SOWK 6003 Social Work Research Week 9 Qualitative Research and its Analysis

1
SOWK 6003 Social Work ResearchWeek 9
Qualitative Research and its Analysis

• By Dr. Paul Wong

2
Overview

• Topics Appropriate for Qualitative Research
• Prominent Qualitative Research Paradigms
• Qualitative Sampling Methods
• Strengths and Weaknesses
• Standards for Evaluating Qualitative Studies
• Research Ethics in Qualitative Research

3
Qualitative Research Methods

• Qualitative research methods attempt to tap the
  deeper meanings of particular human experiences,
  generating theoretically richer observations that
  are not easily reduced to numbers
• By going directly to the phenomenon under study,
  and observing it as completely as possible,
  researchers can develop a deeper understanding of
  it

4
Topics Appropriate for Qualitative Research

• Qualitative research is especially appropriate to
  the study of topics for which attitudes and
  behaviors can best be understood within their
  natural setting
• Qualitative research is especially appropriate
  for the study of social processes over time
  (e.g., rumblings and final explosion of a riot as
  events actually occur)

5
Topics Appropriate for Qualitative Research

• Appropriate topics for field research include
• Practices
• Episodes
• Encounters
• Roles
• Relationships
• Groups
• Organizations
• Settlements
• Social worlds
• Lifestyles or subcultures

6
Prominent Qualitative Research Paradigms

• Naturalism
• An old tradition that emphasizes observing people
  in their everyday settings
• E.g., Ethnography involves naturalistic
  observations and holistic understandings of
  cultures or subcultures
• Grounded Theory
• Attempts to derive theories from an analysis of
  the patterns, themes, and common categories
  discovered among observational data

7
Prominent Qualitative Research Paradigms

• Participatory Action Research
• Implicit belief that research functions not only
  as means of knowledge production, but also as a
  tool for education and development of
  consciousness as well as mobilization for action
• Case Studies
• Idiographic examinations of a single individual,
  family, group, organization, community or society

8
Qualitative Sampling Methods

• Probability sampling is sometimes used in
  qualitative research, however nonprobability
  techniques are much more common
• Nonprobability samples used in qualitative
  research are called purposive samples

9
Qualitative Sampling Methods

• Purposive samples include
• Quota sample
• Snowball sample
• Deviant case sample
• Intensity sample
• Critical incidents sample
• Maximum variation sample

10
Strengths and Weaknesses

• Depth of understanding
• Flexibility
• Cost
• Subjectivity
• Generalizibility

11
Standards for Evaluating Qualitative Studies

• Given the variety of research methods and
  paradigms, a general agreement exists that one
  key issue in evaluating the rigor of qualitative
  research is trustworthiness
• Three key threats to trustworthiness
• Reactivity
• Researcher bias
• Respondent bias

12
Standards for Evaluating Qualitative Studies

• Contemporary Positivist Standards
• Strategies to minimize threats
• Prolonged engagement
• Triangulation
• Peer debriefing and support
• Negative case analysis
• Member checking
• Auditing

13
Standards for Evaluating Qualitative Studies

• Social Constructivist Standards
• This paradigm views trustworthiness and
  strategies to enhance rigor more in terms of
  capturing multiple subjective realities than of
  ensuring the portrayal of an objective social
  reality, the objective of contemporary
  positivists.

14
Standards for Evaluating Qualitative Studies

• Empowerment Standards
• Those who take a critical social science or
  participatory action research approach to
  qualitative research include empowerment
  standards in critically appraising qualitative
  research
• Research must evoke action by participants to
  effect desired change and a redistribution of
  power

15
Research Ethics in Qualitative Research

• Conducting qualitative research responsibly
• involves confronting ethical issues that arise
• from the researchers direct contact with
• participants
• Is it ethical to talk to people when they dont
  know you will be recording their words?
• Is it ethical to see a severe need for help and
  not respond to it directly?
• Is it ethical to pay people with trade-offs for
  access to their lives and minds?

