Debdulal Dutta Roy
Venue: Andhra University
Date: 16.2. 2014
1. AIM OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
- To provide thick and rich
descriptive accounts of the phenomena under investigation.
- It is not concerned with
counting occurrences, volumes, or the size of associations between entities
like quantitative research.
- It is generally engaged
with exploring, describing and interpreting the personal and social experiences
of participants.
2. Types of qualitative research
•
Phenomenology
•
Interpretative
phenomenological analysis
•
Grounded theory
•
Narrative psychology
•
Conversation analysis
•
Discourse analysis
•
Focus groups
3. Phenomenology :
•
To study how one event
causes change in consciousness.
•
The goal of qualitative
phenomenological research is to describe a "lived experience" of a
phenomenon.
•
Researcher can use an
interview to gather the participants' descriptions of their experience, or the
participants' written or oral self-report, or even their aesthetic expressions
(e.g. art, narratives, or poetry).
4. Interpretative phenomenological analysis
•
Aim is to explore in
detail how participants are making sense of their personal and social world.
•
It is the meanings of
particular experiences, events, states hold for participants.
•
It involves detailed
examination of the participant’s lived experience and is concerned with an
individual’s personal perception or account of an objector event, as opposed to
an attempt to produce an objective statement of the object.
•
It is suitable when one is
trying to find out how individuals are perceiving the particular situations
they are facing, how they are making sense of their personal and social world.
5. Grounded theory
•
Aim is to build inductive
theories through data analysis.
•
It consists systematic
guidelines for gathering, synthesizing, analyzing and conceptualizing
qualitative data to construct theory.
•
It begins with a topic or
general research questions to explore and build a theoretical analysis.
6. Narrative psychology
•
Analysis of narrative text
in order to explore relation between sequence of events in the text and mental
states.
7. Conversation analysis
•
Conversation analysis
(commonly abbreviated as CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction,
embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life.
8. Discourse analysis
•
Developed in the 1970s,
discourse analysis "concerns itself with the use of language in a running
discourse, continued over a number of sentences, and involving the interaction
of speaker (or writer) and auditor (or reader) in a specific situational
context, and within a framework of social and cultural conventions" (M.H.
Abrams and G.G. Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 2005).
9. Focus group
•
A focus group is a form of
qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their
perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service,
concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging.
•
Questions are asked in an
interactive group setting where participants are free to talk with other group
members.
Types of focus groups
•
Two-way focus group - one
focus group watches another focus group and discusses the observed interactions
and conclusion
•
Dual moderator focus group
- one moderator ensures the session progresses smoothly, while another ensures
that all the topics are covered
•
Dueling moderator focus
group - two moderators deliberately take opposite sides on the issue under
discussion
•
Respondent moderator focus
group - one and only one of the respondents are asked to act as the moderator
temporarily
•
Client participant focus
groups - one or more client representatives participate in the discussion,
either covertly or overtly
•
Mini focus groups - groups
are composed of four or five members rather than 6 to 12
•
Teleconference focus
groups - telephone network is used
•
Online focus groups -
computers connected via the internet are used
Ref: Smith, Jonathan A. (2008). Qualitative Psychology : A practical guide to Research Methods. New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE
Ethnography is the study of social interactions, behaviours, and perceptions that occur within groups, teams, organisations, and communities. Its roots can be traced back to anthropological studies of small, rural (and often remote) societies that were undertaken in the early 1900s, when researchers such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown participated in these societies over long periods and documented their social arrangements and belief systems. Key features are:
- A strong emphasis on exploring the nature of a particular social phenomenon, rather than setting out to test hypotheses about it
- A tendency to work primarily with “unstructured data” —that is, data that have not been coded at the point of data collection as a closed set of analytical categories
- Investigation of a small number of cases (perhaps even just …
PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
The goal of qualitative phenomenological research is to describe a "lived experience" of a phenomenon. As this is a qualitative analysis of narrative data, methods to analyze its data must be quite different from more traditional or quantitative methods of research.
Phenomenological research characteristically starts with concrete descriptions of lived situations, often first-person accounts, set down in everyday language and avoiding abstract intellectual generalizations. The researcher proceeds by reflectively analyzing these descriptions, perhaps idiographically first, then by offering a synthesized account, for example, identifying general themes about the essence of the phenomenon. Importantly, the phenomenological researcher aims to go beyond surface expressions or explicit meanings to read between the lines so as to access implicit dimensions and intuitions.
