Qualitative Social Research

Contemporary Methods for the Digital Age

Vivienne Waller, Karen Farquharson, Deborah Dempsey

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781446258835
• eBook ISBN: 9781473944343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Qualitative Social Research employs an accessible approach to present the multiple ways in which criticism enhances research practice. Packed full of relevant, ?real world? examples, it showcases the strengths and pitfalls of each research method, integrating the philosophical groundings of qualitative research with thoughtful overviews of a range of commonly used methods.

This book is ideal for students and prospective researchers and explains what makes qualitative sociological research practical, useful and ethical. It's an essential guide to how to undertake research, use an appropriate research design and work with a range of qualitative data collection methods, and includes:

• detailed discussions of ethical issues
• references to new technologies in each chapter
• explanations of how to integrate online and visual methods with traditional data collection methods
• exercises to enhance learning

The authors use their many years' experience in using a range of qualitative methods to conduct and teach research to demonstrate the value of critical thinking skills at all stages of the research process.

Part 1 Getting Ready

There are a variety of issues that a prospective researcher needs to be on top of before designing and actually conducting a qualitative research project. It is important to be clear about how values and beliefs enter the research process, and how these then underpin different approaches to research. It is also important that you have a well-articulated research question that is framed appropriately for qualitative inquiry. Lastly, it is vital to think through the ethical issues and the politics of undertaking any piece of research before you get started.

The first four chapters of this book are intended to get you ready for undertaking qualitative research. They are designed to help you think critically about these issues, formulate a research question, and structure a research proposal.

One The foundations of qualitative research

Contents

• What is qualitative social research? 4
• Qualitative vs quantitative research – a series of trade-offs 5
• Approaching qualitative research 6
• Research paradigms – values and beliefs about research 7
• What is reality and can it be known? 9
  • Positivist 9
  • Post-positivist 9
  • Criticalist 10
  • Constructivist 11
• What is the relationship of the knower to the known? 12
  • Positivist and post-positivist – the dispassionate researcher 12
  • Criticalist – the researcher as advocate 13
  • Constructivist – research as a ‘non-innocent conversation’ 14
• How do we find things out? 15
  • Positivist and post-positivist 16
  • Criticalist 16
  • Constructivist 17
• Conclusion 17
• Going further 18

What is Qualitative Social Research?

How does it feel to be long-term unemployed? What is the relationship between ethnicity and individual health? Why do people waste food?

It is possible to attempt to provide an immediate answer to these questions based on your own understanding of the world. This type of answer may be based on your past experiences and learnings, books you have read, what you have heard other people say, what you believe or your intuition. Another way of obtaining answers to these questions is through conducting social research. This may involve observing people, listening to them talk, asking them questions, or it may not involve any direct contact with people at all. You may instead be studying what people have written, buildings, objects people have made, the traces people leave behind.

At a minimum, social research involves applying empirical research methods to investigate and increase our understanding of some aspect of the social world. In an academic setting, social research is explicitly informed by theory and results in a contribution to theory to help explain what is going on. This book will equip you to conduct high-quality qualitative social research appropriate to the situation and will help you to make best use of digital technologies in your research. We also hope to inspire you when conducting qualitative research to look beyond the obvious taken-for-granted reality to arrive at a new understanding of what is going on.

This book is designed to teach you how to question your own assumptions about the world so that in interpreting the social world through the conduct of qualitative research you may arrive at a new explanation for what is going on. The term ‘qualitative social research’ encompasses a range of approaches to social research that are conceptually distinct from those for quantitative social research, although in practice the two are often used together and the distinction between the two is sometimes subtle. Before delving into qualitative social research, the following section explains what distinguishes qualitative social research from quantitative social research.

Box 1.1

Looking beyond the obvious taken-for-granted reality

Have you ever seen fruit fall from a tree? According to legend, the scientist Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was sitting under an apple tree when an apple fell onto his head. Whereas some of us may have rubbed our skull and watched where we sat next time, Isaac Newton got to thinking about why the apple had fallen rather than remained on the tree or gone upwards. He settled on the idea of some force that pulled everything towards the Earth. Now, the point here is that although many people had seen apples fall from a tree, it was only Isaac Newton who came up with the idea of gravity causing the apple to fall.

