Now that you have read a bit about Qualitative Research, summarize the main elements of this research method in a Blogger entry.
First, we have to define qualitative research - something that is not as easy to do as it sounds, as every author has a different way of describing it. Basically, qualitative research is the "use of naturalistic approaches that seek to understand phenomena in context-specific settings" What was that?" I hear you say. Lets see if I can put it in layman's terms. If you want to find out the exact number of plant species in a certain area, you design a scientific experiment to do this and this is called quantitative research. What you will come up with is a specific number from the counting of species and this can be compared with other counts elsewhere. Easy to do (if you like that sort of thing), and easy to interpret too.
Now lets say you want find out how people react to a bomb exploding nearby (like in the Boston Marathon), or how they feel about this afterwards. You can't gather up all the people there and say "who feels angry?" and then count them and state 50% of the people there were angry - and the reason you can't do this is because some people will feel angry and scared, some scared and worried, some may feel overwhelmed. There could be a myriad of feelings, and actions/reactions to go with each of those feelings. Qualitative research discovers those things. Qualitative researchers want to know where, when, how and under what circumstances behavior comes into being. What historical circumstances and movements are they a part of? Each act, word and gesture is significant in the eyes of the qualitative researcher.
There are two ways of doing this - either by observation or by in depth interview/survey. In an observation, the researcher may be hidden from view or not, or disguised as one of the participants without the others knowing. The interviews and questionnaires will produce much data which will then have to be sorted out - and this can be time consuming.
There are 5 basic features of qualitative research. Firstly, as mentioned above, qualitative researchers take what is known as a "naturalistic" approach. This means the researcher likes to observe what is happening in its' natural environment, armed with a pen, paper or tape recorder.
Secondly, there is the data itself. Instead of pure numbers, the data tends to be 'descriptive' - taking on the form of words or pictures. This in fact is an important point. Qualitative research does not want to boil down the results into a hard number. Nothing is taken for granted or overlooked - gestures, jokes, tone of voice, verbiage, decor, style of dress, response time, body language and a multitude of other details help to enrich the data.
Thirdly, qualitative research is concerned not just with the outcome but with the process of getting there. For example; educators that want to know if the 'self fulfilling prophecy has merit would use qualitative research to find this out - and indeed this has been done by Rosenthall & Jacobson - two researchers in 1968. They gave credence to the idea that students' cognitive performance is affected by teachers' expectations of them through qualitative research (a self fulfilling prophecy).
A fourth most common feature is that qualitative researchers analyze their data inductively.
They do not set out to find data to prove or disprove hypotheses that they have prior to their study - this would be too easy! Instead, their theories come from the "bottom up" rather than the "top down". Emerging more like an artist painting a picture as opposed to a jigsaw puzzle where the outcome is known it is in the first part of the qualitative research where the qualitative researcher discovers the important questions, and then may need to go back to the beginning again to ask more questions or gather more data, or re-sort the data according to the patterns that start to emerge. That is not to say however that qualitative researchers do not specify primary questions to be explored and make plans for for data collection. They do.
Finally, qualitative research sets out to discover the meaning that events have on people who are experiencing them. The researcher then interprets these meanings for the study. This has been a most contentious issue, because the relationship that the observer has with the respondent could effect the outcome. As stated in the JTE article: "The credibility of a qualitative research report relies heavily on the confidence readers have in the researchers ability to be sensitive to the data and to make appropriate decisions in the field".
There are of course many other sources of data that are useful in qualitative research, including official records, letters, journals, diaries, news reports etc. All of these can be used to supplement data collected in qualitative research.
The important thing to remember about this type of research is that the researcher has to transform the data collected into a story that will be read by others. As there are no real tests for validity of the research, qualitative research is judged on three criteria: coherence (does the story make sense?), Consensus (does the reader concur with the findings?) and Utility (is this study useful?). Good qualitative research is more of a road map towards more study than the final word on a subject.
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