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2
What Is Qualitative Research?
CHAPTER OBJECTIVESBy the end of this chapter,you will be able to:
•
link your research topic to an appropriate methodology
•
understand the advantages and disadvantages of both qualitative andquantitative methods
•
recognize the value of (sometimes) using quantitative data in qualitativeresearch
•
understand the diverse approaches underlying contemporary qualitativeresearch.
To call yourself a ‘qualitative’researcher settles surprisingly little.First,as we shallsee at the end of this chapter,‘qualitative research’covers a wide range of different,even conflicting,activities.Second,if the description is being used merely as somesort of negative epithet (saying what we are
not 
,i.e.non-quantitative),then I amnot clear how useful it is.As Peter Grahame puts it:
the notion that qualitative research is non-quantitative is true but uninformative:we need more than a negative definition.(1999:4)
In this second sense,‘qualitative research’seems to promise that we will avoid or downplay statistical techniques and the mechanics of the kinds of quantitativemethods used in,say,survey research or epidemiology.The danger in the term,however,is that it seems to assume a fixed preference or predefined evaluation of 
 
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what is ‘good’(i.e.qualitative) and ‘bad’(i.e.quantitative) research.In fact,thechoice between different research methods should depend upon what you aretrying to find out.For instance,if you want to discover how people intend to vote,then a quan-titative method,like a social survey,may seem the most appropriate choice.On theother hand,if you are concerned with exploring people’s life histories or every-day behaviour,then qualitative methods may be favoured.Table 2.1 gives threemore examples ofhow your research topic should guide your use of quantitativeor qualitative methods.
Attempt Exercise 2.1 about now
Later in this chapter,we consider whether the kind of issues shown in Table 2.1may sometimes make it sensible to adopt both quantitative and qualitativeapproaches.However,you also have to bear in mind that these methods are oftenevaluated differently.This is shown in Table 2.2 which is drawn from the termsused by speakers at a conference on research methods.
TABLE 2.1Qualitative or quantitative methods?
1Imagine you want to study ambulance crews’responses to emergency calls.One way to do this wouldbe to examine statistics giving the time which crews take to get to an emergency.However, such statisticsmay not tell the whole story.For instance, when does the timing of the emergency services’response begin(when the caller picks up the phone, or when the ambulance crew receives the information from theoperator)? And isn’t it also important to examine how operators and ambulance services gradethe seriousness of calls? If so, qualitative research may be needed to investigate how statistics are collected,e.g.when timing starts and what locally counts as a ‘serious’incident.Note that this is not just an issue ofthe statistics being biased (which quantitative researchers recognize) but also an issue of the inevitable(and necessary) intrusion of common-sense judgements into practical decision-making (Garfinkel,1967).2Say you are interested in what determines adolescents’diet.So you do a survey which asks them aboutthe influences on their choice of food (e.g.parents, siblings, peer groups, advertisements etc.).But is‘influence’really a suitable way of describing the phenomenon? For instance, a qualitative study may showthat eating patterns arise in a variety of contexts including negotiations with parents over such practicalmatters as who does the cooking and when the food is served.Hence young people’s diet is not a simpleoutcome of different sets of ‘influences’(Eldridge and Murcott, 2000).3Imagine you want to study decisions by the police to charge juvenile offenders with a crime.It looks likebeing found with a weapon will lead to a criminal charge.But what kind of weapon? To answer this question,you code official records, giving a code of ‘1’to the use of a firearm and a ‘2’to the use of a blunt instrumentsuch as a baseball bat.But what are you to do if some offenders used
both 
weapons (Marvasti, 2004:9–10)?Do you just modify your coding system, or do you add a qualitative study of meetings where police and publicprosecutors grade the ‘seriousness’of an offence and the likelihood of obtaining a conviction in decidingwhether to charge a juvenile with a crime (Sudnow, 1968a)?
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Table 2.2 shows how imprecise,evaluative considerations come into play whenresearchers describe qualitative and quantitative methods.Depending on your point of view,Table 2.2 might suggest that quantitative research was superior because,for example,it is value-free.The implication here is that quantitativeresearch simply objectively reports reality,whereas qualitative research is influ-enced by the researcher’s political values.Conversely,other people might arguethat such value freedom in social science is either undesirable or impossible.The same sort of argument can arise about ‘flexibility’.For some people,suchflexibility encourages qualitative researchers to be innovative.For others,flexibil-ity might be criticized as meaning lack of structure.Conversely,being ‘fixed’givessuch a structure to research but without flexibility.However,this is by no means a balanced argument.Outside the social sciencecommunity,there is little doubt that quantitative data rule the roost.Governmentsfavour quantitative research because it mimics the research of its own agencies(Cicourel,1964:36).They want quick answers based on ‘reliable’variables.Similarly,many research funding agencies call qualitative researchers ‘journalists or soft scientists’whose work is ‘termed unscientific,or only exploratory,or entirelypersonal and full of bias’(Denzin and Lincoln,1994:4).For the general public,there is a mixture of respect and suspicion of quantita-tive data (‘you can say anything you like with figures’;‘lies,damn lies and statis-tics’).This is reflected by the media.On the one hand,public opinion polls aretreated as newsworthy – particularly immediately before elections.On the other hand,unemployment and inflation statistics are often viewed with suspicion – particularly when they appear to contradict your own experience (statistics whichshow that inflation has fallen may not be credible if you see prices going up for the goods you buy!).For this reason,by the end of the twentieth century,in many Western countries,the assumed reliability of quantitative research was beginning to be under signifi-cant threat.The failure of surveys of voting intention in the British general elec-tion of 1992 (almost comparable to the similar failure of US telephone poll studiesin the 1948 Truman–Dewey presidential race) made the public a little sceptical
What is Qualitative Research?
35
TABLE 2.2Claimed features of qualitative and quantitative methods
QualitativeQuantitative
SoftHardFlexibleFixedSubjectiveObjectivePoliticalValue-freeCase studySurveySpeculativeHypothesis testingGroundedAbstract
Source 
:Halfpenny, 1979:799
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