Qualitative Research in Practice

Stories from the field

Yvonne Darlington, Dorothy Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000247084
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Qualitative Research in Practice brings alive wonderfully the business of carrying out qualitative research in the field of welfare and human services. The authors take the reader through the main stages of the research endeavour, cleverly using their own interviews with eminent investigators to illustrate with great immediacy the actual mechanics of the process as described by recognised experts.'

Professor David Howe, School of Social Work and Psychosocial Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

'.very useful and invaluable for social work students and social workers.'

Joyce L. C. Ma, R.S.W. Ph.D., Professor, Department of Social Work, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Qualitative Research in Practice bridges the gap between theory and practice for researchers in the human services. The authors explore qualitative research through actual research projects that illustrate key stages in the research process.

The researchers' 'stories from the field' reveal the human face of research undertaken in often difficult contexts: with homeless people, with disabled people, in nursing homes, with victims of domestic violence, and with adopted children. We see how these leading researchers from different countries deal with the many obstacles they face in their research projects, and how they develop innovative solutions.

Qualitative Research in Practice is a valuable resource for students and practitioners doing research in social work, welfare, community health, counselling and related fields.

1
From practice to research

In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or the larger society while in the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern (Schon, 1983, pp. 42–3).

The swampy lowland of practice in the human services is a place where there are rarely control groups, where operationalising key constructs in behavioural terms is highly problematic (Is happiness the frequency of smiling behaviour?), where the politics of the setting are often overwhelming and where values and ethical issues are critical and complex. This book has more to do with the swampy lowland than the high hard ground. However, there is a lot of territory in the human services field which connects these two parts of the landscape and we believe that researchers in the human services should be creating terraces which link the two parts of the terrain, not creating territorial disputes.

The belief that ‘science makes knowledge, practice uses it’ has been claimed to be one of the assumptions of positivism (Rein & White, 1981, p. 36), yet ‘scientific’ methods of investigation have great difficulty coping with the dynamic and complex social world of the human services. Qualitative research has an important role to play in understanding this world and in complementing other forms of knowledge.

Qualitative research methods have descended from several disciplines and belong to twenty or more diverse traditions (Miller & Crabtree, 1992). Despite such diversity the core qualitative methods can be described as follows:

• In-depth interviewing of individuals and small groups.
• Systematic observation of behaviour.
• Analysis of documentary data.

In this book we will focus on the first two methods. The techniques we will explore in relation to the analysis of transcripts of interviews or observational field notes are also applicable to pre-existing documentary data.

Qualitative research is not new. Historians have always analysed documentary evidence, much of it non-quantitative data such as correspondence, as their primary source material, and through oral history methods have added in-depth interviewing to their repertoire in recent decades. Anthropology, from its conception as a discipline in the mid-nineteenth century, used qualitative methods such as field observation and informant interviewing to understand cultural patterns and social relationships. Sociology has always drawn upon both quantitative and qualitative methods, such as in the influential Chicago school of urban research in the 1920s, and has often utilised both approaches. Organisational theory has been based largely on case studies created from an amalgam of observation, documentary material and interviews.

In recent years specialisations such as medical anthropology and medical sociology have relied heavily on qualitative methods to explore issues relating to health and illness, from the micro-context of the hospital ward or clinic through to the broader sociocultural context. Qualitative methods have extended well beyond the boundaries of the social sciences in academia. Market research was originally based on the social survey but now complements this with focus groups to tap the processes and nuances of consumer opinion, as does research on public opinion and voting intentions.

Qualitative research in the human services

For well over a decade there has also been a growing interest in qualitative research by academics within nursing, education and social work as they attempt to struggle with the issues which arise in their particular part of the swampy lowlands. Research methods such as in-depth interviewing and participant observation are particularly well suited to exploring questions in the human services which relate to the meaning of experiences and to deciphering the complexity of human behaviour.

Understanding the significance of past or current experiences lends itself to methods such as in-depth interviewing in which trust and rapport are essential if an individual is to share thoughts and feelings. Some questions lend themselves to systematic observation in order to identify the dynamics which may be operating in a particular group or organisation, or the interaction of different social groups within a community.

This book draws upon a range of qualitative studies in the human services to illustrate how researchers develop their research question, work their way through a minefield of ethical and political obstacles, systematically collect appropriate data, analyse it with rigour and then disseminate the findings and implications of the research.

