Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Qualitative research - Coggle Diagram
Qualitative research
Unit 1. Research Design
• Go to the People
It is a way of looking at the empirical world: Qualitative research is inductive.
In qualitative methodology, the researcher sees the scene and the people in a logistical perspective; people, settings or groups are not reduced to variables, but considered as a whole.
Qualitative researchers try to understand people within their own frame of reference.
The qualitative researcher suspends or sets aside his own beliefs, perspective, and biases.
• Selection of Scenarios
The ideal scenario for the investigation is one in which the observer obtains easy access, establishes an immediate good relationship with the informants, and collects data directly related to investigative interests. Such scenarios only appear rarely.
Researchers should refrain from studying scenarios in which they have direct personal or professional participation.
When one is directly involved in a scenario, he is likely to see things from only one point of view
• Various Accesses
Access to Organizations: Participating observers generally obtain access to organizations by requesting permission from those responsible.
Access to Public and Quasi-Public Scenarios: Many studies are carried out in public settings (parks, government buildings, airports, railway stations, etc.) and semi-public (bars, restaurants, pool halls, theater, businesses, etc.).
. Access to Private Scenarios: The task that the participant observer must perform to gain access to scenarios (houses) and private situations (some activities take place in all of a set of scenarios) is analogous to that of the interviewer to locate informants.
• Data Collection
Detailed field notes should be kept during the process of obtaining entry into a scenario.
The process of gaining access to a setting also makes it easier to understand how people relate to each other and treat others.
A good way to acquire knowledge about the structure and hierarchy of an organization is to be passed from one to another through it.
Finally, the notes collected at that stage will later help the observer to understand how he is seen by the people of the organization.
Unit 2. Participant Observation in the Field
• Entrance to the field
Participating observers enter the field in the hope of establishing open relationships with informants.
They behave in such a way that they become a non-intrusive part of the scene, people whose position the participants take for granted.
Many of the techniques used in participant observation correspond to everyday rules about non-offensive social interaction, skills in those areas are a must.
• Establish Rapport
Rapport is not a concept that can be easily defined, it means many things:
Communicate your sympathy for informants and get them to accept it as sincere. Penetrate behind people's “stranger defenses”.
Getting people to "open up" and express their feelings about the stage and other people.
Being seen as an unobjectionable person. Share the world perspectives. symbolic of the informants, their language and their perspectives.
• Key Informants
Ideally, participating observers develop close and open relationships with all informants.
Generally, field researchers try to cultivate close relationships with one or two respected and knowledgeable people in the early stages of the investigation. These people are called key informants.
Key informants sponsor the investigator on stage and are primary sources of investigation.
• Field Techniques
Act naive: For many observers, posing as naive but interested strangers is an effective way to obtain data.
Being in the right place at the right time: Perhaps the most effective tactic is to place yourself in situations from which the data in which we are interested is likely to emerge.
In some cases, when informants know too much about the investigation, they are likely to hide things from the observer or stage certain events for the observer to see.
Aggressive field techniques can be employed after the scenario has been understood. At the beginning of a study, we conduct ourselves so as to minimize reactive effects; our goal is for people to act in our presence as naturally as possible.
Unit 3. In-depth interviews
• Type of Interview
Life history or sociological autobiography. In life history, the researcher tries to apprehend the salient experiences of a person's life and the definitions that person applies to those experiences. What differentiates the life story from the popular autobiographies is the fact that the researcher actively requests the account of the experiences and the way of seeing of the person, and constructs the life story as a final product.
Learning about events and activities that cannot be directly observed. In this type of interview, our interlocutors are informants in the truest sense of the word. They act as observers of the researcher, they are his eyes and ears in the field. For so many informants, their role is not simply to reveal their own ways of seeing, but rather they must describe what is happening and how other people perceive it.
Provide a broad picture of a range of scenario situations or people. Interviews are used to study a relatively large number of people in a relatively short period of time compared to the time required for participant observation research.
• Approach to Informants
In most cases it is not known how many in-depth interviews will need to be conducted until you actually start talking to the informants.
Interview projects generally take anywhere from several to more than 25 sections, and 50 to 100 hours for life stories.
Since it is not possible to say in advance how many interviews exactly we want to conduct, it is advisable to advance slowly at the beginning with the informants.
Initial interviews are generally not difficult to get as long as the individuals concerned can get us into their agendas.
• Interview Guide
In large-scale interview projects some researchers use an interview guide to ensure that key issues are explored with a number of informants.
The interview guide is not a structured protocol. This is a list of general areas that should be covered with each informant.
In the interview situation, the researcher decides how to state the questions and when to ask them. The interview guide is just a reminder to ask questions about certain topics.
The use of guides presupposes a certain degree of knowledge about the people one is trying to study.
This type of guide is useful when the researcher has already learned something about the informants through field work, preliminary interviews, or other direct experience.
This guide may also be expanded or revised as additional interviews are conducted.
The interview guide is especially useful in team research and evaluation, or other subsidiary research.
• The survey
One of the keys to a successful interview is knowing when and how to probe, explore, scrutinize.
Throughout the interviews, the researcher follows up on themes that emerged as consequences of specific questions, encourages the informant to describe the experiences in detail, and constantly helps to clarify her words.
Qualitative interviewers must constantly ask informants to clarify and elaborate on what they have said, even at the risk of appearing naive.
Unit 4. Working with the Data
• Descriptive and Theoretical Studies
All qualitative studies contain rich descriptive data: people's own spoken and written words and observable activities.
In participant observation studies, researchers try to convey a sense of "there" and experience the scenarios directly.
However, we can distinguish purely descriptive studies, sometimes called ethnographies, from theoretical or conceptual studies.
• Development and Verification of Theory
Develop an approximate definition of the phenomena to be explained.
Formulate a hypothesis to explain this phenomenon (this can be based on the data, other research or the understanding and intuition of the researcher.
Study a case to see if the hypothesis fits.
If the hypothesis does not explain the case, reformulate or define the phenomenon.
Actively look for negative cases that refute the hypothesis.
When negative cases are found, reformulate the hypothesis or redefine the phenomenon.
Continue until the hypothesis has been adequately tested (until a universal relationship has been established, according to some researchers) by examining a wide range of cases.
• Analysis in Progress
Data analysis is an ongoing process in qualitative research.
Data collection and analysis go hand in hand.
Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and other qualitative research.
Data collection and analysis go hand in hand.
Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and other qualitative research, researchers keep track of emerging topic themes, read their field notes or transcripts, and develop concepts to begin to make sense of their data.
• Construction of Life History
The life stories and important experiences of a person's life, or some main part of it, in the protagonist's own words.
In the construction of life stories, the analysis consists of a process of collating and gathering the story, in such a way that the results capture the feelings, ways of seeing, and perspective of the person.
As a sociological document, the life story should illuminate the significant social features of the events it narrates.
The term career designates the sequence of social positions that people occupy throughout their lives and the changing definitions of themselves and their world that you sustain in the various stages of that sequence.