Nama: FAHRY SURYA KENCANA

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Chapter 16

BASIC QUALITATIVE STUDIES

Basic qualitative studies, also called basic interpretative studies by some, provide rich
descriptive accounts targeted to understanding a phenomenon, a process, or a particular point of
view from the perspective of those involved. The central purpose of these studies is to
understand the world or the experience of another. Basic interpretive studies are more simplistic
compared to other qualitative approaches. They are not restricted to a particular phenomenon as
in case studies. They do not seek to explain sociocultural aspects as in ethnography. They do not
seek to enter the subject’s conceptual world to explain the “essence” as in phenomenology. They
do not seek to define theory as in grounded theory research. They do not convey life stories
through narrative analysis, delve into history, or focus on analyzing content. These studies are, as
the name implies, basic. They describe and attempt to interpret experience. Basic studies use the
most common analysis techniques in qualitative research coding and looking for recurring
themes. Other qualitative approaches are rooted in specific traditions that influence the questions
asked, the data collection process, the analysis approach, and how data are interpreted. More
detail is provided about some of these specific approaches to qualitative research in the rest of
this chapter.

CASE STUDIES
Emerging from approaches in business, law, and medicine, a case study focuses on a
single unit to produce an in-depth description that is rich and holistic. As indicated, case studies
provide an in-depth description of a single unit. The “unit” can be an individual, a group, a site,
a class, a policy, a program, a process, an institution, or a community. It is a single occurrence of
something that the researcher is interested in examining. The unit of analysis determines whether
the study is a case study or a different form of qualitative research. Case studies can answer
descriptive questions (what happened) or attempt to explain why something happened by looking
at a process. A specific unit may be selected because it is unique or typical or for a variety of
other reasons. The unit is defined within specific boundaries, referred to as a “bounded system.”
The greatest advantage of a case study is the possibility of depth; it seeks to understand
the whole case in the totality of the environment. Not only the present actions of an individual
but also his or her past, environment, emotions, and thoughts can be probed. However, case
studies need not be limited to the study of individuals. Case studies are made of communities,
institutions, and groups of individuals. A classic case study of a community was Lynd and
Lynd’s Middletown (1929), which described life in Muncie, Indiana, a typical average-size
midwestern city. This first study was followed by Middletown in Transition in 1937. Another
classic was Hollingshead’s Elmtown’s Youth (1949), which studied the life of adolescents in a
small Illinois community.
The case study has its weaknesses. Although it can have depth, it inevitably lacks
breadth. The dynamics of one individual or one social unit may bear little relationship to the
dynamics of others. The novice researcher should develop a deeper understanding of case study
research before attempting to conduct one. Merriam (1998), Stake (1995), and Yin (2003) all
discuss the use of case study as a research approach.

CONTENT OR DOCUMENT ANALYSIS

Content or document analysis is a research method applied to written or visual materials for
the purpose of identifying specified characteristics of the material. The materials analyzed can be
textbooks, newspapers, web pages, speeches, television programs, advertisements, musical
compositions, or any of a host of other types of documents. Content analysis is widely used in
education. The following are some of the purposes of content analysis in educational research:
1. To identify bias, prejudice, or propaganda in textbooks.
2. To analyze types of errors in students’ writings.
3. Formulating exhaustive and mutually exclusive coding categories
4. Deciding on the sampling plan to be used
5. Training the coders
6. Analyzing the data,
 As the technological world changes and communication over the Internet becomes more
prevalent, there are opportunities for content analysis to play a role in understanding changing
communication patterns.
Content analysis can be slow and time-consuming. Fortunately, computers can now carry out
a content analysis quickly and accurately. Most universities have image scanners that can read
printed pages and transfer the text to electronic files. Then, a computer program can be used to
search through the scanned text and find words or phrases that meet specified criteria. An
advantage of content analysis is its unobtrusiveness. The presence of the observer does not
influence what is being observed. You do not need to enlist the cooperation of subjects or get
permission to do the study. Another advantage of content analyses is that they are easily
replicated.

ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES
Ethnography is the in-depth study of naturally occurring behavior within a culture or
entire social group. It seeks to understand the relationship between culture and behavior, with
culture referring to the shared beliefs, values, concepts, practices, and attitudes of a specific
group of people. The ethnographic research method was developed by anthropologists such as
Margaret Mead as a way of studying and describing human cultures. In Mead’s classic study,
Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), she studied adolescent girls in Samoa and analyzed the
differences in development between Samoan and American girls. Anthropologists immerse
themselves in the lives of the people they study, using
primarily extended observation (participant and nonparticipant) and occasionally in-depth
interviewing to gain clarification and more detailed information.
Creswell (2007) describes two approaches to ethnography. Realist ethnography is the
more traditional approach. In realist ethnography, the researcher tries to provide an objective
account of the situation, typically from a third-person point of view. Standard categories are
used, and factual information and closely edited quotes are presented as data.
Ethnographic research has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is its
observation of behavior in a real-life setting, the assumption being that human behavior can be
fully understood only by knowing the setting in which it occurs. The main limitation is that the
findings depend heavily on the particular researcher’s observations and interpretations of the
data.
 Spindler and Hammond (2000) describe some of the characteristics of good ethnography:
(1) extended participant observation; (2) long time immersion at the site (a year would be a short
time for a community study); (3) collection of large volumes of material such as notes, artifacts,
audio- and videotapes, and so on; and (4) openness, which means having no specific hypotheses
or even highly specific categories of observation at the start of the study. Spradley (1980)
identified the sequence of steps comprising the methodology
of ethnographic research:
1. Selecting an ethnographic project.
2. Asking ethnographic questions.
3. Collecting ethnographic data.
4. Making an ethnographic record.
5. Analyzing ethnographic data.
6. Writing the ethnography.

