Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Qualitative Methods-Notes
Qualitative Methods-Notes
INTERVIEW
The strengths of a structured interview are that: All respondents are asked the same
questions in the same manner. This makes it easy to replicate the discussion. In other
words, it allows for standardization or generalization. On the other hand, the
weaknesses of a structured interview are that: It is not flexible to concrete situations
because the interviewer cannot change the questions, they must all stay the same. In
addition, the format of questionnaire design makes it difficult for the researcher to
examine complex issues and opinions. Even where open-ended questions are used,
the depth of answers the respondent can provide often are more limited than with
almost any other method.
In-depth interview
In-depth interviews are an important tool for qualitative data generation which address
personal experience of various processes in social life of the research participant or
informants. The major aim is to explore in depth respondents’ point of view, experiences,
feelings, and perspectives. In-depth interviews allow for freedom of the respondents to
voice their own concerns hence creating space for mutual evaluation of the issues under
study without the researcher imposing his or her ideas. In this case, questions posed by
the researchers are usually open ended, and may be semi-structured or unstructured in the
sense what matters is the flow of conversations rather than the order of questions.
2. OBSERVATION
The advantage of observation lies in its ability to capture the unverbalized normative
pattern of a small group (Sieber 1978). In other words observation goes beyond what
people can tell the researcher. It also provides the researcher with clue or hints that might
not arise in other methods of data collection. It is therefore possible to follow up on such
issues through probes in other methods such as in-depth interviews and FGDs.
3. ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES
The ethnographic approach is mainly a qualitative research strategy that comes largely
from the field of anthropology. The emphasis in ethnography is on studying an entire
culture. Originally, the idea of a culture was tied to the notion of ethnicity and geographic
location (e.g., the culture of the Haya, Sukuma etc), but it has been broadened to include
virtually any group or organization. That is, we can study the "culture" of a business or
defined group (students, soldiers, musicians, urban residents etc). In addition, with the
ongoing social transformations, current debates in ethnographic practices appreciate the
fact individuals belong to multiple social ties within and beyond their localities. As such
one need to take into account influences beyond local cultural context by analysing the
interplay between the local and global, traditional and modern etc.
Ethnography is an extremely broad area with a great variety of practitioners and methods.
However, the most common ethnographic approach is participant observation as a part of
field research. The ethnographer is expected to immerse in the culture as an active
participant and records extensive field notes. As in grounded theory, there are no pre-set
limits of what will be observed and no real ending point in an ethnographic study.
Although, anthropologists have constantly reflected on their ethnographic practices
questioning some of the old practices of participant observation (see Förster et al. 2011),
long term field work remains to be the core of ethnographic approaches.
Erlandson, David A.; Harris, Edward L.; Skipper, Barbara L. & Allen, Steve D. (1993).
Doing naturalistic inquiry: a guide to methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.