QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Qualitative research – a research in which the investigator attempts to study naturally occurring
phenomena in all their complexity.

General Characteristics of Qualitative Research

1. The natural setting is the direct source of data, and the researcher is the key instrument in
qualitative research.
2. Qualitative data are collected in the form of words or pictures rather than numbers.
3. Qualitative researchers are concerned with process as well as product.
4. Qualitative researchers tend to analyze their data inductively.
5. How people make sense out of their lives is a major concern to qualitative to qualitative
research.

Major Characteristics of Qualitative Research

1. Naturalistic inquiry. Studying real-world situations as they unfold naturally, non-
manipulative, unobtrusive, and non-controlling; openness to whatever emerges – lack of
predetermined constraints on outcomes.

2. Inductive analysis. Immersion in the details and specifics of the data to discover important
categories, dimensions and interrelationships; begin by exploring genuinely open-questions
rather than testing theoretically described (deductive) hypotheses.

3. Holistic perspectives. The whole phenomenon under study is understood as a complex system
that is more than the sum of its parts, focus on complex interdependencies not meaningfully
reduced to a few discrete variables and linear, cause-effect relationships.

4. Qualitative data. Detailed, thick description, inquiry in depth, direct quotations capturing
people’s personal perspectives and experiences.

5. Personal contact and insight. The researcher has direct contact with and gets close to the
people, situation, and phenomenon under study; researcher’s personal experiences and
insights are an important part of the inquiry and critical to understanding the phenomenon.

6. Dynamic systems. Attention to process, assumes change is constant and ongoing whether the
focus is on an individual or an entire culture.

7. Unique case orientation. Assumes each case is special and unique, the first level of inquiry to
being true to, respecting, and capturing the details of the individual cases being studied;
cross-case analysis follows from and depends on the quality of individual case studies.

8. Context sensitivity. Places findings in a social, historical, and temporal context, dubious of
the possibility or meaningfulness of generalizations across time and space.

9. Empathic neutrality. Complete objectivity is impossible; pure subjectivity undermines

credibility; the researcher’s passion is understanding the world in all its complexity – not
proving something, not advocating, not advancing personal agendas, but understanding; the
researcher includes personal experiences and emphatic insight as part of the relevant data,
while taking a neutral non-judgmental stance toward whatever content may emerge.

10. Design flexibility. Open to adapting inquiry as understanding deepens and/or situations
change; avoids getting locked into rigid designs that eliminate responsiveness; pursues new
paths of discovery as they emerge.
Steps in Qualitative Research
1. Identification of the phenomenon to be studied.
2. Identification of the participants in the study.
3. Generation of hypotheses
4. Data collection
5. Data analysis
6. Interpretation and conclusion

Approaches to Qualitative Research

1. Biography

A biographical study is the study of a single individual and his or her experiences as told
to the researcher or found in documents and archival material. An important aspect of some
biographical studies is that the subject recalls one or more special events (an epiphany) in
his or her life. The author of the biography describes, in some detail, the setting or context
within which the epiphany occurred. Lastly, the author is actively present during the study
and openly acknowledges that his or her report is an interpretation of the subject’s
experiences.

Forms of biographies
a. Biographies – life stories written by a person other than the one being studied.
b. Autobiographies – life stories written by persons about themselves
c. Life histories – a combination of biography and autobiography
d. Oral histories – in which the researcher gathers personal recollections, usually from a
variety of individuals.

2. Phenomenology
A phenomenological study investigates various reactions to, or perceptions of, a particular
phenomenon. Data are usually collected through in-depth interviewing. The researchers
then attempts to identify and describe aspects of each individual’s perceptions and
reactions to their experience in some detail.

3. Grounded Theory
In a grounded theory study, the researchers intend to generate a theory that is “ grounded
in data systematically gathered and analyzed”. Grounded theories are not generated before
a study begins, but are formed inductively from the data that are collected during the study
itself.

4. Case Studies
The study of “cases” has been around for some time. Students in medicine, law, business,
and the social sciences often study cases as a part of their training. What “case study”
researchers have in common is that they call the object of their research cases, and they
focus their research on the study of such cases.

ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

What is ethnographic research?

Ethnographic research is, in many respects, the most complex of all research
methods. A variety of approaches are used in an attempt to attain as holistic a picture as
possible of a particular society, group, institution, setting, or situation. The emphasis in
ethnographic research is on documenting or portraying the every experiences of
individuals by observing and interviewing them and relevant others. The key tools, in fact,
in all ethnographic studies are in-depth interviewing and continual, on-going participant
observation of a situation.
Ethnographic Concepts
There are a number of concepts that guide the work of ethnographers as they go about their
research in the field. Some of the important include:
a. Culture. The concept of culture is typically defined in
one of two ways.
1) Those who focus on behavior define it as the
sum of a social group’s observable patterns of behavior, customs, and
ways of life.
2) Those who concentrate on ideas say that it
comprises the ideas, beliefs, and knowledge that characterize a
particular group of people.

