SRM - Week 9 Notes:

Key terms/points:

• Ethnography/participant observation: A research method in which natural social phenomena and processes are studied in their natural setting, relatively undisturbed

• Intensive interviewing

• Focus groups

• Content analysis

• Theoretical sampling

• Jotting - highly selective, partial, abbreviated

• Field notes - transcribed from jotting

• Cross-sectional interview - interview once

• Panel/longitudinal interviews - interview repeatedly at different points of time

General notes:

I. General info on qualitative research

• Names of specific qualitative methods

  • Ethnography/participant observation

  • Intensive interviewing

  • Focus groups

  • Content analysis

• What does qualitative research try to study?

  • How do people make sense of what they’re doing?

  • What meanings do actions/events have for people?

  • Micro-level interactions and socials structures that constrain those interactions

  • How does a lifestyle, community, or subculture work? What are its rules, values, beliefs, etc.?

• 8 ways qualitative is different than quantitative

  • Data

    • Experiments & surveys - predetermined categories

    • Qualitative - observe natural behaviors/artifacts that capture social life as experienced

  • Usually Inductive to form generalizations

  • Exploratory - focus on what ha not been studied before, or feelings/interpretation of people in particular group

  • Social context - interrelationships between people and role of institutions

  • Meanings - focus on meanings people attach to events/phenomena

  • Ideographic more common

  • Design evolves

  • Subjective perspective of researcher usually acknowledged

II. Ethics in qualitative research

• Ethical issues

  • Autonomy of the person

  • Do no definite harm - minimize harm, maximize benefits

  • Kind of people who take risks are the same who get benefit

• Autonomy and deception

  • Does the researcher need to identify themself?

  • What’s the researcher’s obligation to tell subjects’ story the way they want it told?

  • Putting subjects in harms way? Changing their lives?

• Relationships

  • Meaningful and reciprocal relationships with participants

• Representation

  • Voice - whose voice " is “heard” when reading research?

  • Power - who has power in the conversation?

  • Representation - How can the researcher balance—-

    • Needs of the participants to be represented positively?

    • Researcher findings?

• Community engaged participatory research

  • Research WITH community/group

    • Connection - citizen professional

  • Co-creation of project ideas/procedures

  • Substantive participation by the community on nearly all stages of research

  • Shared decision-making

  • Results used to address community priorities and/or change systems

• IRB process

  • Make clear plans about gaining consent

  • Clearly show that benefits outweigh the cost

  • Guard the data carefully

  • Plan for various worst-case scenarios

III. Measurement, generalizability, & causal validity in qualitative research

• Measurement validity

  • Measuring what you think you’re measuring?

    • Qualitative is good at this cause it uses people’s own words

  • Great for conceptualization

  • Can be used to establish face validity, content validity, and construct validity

  • Different for content analysis since one is not using people’s own words

• Generalizability

  • Not generalizable to any population

  • Usually convenience sample

  • Generalizability can be helped by theoretical sampling

    • Helps generalizability by finding out about different perspectives——develops as researcher moves forward

  • Content analysis is different —— could do true random sample of ads/articles

    • Only generalizable to that population

  • Causal validity

    • Can’t prove one thing causes another because spuriousness

    • Good for exploring correlation and causal mechanism

    • Not good for establishing time order

    • Can’t use statistical control since only a few scenarios

IV. Ethnography

• Goals

  • See the world as the research subject see it

  • Understand subjects’ interpretation of the world and how it worlds

  • Balance two perspectives

    • Truly understand insider’s perspective

    • Still be an outsider who can see the bigger picture

• Simple format

  • Go to a place

  • Pay attention to happenings

  • Let things unfold naturally (people watch)

  • Focus on broad topic/question

  • Takes notes carefully and systematically

• Researcher can participate fully, not at all, or something in the middle (participant observer)

• 4 tips from the field

  • Talk can be cheap

    • What do people say compared to what they do?

    • What do they take for granted?

    • What is not discussed?

  • Context is crucial

    • Connect interaction to surrounding social structures

  • Don’t insulate yourself from data

    • Keep yourself open to all possibilities at all times

  • Transparency

    • Reader of research needs to know all about how the data are gathered

V. In-depth Interviews

• What are in-depth interviews

  • 1-1 interviews

  • Lasts 1+ hours

  • Can talk to a person once, or repeatedly over time

  • Audiotape/videotape better than notes

  • Getting their story

• Goals

  • In-depth info on topic of interest

  • Language of respondent pop.

  • Generate hypotheses

  • Get a complete sense of the respondent’s background, attitudes behaviors, and understanding of the social world

• Good for studying?

  • Life histories of people with something in common with each other

  • Personal topics

• Who to interview

  • Depends on purpose, population, and subject of study

  • How to find these people?

    • Purposive sampling?

    • Snowball sampling?

    • Quota sampling?

• Consider location—-researcher should say where the interviews were and discuss implication of location

• Types of information you could get

  • Respondent as reporter/observer about a situation

  • Respondents engaging in self-reflection

  • Respondent gives analyst data and analyst evaluates respondent

  • The interview itself as the subject being studied

• How much structure

  • Structured - researcher asks each respondent the same questions

  • Intensive - researcher tailors each interview to respondent; follows their train of thought

VI. Focus Groups

• What is a focus group?

  • 8-12 similar people who don’t know each other in a room with discussion leader

  • Open discussion about a topic that is observed (videotape or one-way mirror)

  • Everyone gets a chance to voice thoughts

• Goals

  • Useful at the beginning of a study

  • General background info on topic

  • Learn language of respondent pop.

  • Generate hypotheses

  • Anticipate challenges in policy implementation

• Good for studying?

  • What kinds of problems do people face when trying to do a certain thing

  • What people think when they see a particular image or hear a particular question

• Focus groups…

  • Provide insight, not rules

  • Are homogenous, not diverse

    • Want people to understand each other and build on each others thoughts (arguments not the goal)

  • Are flexible

  • Give words/gestures as data, not numbers

• Advantages of focus groups

  • Speed

  • Cost

  • Immersion in data

  • Interplay of respondents

• Limitations of focus groups

  • Generalizability very constrained by sample size and structure

  • Responses from group members are interdependent

  • Data can be hard to summarize

  • Moderator bias

• Researcher needs to plan:

  • What info can you get from a focus group?

  • What info can’t you get?