Qualitative Research Research Paper

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Qualitative research provides rich and detailed accounts of matters under examination in ways, that other, more traditional types of research are unable to express. One of the most important distinctions that sets qualitative psychological research apart from more traditional types of research is that qualitative research is holistic, in that researchers study phenomena in their entirety rather than narrowing the focus to specific defined variables. In this research-paper, you will be presented with information that beginning students of qualitative research and prospective researchers should know.

Qualitative research is exciting and vital for producing new information. It is a highly satisfying endeavor in that it connects us with individuals, activities, and situations that are of importance to research. It allows for the careful exploration of dimensions in the social world that can give the research a depth of information not always obtainable through traditional quantitative research. Qualitative research shows us pictures of everyday life including the understandings, ideas, and experiences of the participants that are rich in significance and provide in-depth understanding. These elements are directly factored into the researcher’s analyses and explanations.

Qualitative analyses are nonstatistical methods using inductive logic. Qualitative research develops theory whereas quantitative research develops and tests theory. Qualitative research describes meaning or discovery whereas quantitative establishes relationship or causation. In qualitative research the researcher is explicitly a part of the data-gathering process whereas in quantitative, the researcher is formally an independent entity. Qualitative research uses communication and observation whereas quantitative uses instruments. Qualitative research uses unstructured data collection whereas quantitative uses structured data collection.

There are many reasons that a qualitative study may be selected over a quantitative study. Some people may simply prefer qualitative research, thinking it is suited to their personal style. Others feel that to make real changes, qualitative is more appropriate. Some people state that they are not comfortable with statistics or math and that they are stronger with their verbal and conceptual skills. Others want to use their research to bring about social, political, and economic change and believe that by engaging participants in the process, they can more easily achieve this change. Inviting cooperation by participants is almost always forbidden in most quantitative research. Although there is validity in some of these reasons, others are simply based on misinformation or lack of knowledge.

History Of Qualitative Research

Qualitative study has its roots in anthropology and sociology; the first researchers were anthropologists who conducted ethnographies of primitive cultures. These in-depth, lengthy studies occurred in the native tribes’ homeland and the researcher was as noninvasive as possible, often living among the people or studying them from a distance, so as not to influence the everyday activities of the group.

Franz Boas, who was born in Germany in 1858, is called “The Father of American Anthropology” because of his contributions to the discipline after he moved to America. In 1883 Boas went to Baffin Island (off the northern coast of Canada) to conduct geographic research on the impact of the physical environment on native Inuit migrations. Boas lived and worked closely with the Inuit peoples and developed an interest in the way the people lived. In a diary entry dated December 23, 1883, Boas wrote,

I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over that of the “savages” and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them….We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We “highly educated people” are much worse, relatively speaking……

Boas’ studies were in contrast to the other interactions with “primitive” peoples by his contemporaries, many of whom were missionaries, explorers, and colonial bureaucrats, who had intentions of influencing or changing the ways these people lived. Boas was a cultural relativist who believed the object of anthropological study is to describe the knowledge that members use to make sense within their own culture.

Qualitative research evolved through a series of historical “moments” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) during the period from 1900 to World War II called the Traditional Period. During this period, anthropologists like Margaret Mead, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown spent prolonged periods of time living among natives and compiling extensive ethnographies (Rosaldo, 1989). They developed fieldwork practices that are still used by qualitative researchers today, including participant observation, interviewing, and artifact gathering, which are described in more detail in this research-paper.

During this same time, sociologists were also exploring the integration of qualitative research methods in their field. At the University of Chicago, sociologists began using their city as a social laboratory to study the everyday lives of Chicagoans (Vidich & Lyman, 1994). Termed Chicago Sociology, the research engaged sociologists for three decades, during which time they produced many urban ethnographies capturing life in the city. The studies utilized techniques similar to those used by the anthropologist studying in faraway lands; only the people and the settings varied.

The period from World War II until the mid-1970s is called the Modernist Phase (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994); it was during this time that researchers formalized qualitative research methods. Attempts were made to establish a fit between expectations for validity, reliability, and generalizability and models of doing research. Several revolutionary books were published including Glaser and Strauss’ The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967) and Blumer’s Symbolic Interactionism (1969).

