Fundamentals of Qualitative Research

A Practical Guide

Kakali Bhattacharya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351865975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Forschung & Methodik in der Psychologie

This book is the road map to proficiency and development in the field of qualitative research. Borrowing from a wealth of experience teaching introductory qualitative research courses, author Kakali Bhattacharya lays out a dynamic program for learning different paradigms of inquiry, empowering students to recognize the convergence of popular research methodologies as well as the nuances and complexities that set each of them apart. Her book:

• supplements the readings and activities in a qualitative methods class, exposing students to the research process and the dominant types of qualitative research;
• introduces a variety of theoretical perspectives in qualitative research, including positivism and postpositivism, interpretivism, feminism, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and Critical Race Theory;
• identifies and summarizes the three dominant methodological approaches in qualitative research: narrative inquiry, grounded theory, and ethnography;
• provides interactive activities and exercises to help students crystallize their understanding of the different topics in each chapter.

1
Unit 1: Meeting Qualitative Methods

So you are new to qualitative methods and do not really know what it is and how to think about it. To top it off, you have to understand the methods, the dense theories, the new language and terms, but also do projects and maybe even some data analysis. Sure, sounds overwhelming to me. This book is designed to help you:

• supplement the readings and activities in a qualitative methods class
• have a space to explore your understanding of qualitative research
• use it as a reference manual for your qualitative projects.

Intentions of This Unit

In this unit, learners will be introduced to the ways in which ideas about reality and truth are taken up in research. Additionally, they will be exposed to the elements of an empirical study, the research process, and the ways to identify these elements in existing qualitative research articles.

Truth, Reality, and Meaning in Research

How one understands truth and reality has a direct bearing on the kind of research one conducts. One way of understanding the concepts of truth, reality, and meaning is to situate them outside of conscious processing. In other words, a chair remains a chair, regardless of whether someone identifies a chair as such. This way of understanding a chair means that there are some inherent stable characteristics of a chair that exist regardless of whether an observer perceives those characteristics. Understanding truth, reality, and meaning this way is not right or wrong, but an approach some people take when thinking about research, and informing their research purpose, their questions, and the way they want to design and report their research. Researchers operating from this understanding of truth, reality, and meaning aim to capture truth that can exist as truth, regardless of who views it, who processes it, and who derives meaning from it. This would be considered to be objectivist truth. The assumption in this kind of knowledge making is that with appropriate processes, verifiable information can be recorded and reported objectively, and repeatedly with similar results, thus generating predictability and generalizability. Chances are, you are probably well familiar with this type of understanding of research.

Another way of understanding the concepts of truth, reality, and meaning is to situate these ideas within the perceptions of the observer and argue that these ideas only take shape within the human consciousness. A chair is not a chair until it is perceived to be so through a human mind and that nothing exists without being processed by human consciousness. In this way of thinking about truth and reality, meaning is constructed based on people’s own understanding of their worlds, experiences, interaction with events, and circumstances in their lives. These kinds of truths, realities, and meanings are relative, situated, and context-driven.

There are other variations of truth and meaning making known as subjectivism and pragmatism, which are not discussed in this book. A decent discussion of these approaches can be found in Michael Crotty’s book titled The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process.

Objectivist and Constructivist Ways of Knowing

Remember, objectivist ways of knowing promote knowing that relies on stable characteristics of the object that can be verified regardless of who the observer is. In other words, a tree would be a tree regardless of whether there is someone to observe the tree being a tree. Constructivist ways of knowing would purport the tree is only a tree when an observer constructs meaning about the object with the characteristics of a tree.

Shifting Between Knowing: Interactive Exercise

Complete the following table with your understanding of objectivist and constructivist perspectives.

Table 1.1 Examples of Objectivist and Constructivist Ways of Knowing

	Objectivist	Constructivist
Heart	A muscular organ, which is hollow, that pumps blood through the circulatory system through dilation and contraction.	A place from where one feels love for other human beings.
Table	A piece of furniture with flat horizontal surface supported by four legs.	A place where one can dance in a bar with adequate amount of alcohol intake.
Dog?
Your research topic?