Qualitative vs Quantitative Research – a Series of Trade-Offs

Any research into an aspect of the social world is fundamentally addressing one of the following two questions:

1. What is going on?
2. How widespread is this?

In crude terms, qualitative research involves investigating the first question, that is, the quality or nature of something, while quantitative research aims to quantify it through addressing the second question. You can only answer the second question if you know the answer to the first, and very different research approaches are required to finding out answers to these two questions.

The following example should make this clearer. When home Internet connections first became available, no one knew what the Internet was being used for at home. Until researchers had done some qualitative research into how people were using the Internet and the meanings that it had for them, it was not possible to find out how widespread particular uses or meanings were, and how these related to particular groups of people. To discover how widespread something is, you need to research everybody or everything, or at least a representative sample of people or things.

This example illustrates another important difference between qualitative and quantitative research. With quantitative research the researcher usually needs to have an idea or a theory about what they think is going on and this means that quantitative research, conducted in an academic setting, tends to be about testing theories. While qualitative research can also be used to test theories, it can be particularly useful when the researcher has little or no idea what is going on with regard to their area of interest. In this case, qualitative research can be conducted to generate theories about what is going on. Another way of saying this is that quantitative research tends to be deductive, whereas qualitative research tends to be inductive.

In the 1960s Robert Bogdan conducted a famous qualitative study of just one person. The goal of his research was to understand what it is like to feel that you are a woman trapped in a man’s body. The result was a book called Being Different: The Autobiography of Jane Fry (Bogdan, 1974). Here the emphasis was on understanding the experiences of ‘Jane Fry’, and the meanings she gave to those experiences, to generate theory about what it is like to feel that you are a woman trapped in a man’s body. As is typical of qualitative research, this research gave voice to ‘Jane Fry’s’ lived experience through narrative (in this case, Jane’s own words). In contrast, quantitative research tends to reduce people’s lived experience to numbers to enable the identification of patterns among large groups. In quantitative research, complex experiences such as gender identity are likely to be reduced to a number on a scale to enable a comparison to be made between different groups of people. For example, a quantitative research project might look for patterns between gender identity and any other aspect of a person’s life that can be measured and reduced to a number for the purposes of identification (e.g. sexual orientation, ethnicity, childhood experiences, attitudes towards religion, as well as any combination of these).

The Jane Fry example above illustrates one of the trade-offs in qualitative research, namely that a depth of understanding is often achieved at the expense of representativeness. Bogdan does not claim that ‘Jane Fry’s’ experience is at all representative of those who feel that they are a woman trapped in a man’s body. However, what Bogdan’s study does provide is a depth of understanding of ‘Jane Fry’s’ lived experience of being a woman trapped in a man’s body, which at that time involved being treated as having a mental illness. As Chapter 5 explains, the findings of this research, although not representative, can still be generalizable.

By now it should be clear that neither qualitative research nor quantitative research is better than the other, but that each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages. At a deeper level, different approaches to research are based on different values and different beliefs about the purpose of research. The aims of this chapter are twofold: first, to enable you to distinguish between the foundations of quantitative research and various approaches to qualitative research, and second, to help you identify the values and beliefs, including your own, that underpin different approaches to research. This will enable you to be conscious of the implications of the research method you are using, as well as the implications of everyday decisions about how you conduct the research.

Approaching Qualitative Research

Before you even think about how you will go about doing a piece of qualitative research, you will need to be clear about the purpose of the research and what you hope to achieve from doing it. We illustrate the importance of this clarity before you start the research by drawing parallels with a more everyday decision (i.e. which bicycle to purchase).

