What will be useful to meet the objectives of your research, and what you can do with the available time and resources as well. One method that you might see in the literature is data saturation, and that refers to the point at which when you analyse your data, you don't identify any new information or themes within the data. At the end, some references of what we've covered today and a bit of additional reading. Thanks very much everyone. We'll see you next week.