The period from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s is called The Moment of Blurred Genres (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994) because of the wide range of paradigms, methods, and strategies from different disciplines. During this time of great debate between qualitative and quantitative camps, qualitative research continued to make its mark as a valid form of scientific research. Journals began publishing more qualitative studies, and qualitative researchers were invited to present at national conferences, thus increasing the legitimacy of the research.

The stage spanning the mid-1980s until the early 1990s was called the Crisis of Representation (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) because of the difficulty in representing truth through text produced from field notes and inter-views. The argument is that “understandings of human experience are always processed through language, and language is inherently unstable” (Denzin, 1989). Although each of these historical periods has come and passed, the methods developed continue to be used by researchers today.

Theory

Hatch (2002) recommends that beginning researchers develop their own definitions of what they believe qualitative research to be in an attempt to establish “conceptual boundaries” for their work. Definitions range from descriptive formulations to product-oriented statements, but the form is not as important as the content. A comprehensive definition, devised by Bogdan and Taylor (1975), states that qualitative research “directs itself at settings and the individuals within those settings holistically; that is, the subject of the study, be it an organization or an individual, is not reduced to an isolated variable or to an hypothesis, but it is viewed instead as part of a whole” (p. 2).

Attributes of Qualitative Research

Many attributes characterize qualitative research. The following discussion introduces the beginning researcher to some of the qualities that distinguish qualitative research from other types of inquiry: centrality of meaning, emergent design, extended firsthand engagement, inductive data analysis, natural settings, participant perspectives, reflexivity, researcher as a data-gathering instrument, subjectivity, and wholeness and complexity.

Centrality of Meaning

Blumer’s (1969) symbolic interactionist theory is a way to systematically explore understandings. Three premises of symbolic interactionism underlie centrality of meaning: (a) humans react to things based on the meanings the things hold, (b) the meanings come from social interactions with other people, and (c) these meanings can change as people encounter new people and things. Although not all qualitative research uses the symbolic interactionist framework, it is a useful way for researchers to understand the way individuals construct meanings in order to participate in society.

Emergent Design

The nature of qualitative research makes it almost impossible to completely design an experiment in advance. Once the researcher enters the environment that is being studied, research designs may change and new designs may emerge. Although researchers may disagree on the extent to which research proposals should be followed, most agree that elements of the design such as research questions and methods may change as the research progresses.

Extended Firsthand Engagement

Extended firsthand engagement refers to spending extensive time in the field researching. Hatch (2002) argues that if researchers are to understand participant perspectives in natural contexts, they must spend enough time in the environment to feel certain they are reporting what they claim. Although qualitative inquiry appeals to a great number of people, few are willing to spend the time needed to produce first-rate research.

Inductive Data Analysis

Qualitative researchers first collect as much information as they can from the setting they are studying and then look for patterns and relations in what they have amassed. It is similar to putting a puzzle together without the advantage of looking at a completed picture of what it should look like when finished. The picture becomes evident as the pieces are placed together. However, qualitative data analysis also involves a deductive element because as the patterns are revealed in the data, hypothetical categories are created, and the data are then read deductively to see if these categories are supported by the original data set (Erikson, 1986).

Natural Settings

The objects of study in qualitative research are the lived experiences of real people in real settings. Therefore, researchers collect information on how individuals make sense of their lives. In traditional research, the examiner has control over the environment and sets up the experiment in a way that controls for the variables of interest. Conversely, qualitative researchers aim to explore human behavior within the most natural setting.

Participant Perspectives

Because qualitative researchers want to understand the world from the perspectives of the people who live in it, they look at the ways people respond to their environments. Researchers are interested in what is happening in the environment, how the participants are responding, and what the interaction between person and environment means to the participant. Researchers should make an effort to highlight the voices of the participants in any good qualitative report.

Reflexivity

In traditional research, it is expected that the researcher remain the “objective scientist.” However, in qualitative research it is impossible to play this role; the researcher is often part of the world of study. Reflexivity is the “process of personally and academically reflecting on lived experiences in ways that reveal deep connections between the writer and his or her subject” (Goodall, 2000).

