Naturalistic Inquiry: Methods of Qualitative Analysis

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Naturalistic InquiryMethods of Qualitative
Analysis

• Recurring Features, Multiple Approaches
• Analytic Method
• E. Ayn Welleford, PhD,
• VCU Department of Gerontology

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Recurring Features of Qualitative Method

• Qualitative Research
• Is Naturalistic
• Is conducted through an intense and/or prolonged
  contact with a field or life situation
• Typically involves normal day to day experiences,
  reflective of everyday life of individuals,
  groups, societies, and organizations.
• Requires that the researcher gains a holistic
  (systematic, encompassing, integrated) overview
  of the context under studyits logic,
  arrangements, explicit or implicit rules

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Recurring Features of Qualitative Research

• Qualitative Research
• Attempts to capture data from the inside
  through
• Deep attentiveness
• Empathetic understanding
• Suspending or bracketing preconceptions about
  the topics under discussion
• Directs the researcher to isolate certain themes
  and expressions that can be reviewed with
  informants, but must be maintained in their
  original forms throughout the study.

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Recurring Features of Qualitative Research

• Primary task
• explicate the ways people in particular settings
  come to understand, account for, take action, and
  otherwise manage their day-to-day situations.

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Recurring Features of Qualitative Research

• Interpretation
• ah, the big question!
• Many interpretations are possible but some are
  more compelling for theoretical reasons or on
  grounds of internal consistency

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Recurring Features of Qualitative Research

• Qualitative Research
• Involves the researcher as a measurement device
• Involves little standardized instrumentation
• Participant directed
• Emergent process
• Involves mostly analysis of text data
• Words are organized to permit the researcher to
  compare, contrast, analyze, and bestow patterns.

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Three Approaches to Qualitative Data Analysis

• Interpretivism
• Phenomenologists are looking for the deep
  understanding
• Capturing the essence of an account
• interpretation of the account by the actors and
  the researcher
• Require that researcher is no more detached than
  the informants
• Often difficult to separate interviewer from
  interviewee
• Phenomenlogists generally do not use coding
• Semiotics, deconstructivism, aesthetic criticism,
  ethnomethodologists

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Three Approaches to Qualitative Data Analysis

• Social anthropology
• Ethnographers focus on extended contact within a
  given community, looking for patterns, or
  rules
• Description of local particularities,
  individuals perspectives and interpretations of
  their world
• Uses multiple data sources (language, artifacts,
  diaries)
• Condense the data with less concern for
  conceptual or theoretical meaning than observation

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Three Approaches to Qualitative Data Analysis

• Social anthropology
• Many social anthropologists are interested in the
  genesis or refinement of theory and may begin
  with a conceptual framework and field test
• Cross-cultural theory in socialization,
  parenting, and kinship has resulted from field
  research
• Life history, Grounded theory, ecological
  psychology, narrative studies, wide range of
  family studies follow this line

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Three Approaches to Qualitative Data Analysis

• Collaborative social research
• Action research is a general strategy for
  institutional change.
• Researcher, with local help, design a field
  experiment (e.g., changing the offerings in a
  cafeteria, redesigning staffing of a unit,
  student evaluations, program evaluation)
• Date are collated and given to the activists
  both as feedback and to craft the nest stage of
  operations

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Three Approaches to Qualitative Data Analysis

• Collaborative social research
• Collaborative action research
• Researchers join closely with the participants
  from the outset
• The aim is the transform the social environment
  through a process of critical inquiry to act on
  the world rather than being acted on.
• Critical ethnography, action science

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Analytic Methods

• Affixing codes to field note drawn from
  observations or interviews
• Noting reflections or other remarks in the margins

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Analytic Methods

• Sorting to identify similar phrases,
  relationships between variables, patterns,
  themes, distinct differences between subgroups,
  and common sequences
• Isolating patterns and processes, commonalities
  and differences, and taking them out to the field
  in the next wave of data collection

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Analytic Methods

• Gradually elaborating a small set of
  generalizations that cover the consistencies
  discerned in the database
• Confronting those generalizations with a
  formalized body of knowledge in the form of
  constructs and theories

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Analytic Methods Specific to Grounded Theory
Method

• Theoretical Sampling
• Constant comparison
• Generative concept relating questions
• Conceptual integration
• Member checks
• Peer review

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Analytic Methods Specific to Grounded Theory
Method

• The object of grounded theory is to discover or
  validate a conceptual framework that explains the
  scene being investigated.

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Grounded Theory MethodFit, Grab, Work

• To Fit, means that the categories that are
  generated must be indicated by the data and
  applied readily to the data
• To have Grab, a theory must be relevant to the
  participant group and the practice group.
• To work, a theory should be able to explain what
  happened, predict what will happen and interpret
  what is happening

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Analytic Methods

• Data collection
• Data reduction
• Data display
• Drawing verifying conclusions

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Process of Constant Comparative Analysis
Sources
Data
Stage 1
Incidents
Coding
Stage 2
Categories/Properties/ Memos
Stage 3
Concepts/Propositions/ Memos
Stage 4
Theory
Source Pickler, R.H. 1990
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Strengths of Qualitative Data

• Focus on naturally occurring, ordinary events in
  natural settings
• Local groundedness
• Case based
• Richness holism thick descriptions
• Sustained period of analysis

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Strengths of Qualitative Data

• Assess causality
• Flexibility - emergent design
• Discovering the meanings of lived experience
• Connecting meaning to the social world

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Strengths of Qualitative Data

• Develop hypotheses
• Test hypotheses
• Supplement, validate, explain, illuminate, or
  reinterpret quantitative data

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Weaknesses of Qualitative Analysis

• Lengthy process
• Stigma Misunderstanding of qualitative method

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Application to your work?

• Jim Birren states that Gerontology as a field is
  data rich but theory poor. How does this relate
  to the need for qualitative exploration?
• Can you see a use for qualitative data analysis
  in your work?