16
Qualitative Research Specific Methods

• PowerPoint presentation developed by
• E. Roberto Orellana Lin Fang

17
Overview

• Preparing for the Field
• The Various Roles of the Observer
• Relations to Participants Emic and Etic
  Perspectives
• Qualitative Interviewing
• Focus Groups
• Life History
• Feminist Methods
• Recording Observations

18
Preparing for the Field

• Search of relevant literature
• Use key informants
• Discuss the group/community with others who have
  already studied it
• Discuss the group with one of its members
• Establish initial contacts with the group to be
  studied

19
The Various Roles of the Observer

• Four different positions on a continuum of
  participant observation roles are
• Complete participant
• Participant-as-observer
• Observer-as-participant
• Complete observer

20
The Various Roles of the Observer

• A complete participant may either be a genuine
  participant in what she is studying or pretend to
  be a genuine participant. People will see her
  only as a participant, not as a researcher
• A participant-as-observer would participate fully
  with the group under study, but would make it
  clear that he is also undertaking research

21
The Various Roles of the Observer

• The observer-as-participant is one who identifies
  herself as a researcher and interacts with the
  participants in the social process but makes no
  pretense of actually being a participant
• The complete observer observes a social process
  without becoming a part of it in any way. The
  participants in a study might not realize they
  are being studied because of the researchers
  unobtrusiveness

22
Relations to Participants Emic and Etic
Perspectives

• Qualitative researchers should learn how to
  simultaneously hold two contradictory
  perspectives
• Trying to adopt the beliefs, attitudes, and other
  points of view shared by the members of the
  culture being studied (the emic perspective)
• Maintaining objectivity as an outsider and
  raising questions about the culture being
  observed that wouldnt occur to members of that
  culture (the etic perspective)

23
Qualitative Interviewing

• Qualitative researchers often engage in in-depth
  interviews with the participants, interviews that
  are far less structured than interviews conducted
  in survey research
• Qualitative interviewing tends to be open-ended
  and unstructured. Three forms of qualitative,
  open-ended interviewing are
• The informal conversational interview
• The general interview guide approach
• The standardized open-ended interview

24
Qualitative Interviewing

• An informal conversational interview is an
  unplanned and unanticipated interaction between
  an interviewer and a respondent that occurs
  naturally during the course of fieldwork
  observation
• With the interview guide approach to qualitative
  interviewing, an interview guide lists in outline
  form the topics and issues that an interviewer
  should cover in the interview, but it allows the
  interviewer to adapt the sequencing and wording
  of questions to each particular interview

25
Qualitative Interviewing

• The standardized open-ended interview consists of
  questions that are written out in advance exactly
  the way they are to be asked in the interview.
  Probes are to be limited to where they are
  indicated on the interview schedule

26
Focus Groups

• To conduct a focus group, researchers bring
  participants together to be observed and
  interviewed as group
• Focus groups are based on structured,
  semi-structured, or unstructured interviews. They
  allow the researcher to question several
  individuals systematically and simultaneously

27
Focus Groups

• offer several advantages
• Inexpensive
• Generate speedy results
• Offer flexibility for probing
• The group dynamics that occur in focus groups can
  bring out aspects of the topic that the
  researchers may not have anticipated and that may
  not have emerged in individual interviews

28
Focus Groups

• Focus groups however, also have disadvantages
• Questionable representativeness of participants
• The influence of group dynamics to pressure
  people to say things that do not accurately
  reflect what they really believe or do
• The difficulty in analyzing the voluminous data
  generated

29
Life History

• Life histories or life stories involve asking
  open-ended questions to discover how the
  participants in a study understand the
  significant events and meaning in their own
  lives. AKA Oral history interviews
• Because life histories provide idiographic
  examinations of individuals lives, they can be
  viewed within the case study paradigm

30
Recording Observations

• Tape recorders are powerful tools for qualitative
  interviewing. It ensures verbatim recording and
  frees interviewers to keep their full attention
  focused on the respondents
• The field journal is the backbone of qualitative
  research, because that is where the researcher
  records the observations. Journal entries should
  be detailed, yet concise.

31
Recording Observations

• Note-taking in qualitative research should
  include both the investigators empirical
  observations and the investigators
  interpretations of them. You should record what
  you know has happened and what you think has
  happened.
• If, possible observations should be recorded as
  they are made otherwise, they should be recorded
  in stages and as soon as possible. Dont trust
  your memory any more than you have to.