Researcher as a Data-Gathering Instrument

The traditional role for a quantitative researcher is to be nonexistent. It would be ideal if a participant acted exactly as he or she would if you weren’t present. The problem is that this tends to ignore any differences made in the environment by the researcher. Qualitative research says document such differences and explicate them. It is difficult to get participants’ views without interacting. However, the primary data in qualitative research is often gathered by the researcher. Thus, the researcher is considered the datagathering instrument, and acts in ways similar to questionnaires, checklists, scales, tests, and other measuring devices. Data may be collected directly from participants in the form of field notes from participant observation or notes from transcripts or interviews. Information can also be collected unobtrusively via artifacts from the research environment or records related to the social experience under investigation. Human competences necessary to take part in living are the same as those that allow qualitative researchers to make sense of the actions, intentions, and understandings of the participants they are examining. Those reading the report need to know about the instrument, so the researcher should describe relevant aspects of self, biases and assumptions, expectations, and relevant history. The researcher may want to keep track of personal reactions and insights into self and post them in a separate journal.

Subjectivity

Qualitative researchers must rely on subjective interpretation because the inner states of their participants are often not directly observable. They would argue that complete objectivity is not possible in any scientific study but that all findings generated from the research are grounded in empirical evidence from their data. The goal is to apply subjectivities in ways that make it possible to understand the unstated motives and assumptions of the participants.

Wholeness and Complexity

Qualitative methods allow researchers to examine unique, dynamic, and complex social settings without reducing them to small pieces of fragmented variables. Qualitative data are “objects, pictures, or detailed descriptions that cannot be reduced to numbers without distorting the essence of the social meanings they represent” (Hatch, 2002, p. 9). The consumer of the research is able, through the detailed data, to be transported into the social situation under examination.

Research Paradigms

Research paradigms are fundamentally different belief systems about how the world is ordered, what we may know about it, and how we may know it. We examine five research paradigms according to ontology, epistemology, methodology, and products. The intention is to give novice researchers a guide for exploring assumptions about what research is and how it works. For a more in-depth discussion of these research paradigms, see Denzin and Lincoln (1994) and Guba and Lincoln (1994).

Positivist Paradigm

The positivist (or realist) believes in an objective universe that has order regardless of human perceptions. Reality is out there to be studied, captured, and understood. Positivists believe that the world has order and that it is possible, through research, to discover that order. Researchers gain knowledge through experiments, quasi experiments, surveys, and correlational studies. The products, or forms of knowledge produced, include facts, theories, laws, and predictions.

Postpositivist Paradigm

In the postpositivist paradigm (or critical realism), reality exists but is never fully apprehended, only approximated. The researcher knows an approximation of reality, as the researcher is the data-collection instrument. Knowledge is gained through rigorously defined qualitative methods, frequency counts, and low-level statistics. Forms of knowledge produced include generalizations, descriptions, patterns, and grounded theory.

Constructivist Paradigm

According to the constructivist paradigm, multiple realities are constructed. Knowledge is a human construction, and the researcher and participant(s) coconstruct understandings. Knowledge is gained through naturalistic qualitative methods that result in case studies, narratives, interpretations, and reconstructions.

Critical/Feminist Paradigm

Those who subscribe to the critical/feminist paradigm believe that the apprehended world makes a material difference in terms of race, sex, and class. According to this view, knowledge is subjective and political and researchers’ values frame inquiry. Knowledge is gained through transformative inquiry that yields value-mediated critiques that challenge existing power structures and promote resistance.

Poststructuralist Paradigm

In the poststructuralist paradigm, order is created within individual minds to ascribe meaning to a meaningless universe. Because (according to this perspective) there is no “truth” to be known, researchers examine the world through textural representations of it. Knowledge about the world is gained through methods like deconstruction, genealogy, and data-based, multivoiced studies. These methods result in reports in the form of deconstructions, genealogies, and reflexive, polyvocal texts.

The five paradigms introduced here are ways of thinking about the order of the world, what is deemed knowledge, and how that knowledge can be expanded. It is important to note that after a researcher has selected the paradigm that makes sense to him or her, the positions taken by other researchers working within other paradigms will not make sense. Starting with the positivist paradigm and moving toward the poststructuralist paradigm, the paradigms move from modern to post-modern. The modernist paradigms are more quantitative in nature and the postmodernist paradigms are more qualitative. Hatch (2002) holds that most students and most individuals in Western society would identify with the positivist paradigm, but beginning researchers are encouraged to explore their own beliefs about how the world is ordered and how it can be known.