The interviews we have conducted with qualitative researchers for this book have been taped and transcribed and excerpts from a few of these studies are used in each chapter in order to highlight aspects of that chapter’s theme. In many ways this is itself a parallel process to qualitative research. In some chapters, including this one, we also draw upon our own qualitative studies—when we do so, we speak to the reader in the first person in order to highlight that the authorial voice is always present in qualitative research.

In this chapter we explore how the questions which arise from practice in the human services can be addressed by both quantitative and qualitative approaches and sometimes by both at the same time. We then draw upon several qualitative studies to examine how research questions can emerge from different contexts and address very different questions.

Our examples cover diverse fields and units of attention and include women who were sexually abused in childhood; parents with an intellectual disability; maternal and child health nurses’ assessment of post-natal depression; a community of homeless people under siege in an inner city area; and a large service system consisting of a large number of organisations.

While most of the researchers were not working as practitioners at the time of the inception of their studies, nearly all of them bring to their research many years of experience working in the human services. Regardless of the researchers’ backgrounds, all of the studies described have important implications for the way in which policies, programs and services are developed and delivered.

Generating research questions

The world of research and the world of practice have remained fairly separate. Yet every day those working in the human services field, be it with individuals, families, groups or whole communities, generate multiple questions from their practice. Some of the questions which arise are clinical hypotheses—ideas about the possible background features or presenting features in a particular individual or family, or working hypotheses about interventions that may result in a certain outcome in a particular case. Beyond the clinical level are similar questions which might relate to a whole group of service users, or how to collaborate with others to bring about a change in an organisation, a community or an entire service system.

Most practitioners would not think of such questions as research. If they had the time to write down their ideas or to share one of their questions with colleagues it might start with a phrase such as ‘I wonder if . . .?’ or ‘I’ve got a hunch that . . .’. Given that research has traditionally been conceived within a ‘hypothetico-deductive’ model of science, it is little wonder that practitioners’ questions which come from the swampy lowland do not come in the form of ‘falsifiable’ propositions.

The often tacit nature of clinical judgement leads the practitioner and others to dismiss their professional knowledge as unresearchable ‘intuition’ (Scott, 1990). This type of knowing is not always easy to state explicitly in a generalisable propositional form, leading Schon (1983) to observe that experienced professionals often know more than they can say.

Practitioners are often intimidated and alienated by the very notion of ‘research’. In a word-association exercise one of us has done many times with groups of experienced health, education and welfare practitioners, words that have been offered in relation to the word ‘research’ include: objective, hard, cold, scientific, measurement, accurate, factual, time-consuming, difficult, prestigious, tedious, expert. When asked to offer words which sprang to mind in relation to ‘practice’, the following were among those typically offered: subjective, people, busy, messy, difficult, soft, warm, pressured, flexible.

The researcher–practitioner split

The dichotomies between notions of objective and subjective and between art and science seem to parallel the dichotomy between the world of research and the world of practice. This dichotomy is not new and has been the focus of a debate which has unfolded over the past half century. The ‘researcher–clinician split’ which occurred in psychology in the 1950s has been attributed to the attack mounted by Eysenck on psychotherapy as pseudo-science (Hersen & Barlow, 1976). Yet behaviourism strongly assisted in the development of the clinician-researcher or practitioner-scientist in psychology, with single subject research designs and other quasi-experimental methods being refined for use in clinical settings.

In the 1970s extreme behaviourist positions were strongly challenged by the rise of humanistic psychology. The faith in empiricism to deliver knowledge for practice in the human services was still strong in some quarters in the 1980s. ‘The issue of whether one can measure the subtleties of human nature and interaction will cease to be a problem once devised measurement rules can be shown to have a rational and empirical correspondence to reality’ (Bostwick & Kyte, 1981, p. 677). Yet in the same era the emergence of emancipatory and feminist research traditions pushed the boundaries of research methods even further to address the power imbalance between the researcher and the researched and to allow the voice of the ‘subject’ to be heard through qualitative research.

In the 1990s the extension of ‘evidence-based practice’ from medicine to the rest of the health field, as well as to education and social welfare, gave empiricist approaches a new vigour in a context of resource scarcity in which effectiveness and efficiency were dominant concerns for government. Yet in the same decade the growth of post-modernist traditions in the social sciences led to a strong resurgence of interest in qualitative research and saw its expansion into fields such as discourse and narrative analysis in cultural studies.

A rapprochement of sorts is occurring between quantitative and qualitative research methods within the social sciences. In recent years we have seen the terms ‘practice research’ and ‘practitioner-researcher’ transcend the narrow behaviourist model of the clinician-scientist and draw upon a broad range of both quantitative and qualitative modes of inquiry. We do not wish to dichotomise quantitative and qualitative methods of investigation here, as the questions which arise in the human services require a broad repertoire of research approaches.