There are many types of ethnographic research called by a variety of names, all with the
characteristics described previously but with different nuances. Among them are
autoethnography (a self-examination within a cultural context), ethnographic case studies (a case
study within a cultural perspective), critical ethnography (a study of a marginalized group),
feminist ethnography (the study of women and cultural practices), and postmodern ethnography
a study of particular challenges or problems of society). More recently, we have seen references
to confessional ethnography, visual ethnography, and online ethnography.
GROUNDED THEORY STUDIES
Grounded theory has its roots in sociology. Its goal is to inductively build a theory
about a practice or phenomenon using interviews and observation as the primary data collection
tools. This emphasis on theory distinguishes it from other qualitative approaches. This research
approach focuses on gathering data about peoples’ experiences in a particular context and then
inductively building a theory “from the bottom up.”
In the role as the primary data-gathering instrument, the researcher asks questions about
some event, experience, or social phenomenon. He or she collects data through interviews and
observations. The personal open-ended interview is the primary method of data collection in
grounded theory studies. The interviewer asks questions about what happened to individuals,
why it happened, and what it means to them. Choose a sample where each individual has had the
experience and can contribute to theory development. Documentary materials (letters, speeches,
etc.) and literature can also be potential data sources. In reviewing text materials, it is important
to identify whether the text is extant (those the researcher did not shape, such as letters or
diaries) or elicited (those in which the researcher involved participants in writing, such as
through an internet survey).
Charmaz (2006, pp. 18–19) suggests that the grounded theory researcher ask him or herself the
following questions as they immerse themselves in the task of developing a theory:
• Have I collected enough background data about persons, processes, and
 settings to have ready recall and to understand and portray the full range
 of contexts of the study?
• Have I gained detailed descriptions of a range of participants’ views and
 actions?
• Do the data reveal what lies beneath the surface?
• Are the data sufficient to reveal changes over time?
• Have I gained multiple views of the participants’ range of actions?
• Have I gathered data that enable me to develop analytic categories?
• What kind of comparisons can I make between data? How do these
 comparisons generate and inform my ideas?

NARRATIVE RESEARCH
 Narrative research has its roots in different humanities disciplines and focuses on stories
(spoken or written) told by individuals about their lives. The researcher emphasizes sequence and
chronology and a collaborative re-storying process. A narrative can be any text or discourse.
Narrative research provides accounts of human experiences by collecting and analyzing stories
about lives. The stories
are accounts of events and actions chronologically connected.
Narrative research can help in understanding change. It has been used to understand
reconciliation and conflict. Also, it has been used to understand cultures and social worlds. In
cultures that have oral traditions, narrative inquiry is an approach that is more welcome than
some other approaches. It has been used to understand African American experiences. In
education, narrative research has been used to examine the career trajectories of principals, life
histories of girls who choose to take advanced mathematics classes, and adolescent culture.
Narrative research has been claimed to be the best qualitative approach for capturing
detailed stories of life experiences of either single individuals or small groups. The researcher
gathers multiple types of stories. Information is collected about the context of stories in order to
situate the individual stories within personal experiences (home, job, and school), within culture
(ethnic and racial), and within history (time and place).
The following are the basic steps in conducting narrative inquiry:
• Step 1: Identify a phenomenon that addresses a problem.
• Step 2: Select an individual from whom you can learn about the phenomenon (or use
your own experience).
• Step 3: Collect stories from the individual that reflect personal experience. Records may
also be collected.
• Step 4: Transcribe the stories including the nuances noted by the researcher. Sometimes it
is not what is said but, rather, how it is said or what is not said.
• Step 5: Retranscribe the stories.
• Step 6: Analyze the stories: Look for elements of time, place, plot, and scene.
• Step 7. Build in past, present, and future; collect other fi eld texts.
• Step 8: Look for themes.
• Step 9: Restory or retell the story in chronological sequence, attending to setting,
characters, actions, problems, and resolutions.
 • Step 10: Write a coherent story in collaboration with the participant about the
individual’s personal and social experiences.
• Step 11: Validate the accuracy of the story with the individual.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
A phenomenological study is designed to describe and interpret an experience by
determining the meaning of the experience as perceived by the people who have participated in
it. Rooted in philosophy and psychology, the assumption is that there are many ways of
interpreting the same experience and that the meaning of the experience to each person is what
constitutes reality. This belief is characteristic of all qualitative studies, but the element that
distinguishes phenomenology from other qualitative approaches is that the subjective experience
is at the center of the inquiry. It is different in that phenomenology makes a distinction between
the appearance of something and its essence.
Phenomenology addresses questions about common human experience. A
phenomenological researcher who was asked to study, for example, the integration of special
needs children into a regular classroom would focus on asking what this experience means to the
parties involved: the special needs children, other students, and the teacher. Whether or not the
integration plan is working is not the important issue; what matters is how the students and the
teacher experience it. “In the same way that ethnography focuses on culture, a phenomenological
study focuses on the essence or structure of an experience.
Phenomenology is not the same as phenomenography, although the differences are difficult to
grasp for novice researchers. Phenomenography has its roots in a set of studies of learning
among university students in the 1970s concerning why some students were better at learning
than others. Phenomenology is rooted in a philosophical method and involves the understanding
of the essence of the phenomenon, whereas phenomenography has a distinct empirical
orientation focused on investigating the experience of others and their subsequent perceptions of
the phenomenon—their reflections on the phenomenon. Both approaches investigate the human
experience.