Methods

Types of Qualitative Inquiry

There are many kinds of qualitative inquiry, and each type has its own unique characteristics. This section includes descriptions of several types of qualitative research from which the beginning researcher may select when choosing to do a qualitative study.

Naturalistic Inquiries

Simply stated, naturalistic methods mean the same as qualitative research. The goal is to capture natural activity in natural settings. Naturalistic inquiry is a specific type of naturalist (or qualitative) method. When designing a naturalistic study, Lincoln and Guba (1985) recommend that researchers do the following: (a) determine the focus of the inquiry, (b) determine whether the focus and the paradigm are an appropriate match, (c) determine the fit of the inquiry paradigm to the theory selected to guide the study, (d) determine where the data will come from, (e) determine the steps of the inquiry, (f) determine what instrument(s) will be used to collect the data, (g) plan data collection, (h) plan data analysis techniques, (i) plan the logistics, and (j) plan the trustworthiness of the study. Naturalistic inquiry is the archetype for constructivist qualitative research.

Ethnographies

Ethnographic inquiries seek to describe culture or parts of culture from the point of view of cultural insiders. Classic anthropological studies, like Boas’ examination of the Inuit people, are ethnographies. Researchers collect data through participant observation, interviewing, and artifact collection. The purpose of ethnography is to account for the behavior of people by describing what they know and how that knowledge enables them to behave appropriately given dictates of common sense in their community.

Macroethnographies and microethnographies are subcategories of ethnography. Macroethnography is merely another word for ethnography (described previously), but microethnographies are not (as the name suggests) ethnographies on a smaller scale. They are most often carried out by sociolinguists and other researchers interested in verbal and nonverbal communication. They collect data through videotaped face-to-face exchanges that reveal the linguistic rules that participants use to construct meanings (see Bremme & Erikson, 1977). These studies are frequently based within the positivist paradigm.

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology focuses on everyday life and is the study of norms, understanding, and assumptions that are usually taken for granted. There is an effort to enrich or extend the study of a culture and its people through personal experience, direct participation, and immersion, thereby achieving an emic (insider’s) perspective on the people and the culture. Interactions are reported auto-biographically. Ethnomethodologies function within the postpositivist paradigm and produce theories to explain contextualized human behavior. An example of an ethnomethodological inquiry is an examination of restoring order to a classroom after a disruption has taken place.

Symbolic Interaction

Symbolic interactionist studies examine the common symbols that give meaning to human interaction within a social group context. These inquiries consist of exploration and inspection elements. The exploration component includes collecting observations, interviews, life histories, letters, diaries, public records, and group discussions. In the inspection phase, the researcher discriminates analytic elements and isolating relations between elements (Blumer, 1969). Of the different types of qualitative research, symbolic interaction stands out because it represents a break from positivism.

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is the reinterpretation of stories, texts, and narratives so as to obscure their original purpose and intent in a particular situational context. Researchers examine the social and cultural conditions or circumstances in which the text was created. Methods used to gather experiential experiences from participants include protocol writing, interviewing, observing, and studying descriptions in literature and the arts. Protocol writing simply consists of asking a participant to write down his or her experiences, and interviewing is done by gathering narrative material through conversation. To observe is to collect anecdotes of experience through close observation. Researchers can look to literature and the arts for rich insight into the nature of the phenomenon under investigation. Extensive archival data exist in poetry, novels, plays, biographies, works of art, diaries, journals, and logs and provide insight into the culture as well as individual experiences. Hermeneutic phenomenology is a constructivist approach because it assumes that although many collectively constructed realities exist at the same time, individuals’ personal experiences ought to be the object of study.

