Summary MTO-E (Qualitative research methods)
Bachelor Personeelwetenschappen
2022-2023
Agenda:
,Week 1 part 1(of 5): Intro
Contrasting qualitative and quantitative research
Qualitative: Quantitative:
Understanding how and why Measuring how many and causality
Theory emergent inductive Theory testing (deductive)
Words & text Variables & Numbers
Participants’ view Researcher’s view
Proximity Distance
Process Statis
Unstructured/open Structured
Rich, deep data Hard, ‘reliable’ data
Interpretation Measuring
Example Qualitative study:
The red letters show why it is a qualitative study.
Example Quantitative study:
The red letters show why it is a quantitative study.
,Typical Research questions
Qualitative research Quantitative research
- Open questions (How, what) - Hypotheses or closed questions
- Focused on understanding, developing - Focused on measuring, causality
concepts.
- Dealing with complex matters for which - Dealing with subjects that can be
people need many words to address these: operationalized into variables:
experiences, meaning satisfaction or motications
- Dealing with processes - Dealing with measuring established
concepts , such as ‘life satisfaction’,
‘Place attachment’, ‘psychological
strain’
Research purposes → Richie & Lewis p. 41
Exploratory (R&L→ contextual): explore a phenomenon (at the start of the research), what
exists? Quantitative: how many. Qualitative: which features?
Descriptive (R&L→ contextual): addressing ‘what’ questions, what is the form or nature of
what exists? More focused than explanatory research
Explanatory addressing why questions.
- Quantitative: Surveys and experiments, measuring, calculating correlations between
variables, building causal models.
- Qualitative research: studying underlying structures, mechanisms and processes to
explain certain behaviors, actions, or events.
Evaluative: appraising the effectiveness of what exists (policy implementations f.e.).
Generative: to develop theories, strategies, or actions.
Extra explanation of the different research purposes:
, Week 1 part 2(of 5): paradigms
Ontology, epistemology, and paradigms in social science research
Ontology is concerned with the nature of reality and what there is to know about the world.
Two major positions
1. Objectivism -> Real as it is
2. Constructionism -> Something we think is real but is actually an idea of how we would
like it to be.
(R&L: Objectivism = Realism and Constructionism = Idealism)
Epistemology: assumptions about the nature of knowledge. So how is/can the knowledge (be)
acquired. Epistemology is concerned with ways of knowing and learning about the world and
focuses on issues such as how we can learn about reality and what forms the basis of our
knowledge.
Several key issues dominate epistemological debates in social research:
1. The way knowledge is best acquired.
→ Bottom-up or top-down. Inductive of deductive processes.
→ Ontological positions have consequences for our epistemological position. If we assume that
there is an external reality, it follows that we can study this reality by using our senses: we can
see it, hear it, smell it, touch it, taste it. The idea that we can know reality through using our
senses is called empiricism. If we believe that reality is constructed, we have to adopt a
different way of gaining knowledge about this constructed reality. For example, we have to
acknowledge that people construct realities in different ways, and we have to find out how
people construct meaning.
Ontology + epistemology = paradigm
So what we think is real and what we can measure with experiences
Timeline (See image below)
