Qualitative Research

The nature of qualitative research

 Study
– perspectives of research participants toward
events, beliefs, or practices
– exploration
• Beginning to understand a group or phenomenon –
development of new theories
– Capture the human meanings of social life as it is
lived, experienced, and understood by the
research participants (social context – unique)
Understanding of a social setting or activity as viewed
from the perspective of the research participants
 Researcher – main instrument
– Data collection, interpretation, written
narrative
– Also rely on disciplined inquiry
• Good qualitative research
– Investigative, inductive, and rigorous in research
methods and data collection techniques
Six general steps in qualitative
research
 Identify research topics
 Review of research
 Selecting participants
 Collecting data
 Analysing data
 Reporting, evaluating, and interpreting
research
Characteristics of quantitative
and qualitative research
Qualitative research approaches
 Case study
– What are the characteristics of this particular entity,
phenomenon, or person?
 Ethnography
– What are the cultural patterns and perspectives of this group
in its natural setting?
 Ethology
– How do the origins, characteristics, and culture of different
societies compare to one another?
 Ethnomethodology
– How do people make sense of their everyday activities in
order to behave in socially accepted ways?
Example
 Grounded theory
– How is an inductively derived theory about a phenomenon
grounded in the data in a particular setting?
 Phenomenology
– What is the experience of an activity or concept from these
particular participants’ perspective?
 Symbolic interaction
– How do people construct meanings and shared perspectives
by interacting with others?
 Action research
– How can practitioners solve or understand an identified
problem and improve practice based on data they have
collected and analysed?
 Historical research
– How does one systematically collect and evaluate data to
understand and interpret past events?
Etnography

 One of the most used and established

qualitative approaches
 Seeks to describe and analyse all or
part of the culture of a community by
identifying and describing the
participants’ practices and beliefs
 Characteristics
– Natural setting, not in a laboratory
– Involves intimate, face-to-face interaction with
participants
– Presents an accurate reflection of participants’
perspectives and behaviours
– Uses inductive, interactive, and recursive data
collection and analytic strategies to build local
cultural theories
– Uses multiple data sources (qualitative and
quantitative data)
Grounded Theory
 Systematic qualitative method that aims
to generate a theory that explains, at a
conceptual level, a process, and action,
or a concept
 “What is happening in this situation and
how can I provide a theory to explain
it?”
 Observation and interviews
 Constant comparison method
– Constantly compares and integrates the date
researcher collects in numerous data collection
forays
– Eliminates redundant (lapuk, unnecessary) results
– Inductive – analysis shifts from specific information
to broader, more inclusive understandings
– Theory evolves during actual research
• Through continuous interplay between analysis and data
collection
Action Research

 Systematic inquiry
 Done by practitioners
– collect and study data that can help them
to both understand and improve their
practice.
 Common action research topics start
with questions such as
– How can I make this better?
– Would this be better if I …?
– Will doing this likely improve students’ …?
– Why does this approach not work as it
should?
 Less formal
Step 1: Selecting a research topic
 e.g.
– the effectiveness of small student groups
for learning English
– How do teachers and parents perceive
home-school relationships?
– how principals judge the quality of their
teachers’s teaching
– etc…
 Topics tend to be generally stated
 Strategies to narrow the scale of a
qualitative study
– E.g. ‘What are the cultural patterns and
perspectives of this group in its natural
setting?  ‘What are the cultural patterns
and perspectives of teachers during lunch
in the teachers’ room?’
1. Narrow the time or resource of topic
2. Narrow the audience to be addressed
3. Narrow the number of participants to save time
and analyses
4.Examine the literature of determine the scale of
the topic
5. Look for potential problems during the early steps
of the research
6. Share the research work with a colleague
7. Obtain the advice of more experienced qualitative
researchers
Step 2: Reviewing the literature

 Some researchers will only

delve(selidik) deeply into their literature
when their topic has emerged
– Bias, prematurely narrow the focus
 Others, on the contrary
– Provide a frame of mind, justify the viability
and credibility of topic
Step 3: Selecting research
participants
 How many participants are enough?
– 1 participant to 60 or 70 participants (multiple
context)
– Rarely more than 20
– Factors
• Researcher’s time, money
• Participant availability, interest
• The extent to which the selected participants represent
the range of potential participants in the setting
• Redundancy of the information gathered from the
participants (data saturation)
Step 4: Data collection