Grounded Theory

Grounded theory was developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) and provides a detailed framework for collecting and analyzing qualitative data in methodical ways. It is a process of generating theory rather than a particular theoretical context. Grounded theory requires the use of inductive derivation and the development of explanatory theory from a documented observational date. This type of inquiry involves a researcher looking at documents (such as field notes) for indicators of categories in events and behavior. The researcher then names and codes them and compares codes to find consistencies and differences. Consistencies between codes (similar meanings or pointing to a basic idea) reveal categories. Although early researchers in this field used to cut apart their notes and make piles of different categories, there are now computer programs that do the work. Grounded theory is a postpositivist method because it assumes that thorough methods can be used to discover estimates of reality that are empirically represented in carefully collected data.

 Participant Observation Studies

Although participant observation studies are similar to ethnographies, they do not require the researcher to spend as much time in the field as ethnographic studies. They are also narrower in focus, and the researcher enters the field with specific interests and questions. Participant observation requires that the researcher become a participant in the culture or context being observed. The literature on participant observation discusses how to enter the context, the role of the researcher as a participant, the collection and storage of field notes, and the analysis of field data. Participant observation can require many days or months of intensive work because the researcher needs to become accepted as a natural part of the culture in order to assure that the observations are of the natural phenomenon. Participant observation fieldwork includes data collection strategies that researchers can use with any of the qualitative research paradigms.

Interview Studies

Although interviewing can be a component of many participant observation studies, it also can be used as the primary data-collection strategy in a qualitative project. In-depth interviews include both individual interviews (e.g., one-on-one) as well as “group” interviews (including focus groups). The data can be recorded in a wide variety of ways including stenography, audio recording, video recording, or written notes. In-depth interviews differ from direct observation primarily in the nature of the interaction. In interviews it is assumed that there is a questioner and one or more interviewees. The purpose of the interview is to probe the ideas of the interviewees about the phenomenon of interest. Unstructured interviewing involves direct interaction between the researcher and a respondent or group. It differs from traditional structured interviewing in several important ways. First, although the researcher may have some initial guiding questions or core concepts to ask about, there is no formal structured instrument or protocol. Second, the interviewer is free to move the conversation in any direction of interest that may come up. Consequently, unstructured interviewing is particularly useful for exploring a topic broadly. However, there is a price for this lack of structure. Because each interview tends to be unique with no predetermined set of questions for all respondents, it is usually more difficult to analyze unstructured interview data, especially when synthesizing across respondents. Qualitative interview studies can be undertaken from all but the positivist paradigm.

Focus Group Studies

Focus groups are sets of individuals with similar characteristics or shared experiences who sit down with a moderator to discuss a topic. The discussion is particularly effective in providing information about the way people think or why they feel the way they do. The focus group is a special type of group in terms of purpose, size, composition, and procedures. The group is typically composed of seven to ten participants who are unfamiliar with each other. The primary reason focus groups are successful is that they tap into human tendencies (Krueger, 1988).

The people included in the focus group possess certain characteristics, provide data of a qualitative nature, and are led in a focused discussion. Focus groups serve many purposes: generating information for questionnaires, producing a needs assessment, testing new programs, discovering what people consider when making decisions, establishing community standards, evaluating existing programs, understanding an organization’s image, getting a response from a mail survey, assessing a product, or providing feedback to administrators.

To make the focus group experience more appealing to prospective members, inducements such as prestige, responsibility, curiosity, and cash are often used to elicit participation. The moderator of the group is there to lead the discussion and maintain order. Typically, the key questions will be limited to about six to ten questions, with possible subpoints within each question. The primary reason for the questions is to maintain a logical sequence to the discussion. The discussion should be limited to an hour and a half. The session should be recorded, and someone should take notes. Krueger (1998, pp. 89-90) presents a very good checklist for focus group interviews. Like individual interviews, focus group interviews can be utilized with any of the qualitative research paradigms.

Narrative Studies

Narrative study is a broad category for research that examines gathering and interpreting the stories that people use to describe their lives. Specific methods include life histories, life history research, biography, personal experience methods, oral history, and narrative inquiry. Closely tied to this is the notion of narrative analysis, which is the study of an individual’s speech. Narrative inquiry overlaps with other approaches. Where discourse analysis looks at interaction between people, narrative analysis looks at the individual. The reasoning is that what someone chooses to tell frames how he or she will be perceived. People always compare ideas about themselves and tend to avoid revealing negatives about themselves. Narrative analysis could also involve study of literature, diaries, or folklore. Because the emphasis is on the meanings individuals generate through stories, this type of inquiry best fits within the constructivist or critical/feminist paradigms.