The interpretation of a group’s culture is considered by many researchers

to be the primary contributions of ethnographic research. Cultural
interpretation refers to the researcher’s ability to describe what he or she
sees and hears from the point of view of the members of the group.

b. Holistic perspective. Ethnographers try to describe as much as they can about the
culture of a group. Thus, they try to gain some idea of the group’s history, social,
structure, politics, religious beliefs, symbols, customs, rituals, and environment.
Developing a holistic perspective demands that the ethnographer spend a great
amount of time out in the field gathering many different kinds of data.
c. Contextualization. When a researcher contextualizes data, he or she places what was
seen and heard into a larger perspective.
d. An Emic Perspective. An emic perspective – that is, an “insider’s perspective of
reality – is at the heart of ethnographic research. Gaining an emic perspective is
essential to understanding – and thus describing accurately – the behaviors and
situations an ethnographer sees and hear. An emic perspective requires one to
recognize and accept the idea of multiple realities. “Documenting multiple
perspectives of reality in a given study is crucial to an understanding of why people
think and act in the different ways they do”. An etic perspective, on the other hand,
is the external objective perspective on reality.
e. Thick Description. In essence, this involves describing what they have seen and
heard – their work in the field – in great detail, frequently using extensive quotations
from the participants in their study.
f. Member checking. By having the participants review what the researchers have
written as a check for accuracy and completeness. It is one of the primary strategies
used in ethnographic research to validate the accuracy of the researcher’s findings.
g. A nonjudgmental Orientation. It requires researchers to do their best to refrain
from making value judgments about unfamiliar practices.

Data Collection in Ethnographic Research

Major means of data collection:
a. Observation
b. Interviewing

INTERVIEW

An interview is used in a variety of research contexts and maybe within an action

research. The purpose of interviewing is to find out what is in or on someone else’s mind. The
purpose of open-ended interviewing data can easily become biased and misleading if the person
being interviewed is aware of the perspective of the interview.

Interview range from fully structured to quite open with many variations between these
extremes.

A fully structured interview – is a face delivery of a questionnaire. The interviewer

must ask the questions exactly as they appear in the interview schedule. The aim is to provide
exactly the same question, and the same order and style of delivery to all interviewees.
 An open interview – has a starting point and an objective but new set agenda of
questions.

The interview is an effective method of conducting a survey, and the use of an interview
has the following advantages over the use of a questionnaires:
a. If the interview is granted, there is no problem with the response.
b. The interview provides opportunity for in-depth probing and elaboration and
clarification of terms, if necessary.
c. Completion of the survey can be standardized.
d. There tends to be more success with obtaining responses on the open-ended items.
e. It is easier to avoid the omission of items.
f. Interviews can be used with individuals from whom data cannot otherwise be
obtained.

Characteristics of an Interview
1. Questions emerged from the immediate context and are asked in the natural
course of things, there is no pre-determination of questions topic or wording.
2. Topics and issues to be covered are specified in advance, or in outline form;
interviewer decides sequences and wording of questions in the course of
interview.
3. The exact wording and sequence of questions are determined in advance. All
interviewees are asked the same basic questions in the same order. Questions
are worded n a completely open-ended format.
4. Questions and response categories are determined in advance. Responses are
fixed, respondents choose from among these fixed response.

Strength of Interview
2. It increases the salience and relevance of questions. Interviews are built on
and emerged from observation. The interview can be matched to individuals
and circumstances.
3. The outline increases the comprehensiveness of the data and makes data
collection somewhat systematic for each respondent.
4. Respondents answer the same questions, thus increasing comparability of
responses; data are complete for each person on the topic addressed in the
interview.
5. Data analysis is simple; responses can be directly compared and easily
aggregated, many questions can be asked in a short time.

Weakness of Interview
1. Different information are collected from different people with different
questions. Less systematic and comprehensive if certain questions do not
arise “naturally”. Data organization and analysis can be quite difficult.
2. Important and salient topics maybe inadvertently omitted.
3. Little flexibility in relating the interview to particular individuals.
4. Respondents must fit their experiences and feelings into the research
categories, may be perceived as impersonal, irrelevant, and mechanistic.

Role of an Interview
Although some surveys are carried out using interview to ask questions and
record answer is certainly a common part of survey measurement procedures either face-
to-face or over the telephone.

Interviews have three primary roles to play in the collection of survey data. These
are:
1. to locate and enlist the cooperation of selected respondents
2. to train and motivate respondents to do a good job of being a respondents.
3. to ask questions, record answer and probe incomplete answers to ensure that
answers meet the question objectives