Suppose you want to buy a bicycle but you are not sure which one is the best for you. In order to decide, you will need to think about what you want the bicycle for and how you want to use it. Will you be the only one riding it? If you want to be satisfied with your purchase, you will need to think carefully about why you want a bicycle. What do you want to use it for? Is it to do high-speed road training? If so, then a road bike may be best. Is it to explore some of the forests near where you live? A mountain bike is best suited for that purpose. Do you want to use it to ride to work each day or just for occasional rides to the shops and the odd longer recreational ride? A hybrid may be best or even an electric bike. Or perhaps you just want a certain type of bike to fit in with a certain type of crowd? You may choose a cruiser or a fixed-wheel bike. It should be obvious here that there is no best bicycle. It depends what you want it for. Whether or not you have made a good purchase decision can only be assessed by taking into account what you want the bicycle for. Buying a high-quality road bike at a bargain price for the purpose of careering down dirt tracks is not a wise move.

Similarly, with qualitative research there is no best method or approach. There are a variety of methods and approaches, each with their own merits and their own disadvantages. To make a good decision about these, you have to look at why you want to undertake the research and what you hope to achieve by doing so. This involves values. Different approaches to research are underpinned by different values as well as different beliefs about knowledge and the nature of reality.

Even once you are clear about what you want to get out of the research, there is still no one best way to actually do the research. Again, it depends on a combination of values and beliefs about the nature of reality and the gaining of knowledge. We will ease into this more philosophical terrain with an everyday example of how our beliefs and values guide our ideas, followed by an everyday example of how beliefs and values guide our actions.

It is clear that there is no one best way of living a good life. Ideas about what is the best way to live will depend on one’s values and beliefs. For example, someone who values money above all will have a different idea about the best way of living a good life from someone who places the greatest value on relationships with other people, or someone who places the greatest value on health or the teachings of their religion. It is only within each of these value and belief systems that it can be judged whether someone has lived a good life. Similarly, ideas about the best way to conduct research are based on values and beliefs.

The following example shows even more clearly how beliefs and values combine to guide not only our ideas but also how we act. How do you travel to work or your place of study? If you cycle, you will probably believe that there is some advantage to cycling rather than walking, driving, or taking public transport. You may believe that it will help you get fit, that it will be quicker, that it will be relaxing, that it will be cheaper, or that it will help reduce air pollution. Will it really be more relaxing? It depends on how you perceive cycling and how you perceive the alternatives. While one person perceives riding on a train as relaxing or a good opportunity to read, another person perceives it as uncomfortable or a waste of time. As well as beliefs, you can see that there are values mixed in with the beliefs about cycling, the valuing of fitness, speed, relaxation, cost and clean air. Similarly, how much you spend on the bicycle will depend not only on how much money you have to spend, but also on your values, your idea of how much a bicycle is worth.

Just as there is no one ‘best’ way to live a good life, and no one ‘best’ way to travel to work, there is no ‘best’ or single correct way to approach or conduct qualitative research, although there are plenty of bad ways of doing qualitative research. For example, there is no ‘best’ way of investigating the relationship between ethnicity and individual health (an example we will return to later). The specific approach that you will prefer to take will depend on a combination of your values and beliefs.

Research Paradigms – Values and Beliefs About Research

We can be more explicit about how values and beliefs enter research by using the idea of a social research paradigm. A paradigm is a set of basic beliefs about how the world is and values about how the world should be. Just as a combination of beliefs and values will guide how you act, a research paradigm is a combination of basic beliefs and values that will guide how you do your research. The beliefs can’t be proved but have to just be accepted on faith. These beliefs and values can be difficult to identify because, unless explicitly challenged, we tend to take for granted both our beliefs about the world and our values.

In the academic literature, you may come across a bewildering array of research paradigm typologies and terminologies. In this chapter, we will guide you through a far simpler way of identifying the beliefs and values that underpin different approaches to social research, by means of the following three questions:

1. What can be known?
2. What is the relationship of the knower to the known?
3. How do we find things out?

Taken together, the answers to these questions c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Getting Ready
• One The foundations of qualitative research
• Two The aims of qualitative research
• Three From topic to research design
• Four The politics and ethics of qualitative research
• Part 2 Doing the Research
• Five Sampling
• Six Interviewing
• Seven Focus groups and group interviews
• Eight Observing people
• Nine Observing things
• Ten Observing texts
• Eleven Narrative inquiry
• Twelve Making sense: data management, analysis and reporting
• Thirteen Combining approaches
• References
• Index