Artifact Analysis

Although many qualitative studies incorporate artifact analysis, it is rare for artifacts other than text-based materials to be used as the primary data source. Text-based materials refer to existing documents (as opposed to transcripts of interviews conducted for the research). These can include newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, memos, transcripts of conversations, and annual reports. Usually written documents are analyzed with some form of content analysis. Artifact analyses fit most appropriately within the postpositivist paradigm because of the static nature of the data and the reliance on the researcher as the data-collection instrument.

One example of artifact analysis is a study of radio station listening preferences. Rather than conducting an obtrusive survey or interview about favorite radio stations, the researchers went to local auto dealers and garages and checked all cars that were being serviced to see what stations the radios were currently tuned to. In a similar manner, if a researcher was interested in magazine preferences, he or she might rummage through the trash of your sample or even stage a door-to-door magazine recycling effort. Researchers need to be very careful about the ethics of this type of measurement. Because researchers may be collecting information without the respondent’s knowledge, they may be violating the respondent’s right to privacy.

Historical Studies

Historical Studies (or Historiographies) involve the collection and analysis of data for the purpose of reconstructing events that happened in the past. Sources for the data are classified as either primary or secondary sources. Primary sources include testimonies (oral or written), original documents, photographs, diaries, journals, drawings, and mementos. Some examples of secondary sources are elements created by others related to the event or events of relevance such as textbooks, journal articles, newspaper accounts, and public records. The researcher is responsible for authenticating the sources and deciding whether to include them in the study. Researchers who use this type of inquiry can operate within several research paradigms. Within the postpositivist paradigm, for example, researchers might generate careful descriptions of events or characters from the past.

Case Studies

Case studies are not distinct from ethnographic or participant observation studies. The definition makes the distinction that case studies are examinations of contemporary figures (as opposed to historical). A case study is an intensive study of a specific individual or specific context. For example, Freud produced case studies of several individuals as the basis for his theory of psychoanalysis. There is no single way to conduct a case study, and a combination of methods such as unstructured interviewing and direct observation can be used. Case studies fit within several qualitative paradigms, but most researchers advocate postpositivist approaches to case study research.

Action Research Projects

Action-focused research (also known as orientational) is ideological, critical, and emancipating because it is concerned with activity and change. This type of research is a practical tool for solving problems and is undertaken to investigate practices and design changes. Researchers may ask how injustice and subjugation shape peoples’ experiences and understanding of the world. The goal is not to just study and understand, but to critique and change something. Researchers use change-oriented engagement strategies, such as an ideological “lens” to explicate, analyze, critique, or demystify a text or social context. Because the desired result is change, and because the researcher’s values are known, this type of inquiry fits most neatly within the critical/feminist paradigm.

Sampling Strategies

Quantitative studies look at sampling in a probabilistic manner. Researchers try to get a representative sample so the results will generalize to the whole population. Qualitative researchers use sampling in this sense, but the selection process focuses on defining the variety of participants to be studied. There are several ways to choose whom to study, and the process is dynamic and ongoing; the choices of whom to study next are not in the initial plan, but are products of what is found.

Some widely used approaches in sampling include maximum variation, snowball approach or networking, extreme or deviant case, typical case, unique case, ideal case, and negative case. In maximum variation sampling, relevant dimensions vary widely within a group. There are central themes that cut across a great deal of participant or program variation, and there are shared patterns across variations. The researcher will clearly see extremes and keep them separate to avoid averaging together extremes so results represent the “average.” When using the snowball approach or networking, each person studied is chosen by a previous participant. Thus researchers will see linkages between people. The researcher may ask, “Who knows a lot about_?” or “To whom should I talk about_?”

Using extreme or deviant case sampling allows researchers to study one or more individuals at some extreme. Researchers using this method are not interested in studying the average or the opposite. They want to study people or situations that are unusual or special in some way. Freud’s examination of hysteric women is an example of this type of sampling. In this type of specialized study, it is not uncommon to have only one participant.

