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BRM II readings summary - Exam 1
Merriam (2014) Chapter 1- What is qualitative research?
There are many definitions of research, what they all have in common is the notion of inquiring, or
investigating something in a systematic manner. In everyday life, we talk about ‘doing research’ to
inform our decisions and to decide on a particular course of action.
● Two forms of systematic inquiry: applied research & evaluations.
● research is typically divided into the categories of basic and applied.
○ basic → motivated by intellectual interest in a phenomenon and has as its goal the
extension of knowledge.
Primary purpose is to know more about a phenomenon.
○ applied → undertake to improve the quality of practice of a particular discipline.
Applied social science researchers hope that their work will be used by
administrators and policymakers to improve the way things are done.
● Forms of applied research: evaluation research, action research
○ evaluation research → collects data or evidence on the worth or value of a program,
process, or technique. Main purpose is to establish a basis for decision-making.
○ action research → goal to address a specific problem within a specific setting, such
as a classroom, a workplace, a program or an organization.
● In short, the research process can ...
contribute to the knowledge base in a field (pure research)
improve the practice of a particular discipline (applied research)
assess the value of something (evaluation research)
address a particular, localized problem (action research)
The nature of qualitative research
● Quantitative: the focus is on how much or how many and results are usually presented in
numerical form.
● Qualitative: Rather than determining cause and effect, predicting, or describing the
distribution of some attribute among a population, we might be interested in uncovering
the meaning of a phenomenon for those involved.
Qualitative researcher are interested in understanding how people interpret their
experiences, how they construct their worlds, and what meaning they attribute to their
experiences.
example: rather than finding out many retired folks take on part-time jobs after retirement, which
could be done through a survey, we might be more interested in how people adjust to retirement,
how they think about this phase of their lives, how they think moving from full-time work to
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retirement, and so on. These questions are about understanding their experiences and would call
for a qualitative design.
Where does qualitative research come from?
● decades ago sociologist and anthropologists were asking questions about people’s lives, the
social and cultural contexts in which they lived, the ways in which they understood the
worlds, and so on. The researchers went ‘into the field’ and observed what was going on,
interviewed people and analyzed documents and artifacts.
● Two important publications contributed to the emergence of qualitative research:
○ Grounded Theory: rather than testing theory, their (Strauss & Glaser) book made a
case for building theory from inductively a nalyzing social phenomenon.
○ Naturalistic inquiry: a study was naturalistic if it took place in the real-world setting
rather than a laboratory, and whatever was being observed and studied was allowed
to happen ‘naturally’ .
● Carr and Kemmis (1995) 1make a distinction between three forms of research: positivist,
interpretivist, and critical.
○ positivist orientation assumes that reality exists ‘out there’ and it is observable,
stable, and measurable.
○ interpretive research, which is were qualitative research is most often located,
assumes that reality is socially constructed, that is, there is no single, observable
reality. Rather there are multiple realities, or interpretations, of a single event.
(subjective meaning)
■ phenomenology → the study of how people describe things and experience
them through their senses.
■ symbolic interactionism→ focuses on meaning and interpretation, especially
that which people create and share through their interactions.
○ critical research goes beyond uncovering the interpretation of people’s
understandings of their world. Critical research has its roots in several traditions and
currently encompasses a variety of approaches. The purpose is to critique and
challenge, to transform and empower.
● To the above typology, Lather adds post structural or postmodernism
○ postmodernism: This approach is different than the previously discussed three
approaches, nevertheless it is influencing our thinking about interpretive qualitative
research and also critical research. According to postmodernists, explanations for the
ways things are in the world are nothing but myths or grand narratives. → There is
no single truth
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Example of Highschool dropouts-used to describe the differences among the four approaches to
research above.
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Definition and Characteristics of Qualitative Research
● Van Maanen (1979): ‘An umbrella term covering an array of interpretive techniques which
seek to describe, decode, translate, and otherwise come to terms with the meaning, not the
frequency, of certain more or less naturally occuring phenomena in the social world.
○ understanding the meaning people have constructed
● Four characteristics are identified as key to understanding the nature of qualitative
research:
○ focus is on process, understanding, and meaning
○ researcher is primary instrument of data collection and analysis
○ the process is inductive
○ the product is richly descriptive
Focus on Meaning and Understanding
● overall purpose of qualitative research is to achieve an understanding of how people make
sense out of their lives, delineate the process of meaning-making, and describe how people
interpret what they experience.
● Key concern is to understand the phenomenon of interest from the participant’s
perspectives, not the researcher’s.
○ emic → insider’s perspective = research participant
○ etic → outsider’s perspective = researcher
Researcher as primary instrument
● Since understanding is the goal of this research, the human instrument, which is able to be
immediately responsive and adaptive, would seem to be ideal means of collecting and
analyzing data.
● the human instrument has shortcomings and biases that might have an impact on the study.
An Inductive Process
● often qualitative researchers undertake a qualitative study because there is a lack of theory
or an existing theory fails to adequately explain a phenomenon.
● researchers gather data to build concepts, hypothesis, or theories than deductively testing
hypotheses as in positivist research.
● Quantitative → testing hypotheses as in positivist research
Rich description
● words and pictures, rather than numbers are used to convey what the researcher has
learned about a phenomenon
● rich descriptions of the context, interviews, data, documents, field notes, videos and so on.
Other characteristics and Competencies
● the design of a qualitative research is emergent and flexible, responsive to changing
conditions of the study in progress.
● sample selection in qualitative research is usually (but not always) nonrandom, purposeful,
and small, as opposed to larger, more random sampling in quantitative research.
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