 Observations, interviews, phone calls,

personal and official documents,
photographs, recordings, drawings, e-
mail messages and responses, informal
conversations
 Each data type shares one common
aspect
– The researcher is the primary source of
data
– Depends on the researcher’s ability to
integrate and analyse data
 Data collection
– Also known as fieldwork
 Cautions to make the initial days of entry into
the setting less painful
– 1. Do not take what happens in the field
personally.
– 2. Set up your first visit so that someone is there
to introduce you to the participants
– 3. Don’t try to accomplish (complete successfully)
too much in the first few days.
– 4. Be relatively passive. Ask general, nonspecific,
noncontroversial questions.
– 5. Be friendly and polite.
Observation
 Types of observers
– Participant observer
• Engages fully in the activities being studied
• May become emotionally involved
• Gain insights and develop relationships with participants
that cannot be obtained in any other way
– External or nonparticipant observer
• One who watches but does not participate
• Less intrusive, less likely to become emotionally involved
Example
 Field notes
– The record of
• what the observer has specifically seen or heard
(descriptive) – emic data
• Personal reactions (what the observer has experienced
and thought about during an observation session)
(reflective) – etic data
– Data that will analysed
• Provide description and understanding of the research
setting and participants
– Notes made in the field (fresh to the researcher)
– Protocol
• List of issues to guide the observation
• Provides a common framework for field notes, making it
easier to organise and categorise data across field notes
• A simple protocol of observation may include these topics
– Who is being observed? How many people are involved,
who are they, and what individual roles are evident?
– What is going on? What is the nature of conversation?
What are people saying or doing? What is the physical
setting like? How are people seated, and where? How do
the participants interact with each other? What are the
status or roles of people; who leads, who follows, who is
decisive, who is not? What is the tone of the session?
What beliefs, attitudes, values, etc. seem to emerge?
 – How did the meeting end? Was the group divided,
united, upset, bored, or relieved?
– What activities or interactions seemed unusual or
significant?
– What was the observer doing during the session?
What was the observer’s level of participation in the
observation?
• Sample observation protocol
– Field notes – provide thick description
• Be clear and descriptive
• Don’t write “The class was happy.” Instead,
describe the activities of the students, the looks
on their faces, their interactions with each
other, the teachers’ activities, and other
observations that led you to think the class was
happy.
 Memo writing
– Simultaneous data collection and analysis
– Memo
• A form of thinking on paper
• Researchers write memos to themselves that describe
their mental exploration of their ideas, themes, hunches,
and reflections about the research topic
• Helps to identify topic/issues the researcher wishes to
explore in more detail
• Identify areas that might be important to focus on in data
analysis
• Helps to improve data collection
 Recording observations
– Record simultaneous observations of as many
behaviours as the qualitative researchers can attend to
 Assessing observer reliability
– Quantitative
• At least two observers independently make observations so
that their recorded judgements can then be compared to
determine agreement
– Qualitative
• Emphasise the observer’s ability to accurately record the
details of the observed behaviour
• One solution - Video or audio recording
– Difficult to obtain reliable observations from a single observation
– Can play back – for the researcher as well as other observers
– To obtain reliable judgements or evaluations
• The best way to increase observer reliability is
by training and monitoring them
• Training
– Observers - Most important effect on reliability and
validity of observations
– To determine agreement among observers, at least
two observers are required
– Additional observer (at least one person besides
yourself) must be familiar with the observational
procedures
» What behaviours to observe, how behaviours
are to be coded, how behaviours are to be
recorded, and how often
» Guarantee to attain the desired level of inter-
observer reliability
• Monitoring
– Guarantee the level of inter-observer reliability is
maintained
– Observers can get tired, bored, overconfident, and
forgetful over time
Interviews
 Obtain important data – cannot acquire from
observation
 Experiences and feelings
 Types of interviews
– Structured
• A specified set of questions to be asked
– Unstructured
• Questions being prompted by the flow of the interview
– Semistructured
• Combine both approaches
– Single participant or a group of participants
(focus group)
– Focus group
• Variety of views
• Few participants may be overly outspoken,
overshadow quieter participants
 Collecting data from interviews
– Taking notes during the interview
– Writing notes after the interview
– Audio- or videotaping the interview
• Transcribe
• Write the date, subject discussed, and participant (coded
name) on the transcript, number all pages
• Transcripts
– Field notes for interview data
 Guidelines for interviewing
– Listen more, talk less
– Follow up on what participants say and ask
questions when you don’t understand
– Avoid leading questions
– Don’t interrupt
– Keep participants focused and ask for concrete
details
– Tolerate silence
– Don’t be judgmental about participants’ views or
beliefs
– Don’t debate with participants over their responses
Threats to the Quality of
Observations and Interviews
 Observer bias
– Refers to invalid information that results from the
perspective the researcher brings to the study
– Halo effect
• Initial impressions concerning an observee affect
subsequent observations
 Observer effect
– Refers to the impact of the observer’s participation
on the setting
– Situation is somewhat different than it would have
been if the observer did not participate
Enhancing Validity and
Reducing Bias
 Questions related to the validity of the
data – to be answered by the
researcher
– “How much confidence can I place in the
data that I have collected?”
– “What is the quality of the data I have
obtained from participants?”
– “Have any personal biases intruded into
my data collection?”
 Strategies to reduce researcher bias and
improve the validity of the data collection
– Extend the study
– Include additional participants
– Obtain participant trust and comfort
– Recognise one’s own biases
– Work with another researcher
• Independently gather and compare data
– Allow participants to review and critique field notes
for accuracy and meaning
– Do not ignore ‘outliers’ (unusual or
contradictory results for explanation)
– Corroborate data by using triangulation
• Researchers triangulate by using different data
sources to confirm one another
• e.g.
– Interview, related documents, and recollection of
data from other participants produce same
descriptions of an event
– A participant responds similarly to a personal
question asked on three different occasions
• Three types of triangulation
– Comparing multiple sources of data across
participants, times, and sites
– Comparing the results of multiple independent
investigators
– Comparing multiple methods of data analysis
Data analysis
 Lengthy and time consuming
 Multistage process of organising,
categorising, synthesising, interpreting,
and writing about the data
 Each of these processes is iterative
(again and again/repetitive)
– In most cases, research will cycle through
the stages more than once to narrow and
make sense of what she has seen in the data
 Steps in analysing qualitative research
data
– Data managing
– Reading/memoing
– Describing the context and participants
– Classifying
– Interpreting
 Data managing
– Data organising activities
• Write dates on all notes
• Sequence all notes with labels (e.g. 6th set of notes)
• Label notes according to type (e.g. observer’s notes, memo to
self, transcript from interview)
• Make two photocopies of all notes and retain original copies
• Organise computer files into folders according to data type
and stages of analysis
• Make backup copies of all files
• Read through data and make sure it is complete and legible
before proceeding to analysis and interpretation
• Begin to note themes and patterns that emerge
 Once data are organised, data analysis
begins
 Analysis requires four iterative steps
– Reading/memoing
– Describing what is going on in the setting
– Classifying research data
– Interpreting
 The cyclical process
 The process focuses on
– (1) becoming familiar with the data and identifying potential
potential themes in it (reading/memoing)