Researchers using typical case sampling decide what characterizes “typical” and then search out that individual. Typical case sampling seeks out the most frequently occurring situation or condition. When researchers stumble upon very rare combinations of things, they have what is called a unique case. Ideal case is simply the perfect situation.

When a researcher is looking for an exception to the emerging rule or hypothesis, she is looking for a negative case. This is often used in analytic induction approach when the goal is to refine generalizations by setting out to find when and where it doesn’t hold true.

Although other types of sampling are used, the goal is not to know them all, but to see that there is a wide variety of possibilities. Researchers should be open to inventive ways of choosing the best ways to study participants in different situations. Sampling methods that emerge during study frequently provide the researcher with what is needed and may be better than using initial selection. However, it is very important to articulate in writing how and why a certain sampling technique was used. Researchers should provide detail as well as a strong rationale for choices made.

Qualitative Data Analysis

Qualitative Validity and Reliability

In quantitative research, validity is defined as the extent to which a measuring instrument is measuring what is intended. In qualitative inquiry, many researchers reject this framework because they believe it is based on the realist assumption that there is a reality external to our perception of it. Consequently, it doesn’t make sense to be concerned with whether an observation is true or false with respect to an external reality. Another way to look at this concept is to decide whether your study is trustworthy. How can a researcher persuade his or her audience that the findings of an inquiry are worth paying attention to?

Guba and Lincoln (1994) proposed four criteria for judging the trustworthiness of qualitative research and offered credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability as alternatives to more traditional quantitatively oriented criteria. These criteria better reflect the underlying assumptions involved in much qualitative research.

Credibility

How credible are the particular findings of the study? The goal is to demonstrate that the inquiry was conducted in such a manner as to ensure that the subject was accurately identified and described. This involves establishing that the results of qualitative research are believable from the perspective of the participant in the research. Because, from this perspective, the purpose of qualitative research is to describe or understand the phenomena of interest from the participant’s eyes, the participants are the only ones who can legitimately judge the credibility of the results.

Transferability

How transferable and applicable are these findings to another setting or group of people? The purpose is to demonstrate that the applicability of one set of findings to another context rests more with the investigator who would make that transfer than with the original investigator. This is also known as generalizability. The qualitative researcher can enhance transferability by doing a thorough job of explaining the context of the research and the specific assumptions that were made. The person who wishes to generalize the results to a different context is then responsible for making the judgment of how sensible that is.

Dependability

How can we be reasonably sure that the findings would be replicated if the study were conducted with the same participants in the same context? The researcher attempts to account for changing conditions in the phenomenon chosen for study as well as changes in the design created by an increasingly refined understanding of the setting. The traditional quantitative view of reliability is based on the assumption that experiments can be replicated. Essentially, dependability is concerned with whether the same results would be obtained if observations could be made of the same thing twice. The idea of dependability emphasizes the need for the researcher to describe in detail the ever-changing context in which the research occurred and how these changes affected the way the research approached the study.

Confirmability

How can one be sure that the findings are reflective of the participants and inquiry themselves rather than a creation of the researcher’s biases or prejudices? Confirmability captures the traditional concept of objectivity. Do the data help confirm the general findings and lead to the implications? Because qualitative research assumes that each researcher brings a unique perspective to the study, confirmability refers to the degree to which the results could be confirmed or corroborated by others. To enhance confirmability, the researcher can document the procedures for checking and rechecking the data throughout the study. Another researcher can review the results or the researcher can actively search for and describe negative instances that contradict prior observations. After the study, a data audit could be conducted that would examine the data collection and analysis procedures and make judgments about the potential for bias or distortion.

Many quantitative researchers see these criteria as a way to rename the quantitative criteria in order to increase the legitimacy of qualitative research. However, qualitative researchers believe that the traditional quantitative criteria cannot be applied to qualitative research. For example, how can the external validity of a qualitative study be judged if formalized sampling methods were not used? How can the reliability of qualitative data be judged when there is no mechanism for estimating the true score?

These alternative criteria remind researchers that qualitative research cannot be considered only an extension of the quantitative paradigm into the realm of nonnumeric data.