Quantitative and/or qualitative methods?

Some questions are readily transformed into testable propositions and can be investigated using quantitative methods. Sometimes this involves a major endeavour to collect and analyse the necessary data but it can also involve the analysis of data which can be collected easily or which already exists. For example, hypotheses such as ‘Clients who are rung the day prior to an appointment will be more likely to keep the appointment’ or ‘Clients who are offered an appointment within three days of making the appointment will be more likely to keep the appointment’ are easy to test even in a small human service organisation.

The client information systems and management information systems used in human service agencies today provide an extraordinary reservoir of quantitative data which can be analysed very simply to answer many questions about service user characteristics, the nature of service provision and, to some extent, the outcomes of service. Furthermore, hypotheses about patterns of presentation to a service in relation to different sections of the community can be relatively easily investigated if the demographic profile of an area is known. Thus the over- or under-representation of males or females or people of different age groups, occupational status or ethnic backgrounds can be identified. The reasons why this might be so cannot be so easily investigated using quantitative methods, however, and qualitative methods may have a place in exploring how people define their needs and why and how they seek assistance in certain places.

Similarly, feedback from those using services can be obtained easily through routine client satisfaction scales which rate different aspects of a service, but hearing how the clients have benefited or not from a service in their own words will require more than a standard quantitative approach. To tap both dimensions of consumer feedback may require a combination of questionnaire items with predetermined response categories as well as a number of open-ended questions such as ‘How did you expect to benefit from this service?’, ‘What were the most useful/least useful aspects of the service?’ and ‘What suggestions could you make for improving the service?’

The latter type of question does not presuppose a particular classification of responses, and in analysing such data the researcher has to inductively derive categories from the individual responses. This involves making qualitative judgements about their meaning before they can be allocated to a particular category. Of course, one can ‘allow the data to speak for itself’ by reproducing all of the individual responses but this merely leaves the task of making sense of the responses up to the reader. It is possible to turn qualitative data of this nature into quantitative data if the categories are clearly defined. Thus, with some risk to the diversity and nuances of the data, and recognising that those with literacy problems may remain unheard, it is possible to take some qualitative data from the swamp up to the high hard ground and analyse it there.

In other situations, questions from both the high ground and the swampy lowland emerge from the same setting but cannot be transformed into quantitative data. Thus a social worker in an oncology unit of a hospital who is interested in establishing a support group for women with gynaecological cancers may ask herself a range of very different questions. As she looks at a list of the patients in a particular ward she may ask the following sorts of questions: How many women in the ward at this time have a similar diagnosis? How many with this diagnosis are at a similar stage in the trajectory of their condition? What is their average length of admission? These are fairly straightforward numerical questions for which the data already exist.

The next question she may ask is of a very different order: What are the multiple meanings of such a diagnosis for these women and significant others in their lives at this time? This is a hermeneutic question, that is, it is about the construction of meaning. The responses to such a question are unlikely to be easily classified into mutually exclusive categories that could be quantitatively analysed and, even if they were, it is likely that much damage would be done to their complexity and subtlety. One of us has argued that ‘meaning construction’ is at the heart of much of the work in the human services field and that the core traditional professional tools of client-centred interviewing and observation are not dissimilar to the qualitative research methods of in-depth interviewing and participant-observation (Scott, 1989).

The same question which our social worker asks about the meaning(s) of gynaecological cancers could equally be asked by a medical sociologist. The difference would be, however, that for the professional practitioner such a question is immediately and directly connected with what she then does and leads to a series of equally complex questions. Would it be helpful or unhelpful to form a support group for these women? What would be the best way to facilitate such a group? How could one know whether the group was successful or not? For whom might it have been helpful or unhelpful and why? How might forming such a group affect and be affected by the current pressures on staff in the ward and the inter-professional tensions and dynamics?

Researchers could explore (and some have done so) certain aspects of these questions using quantitative methods, for example, by investigating the long-term outcomes of cancer support groups in relation to years of survival. On the other hand, qualitative methods may allow some of the questions to be explored in a different way. For example, the views of the women themsel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The researchers
• Table of research studies
• Preface
• 1 From practice to research
• 2 Ethics and organisations
• 3 In-depth interviewing
• 4 Observation
• 5 Tailoring data collection to suit the needs of research participants
• 6 Mixing methods
• 7 Analysing data
• 8 Presenting and writing up
• 9 Epilogue: From research to practice, programs and politics
• References
• Index