Qualitative Research In Education

Robert R. Sherman, Rodman B. Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135388867
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Published in the year 1988, Qualitative Research In Education is a valuable contribution to the field of Education.

Part I

Frame of Reference

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Chapter 1

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Qualitative Research in Education: A Focus

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Robert R. Sherman and Rodman B. Webb

Foundations of Education
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611

Qualitative research in education has come into vogue. As the song used to say, ‘everybody's doing it’. Yet onlookers, especially students, may not see clearly what is being done and why. We need a systematic discussion of the nature, presuppositions, origins, functions, and limitations of qualitative research; the commonality — if any — among its several methods; and its relation to quantitative research.

Aim and Method

The aim of the present essays is to explain the nature and use of qualitative research methods in education. We have asked scholars who work in areas and use methods commonly thought to be ‘qualitative’ to describe the methods and results specific to their interests and styles of inquiry. We present essays in the areas of philosophy of education, history, biography, ethnography, life history, grounded theory, phenomenography, curriculum criticism, the uses of literature in qualitative research, and critical theory. We have asked the essayists to address the following concerns:

1 What is the meaning of ‘qualitative’? In what respects and manner is your method and/or area of inquiry qualitative?

2 Are there qualitative ‘schools’ within the area? That is, sort out the qualitative activities within the area and define the qualitative similarities and differences within the area.

3 Elaborate the qualitative method and show its use through examples. While the aim is not to present a cookbook method, the introduction to qualitative methodology within the area should be explicit enough to enable students to become familiar with it and to build on it.

4 Though the essays are not intended to be a review of the literature about qualitative research and methods, but rather an introduction to what those methods are and how they apply in educational settings, the essays should provide citations to work that has been done so that students may build on them.

5 Suggest a reading list (which may double as a reference list). It should contain citations to qualitative methodology, pertinent to the area being covered, and specific examples where that method is employed.

The essays in this collection follow these guidelines rather well. J. Giarelli and J. J. Chambliss explain, from the perspective of philosophy of education, the evolution of the concern with qualitativeness and the role of philosophy of education in qualitative inquiry. C. H. Edson argues that qualitative inquiry is a form of ‘moral discourse’, an attempt to ‘understand ourselves in relation to the larger world’. That larger world includes both the past and the present, and historical study is a way to reveal the relation. Further, making history personal, J. Campbell argues that the ‘new qualitative force’ is grounded in biography, getting support from the phenomenologist A. Schutz, who believed that the ‘biographic situation’ is the basic unit of human understanding. Edson, especially, elaborates some of the methods for doing historical work.

The discussion then turns to ethnography. N. Shimahara traces the connection of ethnography to anthropology and explains the assumptions, strategies, and methodological orientation of anthroethnography. At first it may appear that P. Woods' ‘Educational Ethnography in Britain’ duplicates Shimahara's discussion, but that would be short-sighted. Woods' essay is unique in its comparative perspective and in its focus on the findings of ethnographic studies as a way to demonstrate ethnographic, and qualitative, concerns and methods. I. Goodson's and R. Walker's ‘Putting Life into Educational Research’ is a return to history, this time to broaden the interpretive scope of ethnographies, which Goodson and Walker believe too often have a ‘timeless’ appearance. Classroom events need to be interpreted within the perspective of the teacher's life span, not just of the moment when they occur.

S. Hutchinson describes ‘grounded theory’, which is concerned with theory generation, rather than verification, through discovery of what the world appears to be to participants and, through an analysis of those perceptions, of the basic social processes and structures that organize the world. This aim is similar to F. Marton's ‘phenomenography’, which is a way of ‘mapping’ the qualitatively different ways in which people perceive, conceptualize, and understand — in a word, ‘experience’ — the world around them. Such observations are analyzed into categories, derived from the experiences themselves, from which one can assess the appropriateness of educational strategies.

D. Ross explains how the techniques of social anthropology and aesthetic criticism are combined in ‘curriculum criticism’ to describe, interpret, and evaluate curricula. Relying even more on aesthetics and philosophy, M. Greene discusses the uses of literature as an expression of qualitative inquiry. Imaginative literature may be the par excellence representation of qualitative concern. J. Dewey (1922) once said that the novelist and dramatist are more illuminating and more interesting commentators on conduct than is the formalizing psychologist:

The artist makes perceptible individual responses and thus displays a new phase of human nature evoked in new situations. In putting the case visibly and dramatically he reveals vital actualities. The scientific systematizer treats each act as merely another sample of some old principle, or as a mechanical combination of elements drawn from a ready-made inventory, (pp. 155–156)

This is M. Greene's concern. For her, qualitative research is an effort to comprehend not only the modes of cultural arrangements but the ways in which those arrangements are experienced by individuals, in order to provoke intelligibility and involve one personally and intersubjectively in conscious pursuits of meaning. For qualitative researchers, life is not a dress rehearsal; it is the real thing.

Finally in this collection, while education may be less monolithic today than in the past in that different critiques are more tolerated, educational research, according to H. Giroux, still seems to aim simply at understanding what each tradition is doing rather than debate the political and moral implications of the research and its methods. Giroux asks what role educational researchers, as intellectuals, should play in extending free discourse and democracy in public and private life. In other words, though the forms of inquiry may have multiplied (quantitative and qualitative, as well as variations within each form), they all continue to avoid the political issue, which enables whatever dominant ideology (and methodology) to continue its hold. The role of ‘critical theory’ is to uncover, or ‘dis-cover’, those tendencies and to propose other ways of seeing and behaving.

