CHARACTERISTICS OF QUALITATIVE

RESEARCH


All studies that we would call qualitative do not
exhibit all the traits with equal potency. Some, in
fact are almost completely barren of one or more.
The question is not whether a particular piece of
research is or is not absolutely qualitative; rather it
is an issue of degree.



1.- Qualitative research has the natural setting as the
direct source of data and the researcher is the key
instrument.
Researchers enter and spend considerable time in
schools, families, neighborhoods, and other locales
learning about educational concerns.
Qualitative researchers go to the particular setting
under study because they are concerned with
context.

2.- Qualitative research is descriptive
The data collected are in the form of words or
pictures rather than numbers. The written results of
the research contain quotations from data to
illustrate and substantiate the presentation. The
data include interview transcripts, field notes,
photographs, videotapes, personal documents,
memos, and other official records


3.-Qualitative researchers are concerned with process
rather than simply with outcomes or products.
Qualitative researches are more interested in
knowing the causes of something that the
consequences.
In the case the researcher ask questions like:
-How do people negotiate meaning?.
-How do certain terms and labels come to be
applied?.

-How do certain notions come to be taken as part of
common sense?.
For instance, the researchers examined teachers
attitude toward certain kinds of children and then
studied how these attitudes were translated into
daily interactions with them and how the daily
interaction reified those assumed attitudes.


4.- Qualitative researchers tend to analyze their
data inductively.

Qualitative researchers dont research evidence to
prove or disprove hypotheses they hold before the
study, rather, the abstractions are built as the
particulars that have been gathered are grouped
together.
The researcher start to know their direction after ha
has spent time collecting the data.

This process is like a funnel: things are open at the
beginning and more directed and specific at the
bottom.
You are constructing a picture that takes shape as
you collect and examine the parts.
The researches dont assumed that enough is
known to recognize important concerns before
undertaking the research.



5.- Meaning is of essential concern to the
qualitative approach.


The researchers are interested in the ways different
people make sense out of their lives.
The purpose of this process is learn the perspective
of the participants to illuminates the inner dynamics
of situations.
Researchers are concerned with making sure they
capture perspective accurately.


Theoretical underpinning
Among quantitative researchers in education its use
is sometimes restricted, but our use of the word is
much more in line with its use in sociology and
anthropology. Similar to the term paradigm (Ritzer,
1975)
When we refer to a theoretical orientation we are
talking about a way of looking at the world, the
assumptions people have about what is important,
and what makes the world work.
Good researchers
Are aware of their theoretical base and use it to
help collect and analyze data.
They emphasize facts and causes of behavior.
Qualitative researchers reflect some sort of
phenomenological perspective. There are debates
concerning the use of the world phenomenology
and we use it in the most general sense.

Phenomenological approach
It requires a set of assumptions that are different
from those used when human behavior is
approached with the purpose of finding causes
and facts
Researchers in the phenomenological mode
attempt to understand the meaning of events and
interactions to ordinary people in particular
situations.
They attempt to gain entry into the conceptual world
of their subjects (Geertz, 1973), to understand how
and what meaning they construct around events in
their daily lives. They believe that multiple ways of
interpreting experiences are available to each of us
through interacting with others, and is the meaning
of our experiences that constitutes reality. (Greene,
1978)
Qualitative researchers also tend to be
phenomenological in their orientation.

Symbolic Interaction
It was presented in the Chicago School approach to
research in the early part of this century. John
Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher and educator,
was at Chicago during the formative years of this
theoretical perspective, and his writings and
personal contacts with investigators as George
Herbet Mead contributed to its development.

Mead`s formulation in Mind, Self, and Society is the
most cited, early source of what is now called
symbolic interaction.
Compatible with the phenomenological perspective
and basic to the approach is the assumption that
human experience is mediated by interpretation.
Objects, people, situations and events do not
possess their own meaning; rather is conferred on
them.
The meaning people give to their experience and
their process of interpretation are essential and
constitutive, not accidental or secondary to what
experience is. To understand behavior, we must
understand definitions and the process by which
they are manufactured. Human beings are actively
engaged in creating their world; understanding the
intersection of biography and society essential.
People act not on the basis of predetermined
responses to predefined objects, but rather as
interpreting, defining, symbolic animals whose
behavior can only be understood by having the
researcher enter into the defining process through
such methods as participant observation.
Interpretation is not an autonomous act, nor is it
determined by any particular force, human or
otherwise. Individuals interpret with the help of
others. Through interaction the individuals construct
meaning.
Interpretation, then, is essential. Symbolic
interaction becomes the conceptual paradigm rather
than internal drives, personality traits, unconscious
motives, needs, socioeconomic status, role
obligation, cultural prescriptions, social-control
mechanism, or the physical environment. These
factors are draw upon by social scientist to
understand and predict behavior.

The symbolic integrationist understands behavior
only on the degree that they enter in and affect the
defining process.
It does not deny that there are rules and
regulations, norms and beliefs systems in society. It
does suggest that they are important in
understanding behavior only if the people take them
into account.
It is suggested that is not the rules, regulations,
norms or whatever that are crucial in understanding
behavior, but how these are defined and used in
specific situations.
People act, however, not according to what the
school is supposed to be, or what administrators
say it is but, rather, according to how they see it.
Another important part of symbolic interaction theory
is the construct of the self. The self is the definition
people create (through interacting with others) of
who they are. In constructing or defining self, people
attempt to see themselves as others see them by
interpreting gestures and actions directed toward
them and by placing themselves in the role of the
other person.
The self is thus also a social construction the result of
person perceiving themselves and then developing a
definition through the process of interaction.