Instructor Note: If students struggle to think about their research topic from an objectivist perspective, guide them to think about the topic in closed-ended ways, where there is a yes/no answer or questions about causes or effects are being asked, or questions about differences are being asked. In other words, questions that take the format of “Is there a difference between X and Y?” or “Does X cause Y?” could start the thinking process on objectivist ways of knowing. If they still struggle, it might be an opportunity to discuss the probable nature of social science research and how absolute, 100 percent objective, and generalizable claims in social science research are nonexistent.

© 2017, Fundamentals of Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide, Taylor & Francis, Routledge.

The Black Box of Research: Interactive Exercise

This is a class exercise I have conducted to help students understand the various ways in which meaning making occurs. This exercise works if the materials used in the exercise are kept hidden from the students. Students, if you want to do this exercise on your own, then have someone else create a box for you so you do not know what is inside the box.

• Take an empty box and put various objects inside it. These could be objects such as paperclips, pencils, stones, or paper. Or it could be objects like a small piece of sponge, a comb, or a glowing ball. Seal the box so that no content can come out of the box or can be seen.
• Repeat this process with several boxes, enough where a group of three to four students can work with one box.
• Ask students to document what they would consider to be objectivist truths and constructionist truths about the contents in the box. What would be something that could be agreeable across multiple groups of people in terms of statements made about the contents inside the box? What could be agreeable about the contents of the box if only two people share the same perception? Could there be items in the box that are not knowable, or not knowable fully?
• Connect the claims made by students to the nature of inquiry in social sciences. What is measurable? What is knowable? How much can truly be known if at all? What can be said about what is not knowable in tangible terms but still influences some form of meaning making?
• At the end of the exercise, please do not open the box. Students often want to know exactly what is inside the box. This is where we get into the discussion about research where nothing is ever 100 percent knowable, generalizable, predictable, or holistic—that we can come as close as we possibly can, but our claims are never fully absolute and we use many probabilistic and tentative tools to construct knowledge from research.

After conducting the activity, students should reflect on the following in their research journals. Students, if you do not have a research journal, then start one, where you would document your thoughts about everything that comes up during your academic journey.

What ways do you understand the process of inquiry now? When determining what was inside the boxes, what did you use as your criteria? What did you miss? How did you compare to other people in your group? What does this tell you about your approach to inquiry?

© 2017, Fundamentals of Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide, Taylor & Francis, Routledge.

Elements of Research

Before any discussion of qualitative research, it is important to focus on what counts as research. Michael Crotty describes research as having four elements. These elements are methods, methodology, theoretical perspective, and epistemology. Throughout this book, I will be referring to these terms in various levels of detail. Methods refer to the ways in which data collection occurs in research. These could include interviews, observations, surveys, etc. Methodology is akin to the blueprint of the research study. It is the design of the study, the master plan for executing all aspects of the study. Theoretical perspective is the lens through which we try to understand our studies. This lens offers us some way to organize our thoughts, lay out our assumptions and beliefs, and logically defend the organizing patterns through which we might want to explore the topic of our interest. And epistemology is basically the way we know our world. I would also add to it another concept, ontology, which refers to our nature of being. Later in this unit, I will elaborate more on these ideas and how they specifically inform the research process. When all these elements are aligned, you can argue that you have a rigorous study.

Quantitative research aims to discover certain patterns that can be captured and predicted accurately with some degree of confidence that something beyond coincidence is occurring which is generalizable to a population of interest. Qualitative research, on the other hand, aims to work within the context of human experiences and the ways in which meaning is made out of those experiences. Qualitative researchers take different approaches when constructing knowledge about human experiences. The theoretical perspective held by a qualitative researcher plays a key role in informing what a qualitative study might look like. This idea will be elaborated further in this unit.

Searching for Research: Interactive Exercise

Using your library databases, find at least three peer-reviewed empirical studies that were conducted using qualitative methods. Keep these three articles handy as we will be referring to these articles throughout the handbook. Look through these articles and answer the following questions:

What were the research purposes listed i...