Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research

  • gain holistic pictures or in-depth understanding of perceptions and experiences

  • focus on words, observations, or documents/materials to understand a phenomenon or event

  • Understand meaning within cultures, among religions and genders

  • flexible and emergent


Major types of Qualitative Research

Phenomenology- description and interpretation of human experience

Phenomenology

Descriptive phenomenology

  • describe human experience

  • as people experience them

    • hearing

    • seeing

    • believing

    • feeling

    • deciding

  • used to better understand poorly understood aspects of experiences

  • researcher identifies and acknowledges own preconceived beliefs and opinions about the phenomenon

    • reflexive journaling


Interpretation/Hermeneutic Phenomenology

  • emphasis on interpreting and understanding experience, not just describing it

  • reflexivity does not occur

  • Hermeneutic- examines contextual features of an experience such as gender, employment, or well-being of people or groups with the experience


Hermeneutic circle

  • researchers prior understanding, experiences, and worldview are seen as part of the interpretive process

  • researchers background cannot be separated from the interpretation

  • engage in the hermeneutic circle

    • moving back and forth between the parts


Grounded Theory

“What is the process of patterns behavior”

  • creates a theory about what’s in the data

  • Focus- basic social psychology problems that defined group of people experience and how people come to resolve a problem or concern


Coding

  • broad categories that later add an action to develop categories for information to understand themes

    • Broad category → action → categories → themes

  • the reason for smaller studies

  • multiple types of comparisons

    • data-data

    • data-code

    • code-code

    • code-category

    • category-category


Ethnography

Culture- the way people live (patterns, symbolic structures, values, norms)

  • Study of a social group’s culture

  • Extensive fieldwork

    • the hours do not end until the new information is no longer repetitive

    • sometimes months or years

  • cultured inferred from words, actions, and products of its members

  • Assumption: culture guides the way people structure their experiences

  • uses multiple sources of data

    • observation

    • focus groups

    • field notes (write down all observations like a diary or journal)

    • pictures

    • artifacts

  • thick descriptions/detailed descriptions of cultural behavior


Qualitative sampling

snowball sampling- network sampling

  • reaching out to everyone you know and they reach out

  • large sample acquired

purposive sampling- researchers deliberately choose cases or participants who best contribute to the study

Theoretical sampling- decisions about where to find data and members or a group who best contribute while collecting and analyzing data

  • similar to purposive, but referenced most in grounded theory

  • ongoing and occurs while continuing to gather data


Self-Report Techniques

Unstructured interviews

  • conventional, total flexibility

  • open-ended questions

    • “What happened when you learned your partner had stage 4 breast cancer?”

Semi-structured Interviews

  • Use of topic guide

    • “Whom did you share the finding of breast cancer with?”

    • “How would you describe the emotions you felt?”


Focus Groups

  • interviews in small groups (5-10 people)

  • led by a moderator


Diaries

  • source in historical research

  • ability to record a thing in real time

    • limits recall bias

    • people may change what they write knowing someone else will read it

  • provides intimate detail of daily life


Observational method

  • unstructured observation in natural settings

    • aka field notes

      • includes participant observation


Recording Observations

logs- daily record of events and conversations

Field notes/ memo writing- broader and more interpretive and represents researcher’s efforts to record, synthesize, and understand data


Audit Trail

  • record of steps, decisions, and processes

  • “Paper trail”

  • Shows how data was collected, analyzed, and interpreted


Analysis Approaches

Usually, multiple approaches are used at the same time to analyze a piece of information


Phenomenological Analysis

Mised Approach - Member-checking

Holistic approach - entire text to understand its meaning

Selective approach- pull out essential statements

Detailed approach- analyzed line-by-line



Ethnographic analysis- continue to look for patterns and compare one pattern against another

Grounded Theory analysis- uses constancy comparative analysis to constantly compare one source of that to another to see if they are similar

  • allows for theory development


Findings/ results

  • description of participants

  • description of themes

  • a lot of quotes to support themes

  • Discussion

    • implications for practice

  • Limitations

  • conclusion



Trustworthiness and Integrity

Credibility

  • carrying out the study in a way that enhances the believability

  • assessing quality and integrity of study

  • Researcher Credibility- having experience or background related to phenomenon


Dependability

  • consistency of data over time and in different situations

  • use audit trail of what was done


Confirmability

  • impartial and limited bias

  • Reflexivity - keeping notes of attitudes and preconceptions

  • member-checking- feedback form participants about emerging themes

  • Data Triangulation- use of multiple data sources or collection techniques to validate conclusions


Transferability

  • finding transferred to other settings

  • like generalizability in quantitative research


Additional Strategies

prolonged engagement- sufficient time to gain in-depth understanding

persistent observation- depth and focus of observation

thick and contextualized description- vivid portrayal of study participants, their context, and the phenomenon under study