Analysis of Data

Content Analysis

Although I presented methods of data collection previously, this section will briefly describe ways that collected data can be analyzed. Content analysis is the analysis of text documents and can be quantitative, qualitative, or both. The purpose of content analysis is to identify patterns in text. Content analysis is an extremely broad area of research and includes thematic analysis of text, indexing, and quantitative descriptive analysis.

Thematic analysis of text is the identification of themes or major ideas in a document or set of documents. The documents can be any kind of text including field notes, newspaper articles, technical papers, or organizational memos. Researchers use computers to complete indexing. The computer program scans the text and indexes all key words. All key words are alphabetized and listed with the text that precedes and follows it so the researcher can see the word in the context in which it occurred in the text. The purpose of quantitative descriptive analysis is to describe features of the text quantitatively. A researcher might want to find out which words or phrases were used most frequently in the text.

When using content analysis, researchers are limited to the types of information available in text form. If the inquiry is about the way a news story is being handled by the news media, there would be a plethora of news stories from which to sample. On the other hand, if the research is on people’s views on capital punishment, there may not be an appropriate archived text document. Researchers should also be careful when sampling in order to avoid bias. For example, a study on methods of treating AIDS might use the published literature as the population, thus excluding unpublished writing on AIDS and the most recent work that has not yet been published. Researchers also must be careful about interpreting results of automated content analyses because a computer program cannot infer meaning. It is easy in a large-scale analysis to misinterpret data because the subtleties of meaning were not taken into accounted. Content analysis has the advantage of being unobtrusive and can be an expedited method for analyzing large amounts of text.

Secondary Analysis of Data

Secondary analysis also uses archival data; however, secondary analysis typically refers to the reanalysis of quantitative data rather than text. The data that is routinely collected by governments, businesses, schools, and other organizations are stored in electronic databases that can be accessed and analyzed. Conveniently, many research projects store raw data in computer archives, making it easy for other researchers to analyze. Among the data available for secondary analysis are census bureau data, crime records, standardized testing data, economic data, and consumer data.

The greatest advantage of secondary analysis is that it is efficient. It makes use of data that were already collected by someone else, and it allows the researcher to extend the scope of the study. The costs involved in taking a national sample would keep many researchers from undertaking large studies. By using archived national databases, researchers can use a relatively small budget while producing a much broader study.

Difficulties with using secondary analysis are rooted in the data retrieval process. Accesses and linking data from large complex databases may require the assistance of computing professionals. By using data collected by others you are assuming they followed the correct procedures for data collection and storage. Large, well-financed national studies are usually documented quite thoroughly, but even detailed documentation of procedures is often no substitute for direct experience collecting data.

Future Directions

Because of the emphasis on in-depth knowledge and elaboration of images and concepts, qualitative methods have historically been useful for studying marginalized groups. Research in the fields of women, disability, education, social work, nursing, and human service has been and continues to be the focus of this type of inquiry. As qualitative researchers produce sophisticated studies using the methods described in this research-paper, it will become more accepted to use qualitative methods to investigate more diverse individuals, groups, and social phenomena.

Summary

Although using quantitative methods may seem easier, the data give you limited information on quantities and level of statistical significance (if any). Qualitative approaches, conversely, give you meanings and descriptions of personal significance. Which method a researcher decides to use depends upon the purposes and goals of research and is often some combination of both.

This research-paper presented the basics of qualitative research to give beginning researchers basic knowledge and suggestions for finding more information about perspectives and methods that may be of further interest. There was an emphasis on the fact that there are different ways of understanding and knowing and that each researcher must identify the paradigm in which he or she operates prior to beginning research endeavors. It is from the chosen paradigm that researchers operate. What a researcher does will depend on the way the research questions were structured, the philosophical and methodological stance in which they function, the way the project was designed to support these, and the realities of the research process that has been pursued.

Successful researchers keep track of the pulse of the field. That is, they find out what other researchers with similar interests have done and are doing. Once a researcher has identified with a certain paradigm, he or she is encouraged to study other works and previous studies that have been done. Developing this foundation will give beginning researchers the basis upon which to build their own distinctive approach to qualitative inquiry.

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See also:

• Psychology Research Paper Topics
•  Psychology Research Paper Examples

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