QUALITATIVE

RESEARCH:CHARACTERISTICS,
STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES,
AND KINDS
Lesson 4
 Activity: What’s your take?

▪ Give your opinion or perception about the following

ideas/concepts.
1. Boy/Girl Bestfriend
2. Best Strand in Senior High School
3. Strict Teacher
4. PR 1
5. Most Hated Subject
Based on our previous
discussion, what is
qualitative research?
 Characteristics of Qualitative
Research
1. Human understanding and interpretation. Data
analysis results show an individual’s mental, social,
and spiritual understanding of the world.
2. Active, powerful, and forceful. As you go through the
research process, you find the need to amend or
rephrase interview questions and consider varied ways
of getting answers, like shifting from mere speculating
to traveling to places for data gathering.
3. Multiple research approaches and methods.
Qualitative research allows you to approach or
plan your study in varied ways.
4. Specificity to generalization. Specific ideas in a
qualitative research are directed to a general
understanding of something.
5. Contextualization. It is crucial for you to
examine the context or situation of an
individual’s life—the who, what, why, how, and
other circumstances—affecting his or her way of
life.
6. Diversified data in real-life situations. A
qualitative researcher prefers collecting data in a
natural setting .
7. Abounds with words and visuals. Words, words,
and more words come in big quantity in this kind
of research.
8. Internal Analysis. Here, you examine the data
yielded by the internal traits of the subject
individuals (i.e., emotional, mental, spiritual
characteristics).
 Types of Qualitative Research
1. Case Study. This type of qualitative research usually
takes place in the field of social care, nursing,
psychology, rehabilitation centers, education, etc. It
seeks to find answers to why such thing occurs to the
subject.
2. Ethnography. Ethnography is the study of a particular
cultural group to get a clear understanding of its
organizational set-up, internal operation, and lifestyle.
3. Phenomenology. This refers to the study of how
people find their experiences meaningful. Its
primary goal is to make people understand their
experiences about death of loved ones, care for
handicapped persons, friendliness of people, etc.
4. Historical Analysis. Central to this qualitative
research method is the examination of primary
documents to make you understand the
connection of past events to the present time.
5. Grounded Theory. Grounded theory takes
place when you discover a new theory to
underlie your study at the time of data
collection and analysis. Through your
observation on your subjects, you will
happen to find a theory that applies to your
current study.
6. Content and Discourse Analysis. Content
analysis is a method of quantitative research
that requires an analysis or examination of the
substance or content of the mode of
communication used by a person, group,
organization, or any institution in
communicating. A study of language structures
used in the medium of communication to
discover the effects of sociological, cultural,
institutional, and ideological factors on the
content makes it a discourse analysis.
 Advantages or Strengths of
Qualitative Research
1. It adopts a naturalistic approach to its subject matter,
which means that those involve in the research
understand things based on what they find meaningful.
2. It promotes a full understanding of human behavior or
personality traits in their natural setting.
3. It is instrumental for positive societal changes.
4. It engenders respect for people’s individuality as it
demands the researcher’s careful and attentive stand
toward people’s world views.
 Advantages or Strengths of
Qualitative Research
5. It is a way of understanding and interpreting
social interactions.
6. It increases the researcher’s interest in the study
as it includes the researcher’s experience or
background knowledge in interpreting verbal
and visual data.
7. It offers multiple ways of acquiring and
examining knowledge about something.
 Disadvantages or Weaknesses of
Qualitative Research
1. It involves a lot of researcher’s subjectivity in data
analysis.
2. It is hard to know the validity or reliability of the data.
3. It’s open-ended questions yield “data overload” that
requires long-time analysis.
4. It is time-consuming.
5. It involves several processes, which results greatly
depend on the researcher’s views or interpretations.
 Activity No. 2
Draw a table with three columns where you can
list down topics of your own for a qualitative
research. The first column is for the topic, second,
for the purpose, and third, for the type of qualitative
research to be used.
TYPE OF QUALITATIVE
TOPIC PURPOSE RESEARCH