– (2) examining the data in depth to provide detailed descriptions

of the setting, participants, and activity (describing)

– (3) categorising and coding pieces of data and grouping them

into themes (classifying)

– (4) interpreting and synthesising the organised data into

general written conclusions or understandings based on the
data (interpreting)
Reading/Memoing
 Read and write memos about all field notes,
transcripts, memos, and observer comments to get an
initial sense of data
 Find a quiet place and plan on reading for a few hours
at a time
 “the first time you sit down to read your data is the only
time you come to that particular set fresh.” (Krathwohl,
1998)
 Write notes in the margins or underline sections that
seem important (recording initial impressions)
 Begin to search for recurring themes or common
threads
Describing
 Addresses what is going on in the setting and among the
participants
 Based on collected observations, questionnaires, and field
notes
 Aim – provide a true picture of the setting and events that take
place in it to gain an understanding of the study context
 Develop thorough and comprehensive descriptions of the
participants, the setting, and the phenomenon studied (known
as thick description as it conveys the thick complexity of the
research)
 Description leads to
– Separation and grouping of pieces of data related to different
aspect of the setting, events, and participants
– Classifying the data
Classifying
 Qualitative data analysis is basically a process of
breaking down data into smaller units,
determining their importance, and putting the
pertinent units together in more general,
interpreted form
 Classifying – typical way qualitative data are
broken down
 A category is a classification of ideas or concepts
 Categories are used to organise similar concepts
into distinct groups
Interpretation
 Need to understand one’s own data in order
to describe it to others (Dey, 1993)
 “What are the meanings in the data?”
 Regardless of the research approach, the
implicit issue in data interpretation is the
answer to these three questions:
– What is important in the data?
– Why is it important?
– What can be learned from it?
 Interrelationships among these steps
– Logical sequence
• Reading/memoing -> describing -> classifying ->
interpreting
– Not necessarily linear
– As the researcher begins to internalise and reflect
on the data, the initial ordered sequence may lose
its structure and become more flexible
• e.g.
– describing lead to interpretation without the intermediate
step of classifying
– Interpretation lead to reclassifying some issues
 Once a researcher is into the data, it is not the four
steps that lead to understanding and interpretation
 It is the researcher’s ability to think, imagine, create,
intuit, and analyse that guides the data analysis
 Researcher – data analyser
 Quality – depend heavily on the intellectual qualities
of the qualitative researcher (ability to integrate,
analyse, and classify)
 Data analysis process
– Process of digesting the contents of qualitative data and
finding related threads in it
Writing the Report
 Data analysis and interpretation also go on
during the writing of the report
 Writing the report tests the quality and
meaningfulness of ideas and logic
 Writer must return to the data to clarify a
thought or to verify logical connection in the
report
 Focus on the key themes and interpretations
 Language should be straightforward
 More like a story than a formal report