The essays are presented in a ‘rough and ready’ order. We believe that philosophic questions have to be raised first in any inquiry. Giarelli and Chambliss note that the first matter to be considered in any research is ‘what is the question?’ History may then contribute some background. Ethnography and related approaches attempt to portray how participants themselves see the matters in which they are involved. As we have noted, a return to ‘life history’ could broaden the context for richer interpretations. Qualitative research is interested in the motives and aims, not just the behavior, of those who are studied. Curriculum criticism, we also have noted, draws on anthropology and aesthetics, which is why we have placed it between those methods and Greene's account of the uses of literature. Finally, not least, but no doubt the result of some researchers focusing single-mindedly on methodology, political and moral considerations are raised in Giroux's account. Other essayists, particularly Edson with history and Greene with literature, consider morality to be pre-eminent. Prior to all these discussions, and for ‘focus’, in addition to the present essay, is James Giarelli's ‘Qualitative Inquiry in Philosophy of Education: Notes on the Pragmatic Tradition’, which serves as an introduction. It puts into useful philosophic perspective why qualitative research is coming of age rather than merely coming into vogue, identifies some problems and issues that qualitative inquiry must address, and sketches initial answers to some important questions.

Qualitative Similarities

From here on we will let the essayists give their own details. But it should be useful to ask about the ways in which different qualitative areas and methods may be similar. Are there similar ‘qualitative’ concerns no matter where they may be found or what method is employed? Some things stand out in the essays at hand.

One of those things is context. Shimahara says that human behavior — experience — is shaped in context and that events cannot be understood adequately if isolated from their contexts. He believes that such isolation, called ‘context stripping’, is a key feature of science. Giarelli and Chambliss interpret inquiry to be a questioning or searching with an intent or an objective in mind, that is, within some limits. Inquiry is bounded; it cannot be abstracted or approached in general.

The contexts of inquiry are not to be contrived or constructed or modified; they are natural and must be taken as they are found. The aim of qualitative research is not verification of a predetermined idea, but discovery that leads to new insights. Thus qualitative researchers focus on natural settings. (Qualitative research is sometimes called ‘naturalistic inquiry’; Lincoln and Guba, 1985.) Nothing is predefined or taken for granted. Shimahara, representing the general view, says that ethnography, for example, is the study of events as they ‘evolve in natural settings’ or ‘contexts in process’.

Another way to make the point is that qualitative researchers want those who are studied to speak for themselves. This appears to be a universal focus, certainly among the essayists in this collection, no matter what their method. The biographer, Jack Campbell, calls this attempt to confront empirical reality from the perspective of those being studied, the ‘generic qualitative approach’.

Moreover, experience is to be taken and studied as a whole, or holistically. One must attend to all features of experience. The philosophers, Giarelli and Chambliss, remind us that perceptual fields are experienced as wholes. So they say that the researcher must cultivate sensitivity to situations or experience as a whole and to the qualities that regulate them. For example, no biographer would explain his subject as a collection of separate variables. Rather, according to Campbell, biography must ‘portray the subject as a whole, in the temporal, geographical, sociocultural context’. Edson even asserts that qualitative inquiry intends to make phenomena more complex, for ‘complexity, not simplicity, describes life in both the past and the present’. (Marton says that ‘researchers cannot take it for granted that subjects always will take a holistic rather than atomistic view of … events’, but his comment really makes the earlier point that qualitative research presumes nothing, but focuses on the perspective of those being studied. That the researcher, surely, aims at a holistic account is inferred further from Goodson and Walker's campaign to add ‘life history’ to qualitative studies.) Moreover, holism implies context (though not vice versa), for to take something as a whole suggests that it has boundaries. To make the point about the whole, or holism, with another word, the aim of qualitative research is to understand experience as unified.

Methods of inquiry for carrying out these aims must be appropriate to the aims. It might be expected that the philosophers would remind us of Aristotle's dictum that each ‘science’ has its appropriate methods which can be found only in its distinctive subject matter. Qualitative researchers take the point seriously. This is not to say that different researchers will not borrow or share features of method, if they are useful. Each of the essayists, and particularly those who build on anthropological and ethnographic bases, describe methods that are similar in some respects and even acknowledge that their inquiries might benefit from other perspectives and approaches.

The point is that qualitative researchers will employ methods and strategies that are consistent with the aims we have generalized here. They will not superimpose a general method on experience, but will be sensitive to the effects of methods on inquiry. (For this reason, ethnographers, for example, are careful to employ non-interventionist methods.) The point is often made by contrast with science and the method of science, which intervene in experience and structure and report experience quantitatively. Both Giarelli and Chambliss and Shimahara believe that some interests in experience cannot be measured quantitatively. For the former, philosophers, it is the ‘possibilities’ in experience, the questions that can be formulated for inquiry, that are important. For the latter, an ethnographer, social-cultural patterns of experience or relationships among events are the matters of importance, not the quantification of human events. (Marton also focuses on relationships.)

Though these ideas stand out, one still might wonder what the term ‘qualitative’ means. It was not a requirement that the essayists define the term directly and at the outset of their discussions. To do so might have prevented the discussions from even taking place. A philosopher (Greene, 1971) has observed:

It is part of the popular mythology that we cannot have fruitful … discussions unless we first define our terms. It is a common belief that we ought to start with definitions. This point of view is … misleading. The object of … analysis is to arrive at something like a definition; therefore, in principle, it cannot start with one. … The search for clarity and precision of thought is an important venture. To suppose that it can get started only by agreement on definitions is to prevent it from starting at all. (pp. 15–16)

But now that we have the discussion in the essays, we can draw them together and summarize that ‘qualitative’ implies a direct concern with experience...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Explorations in Ethnography Series
• Full title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword and Acknowledgments
• Part I Frame of Reference
• Part II Methods
• Subject Index
• Index of Names