Why do qualitative researchers need to give detailed description of social settings

Qualitative Research

Qualitative researchers examine how people learn about and make sense of themselves and others and how they structure and give meaning to their daily lives. Therefore, methods of data collection are used that are flexible and sensitive to the social context. A popular method of data collection is the qualitative interview in which interviewees are given the floor to talk about their experiences, views, and so on. Instead of a rigidly standardized instrument, interview guides are used with a range of topics or themes that can be adjusted during the study. Another widely used method is participant observation, which generally refers to methods of generating data that involve researchers immersing themselves in a research setting and systematically observing interactions, events, and so on. Other well-known methods of qualitative data collection are the use of focus (guided-discussion) groups, documents, photographs, film, and video.

Settings, events, or interviewees are purposively sampled, which means guided by the researcher's need for information. Provisional analyses constantly change this need, and therefore sampling takes place during the research and is interchanged with data collection. Contrary to probability sampling, which is based on the notion that the sample will mathematically represent subgroups of the larger population, purposive sampling is aimed at constructing a sample that is meaningful theoretically; it builds in certain characteristics or conditions that help to develop and test findings and explanations. Sampling strategies include aiming at maximum variation, snowball sampling, critical case, and stratified purposeful.

The intense role of the researcher brings about issues with regard to reliability and validity. That the researchers are their own instrument is necessary to gain valid knowledge about experiences or the culture of a specific individual or group; to reduce the reactivity of the research subjects, prolonged engagement is recommended. Another issue is the lack of control over the researchers' activities; therefore, researchers should keep detailed notes of their fieldwork and the choices they make in order to increase replication and reproducibility. Many other quality procedures have been developed, such as triangulation, member checks, peer debriefing, and external audits.

DATA: DEALING WITH DATA

For qualitative researchers, data is the fundamental matter from which everything is derived: the ideas and the theories emerge from the data – in contrast to positivist research, where the data is a means of testing the hypothesis. Quantitative researchers work within a structured environment and refine their data down to a representative abstraction such as a number or a graph; by contrast a qualitative researcher seeks to remain as close to his data as possible all the way through the research process. The original data should still be recognisable in the final report.

The most manageable form of qualitative data is text. e.g., transcripts of interviews, records of discussions, historical or literary documents, field notes, newspaper clippings, reports, etc. But data can also be non-textual, e.g., photographs, videotapes, musical recordings or scores, artefacts, etc. It is subjective and unstructured and requires the researcher using or developing indexing systems in order to manage it.

Qualitative research involves the development of ideas about the data and exploration of these ideas. This involves developing a system of categorisation and linking these categories in ways, which describe the data. Theories are constructed and tested by exploring their links with data.

2.3 Qualitative and Quantitative Analytic Approaches

Many qualitative researchers take the association between class and crime for granted, focusing their efforts on gangs or individuals in extremely marginalized circumstances. Increasingly, however, such work also includes a comparative dimension. Mercer Sullivan (1989) for example, shows how early criminal behavior can disrupt adolescent education and employment, which in turn increases adult criminal behavior. By examining cliques of boys from similar class positions but different neighborhoods and ethnicities, Sullivan identifies contingencies such as local job networks and illegal markets that mediate the relation between class origins and crime. Other ethnographic work illustrates how street crime is woven into the everyday lives of some individuals and neighborhoods (Venkatesh 1997), identifying the critical turning points in their criminal histories. Because such insights are difficult to glean from the quantitative analysis of survey data, several prominent quantitative criminologists have added a qualitative element to their investigations (Hagan and McCarthy 1997, Sampson and Laub 1993).

2.2 The Legitimation Crisis

Many contemporary qualitative researchers challenge postpositivist arguments concerning the text and its validity. Lather (1993) and Scheurich (1997, p. 84) argue that validity is a text's call to authority and truth. Lather calls this version of validity epistemological. That is, a text's authority is established through recourse to a set of rules concerning knowledge, its production, and representation. These rules, as Scheurich (1997) notes, if properly followed, establish validity. Without validity there is no truth, and without truth there can be no trust in a text's claims to validity. With validity comes power, and validity becomes a boundary line ‘which divides good research from bad, separates acceptable (to a particular research community) research from unacceptable research … it is the name for inclusion and exclusion’ (Scheurich 1997, p. 84).

Poststructuralism reads the discussions of logical, construct, internal, ethnographic and external validity, text-based data, triangulation, trustworthiness, credibility, grounding, naturalistic indicators, fit, coherence, comprehensiveness, plausibility, truth, relevance, as attempts to reauthorize a text's authority in the postpositivist moment. Such moves still hold (all constructionist disclaimers aside) to the conception of a ‘world-out-there’ that is truthfully and accurately captured by the researcher's methods and written text.

These words, and the methodological strategies that lie behind them, represent attempts to thicken and contextualize a work's grounding in the external empirical world. They represent efforts to develop a set of transcendent rules and procedures that lie outside any specific research project. These rules, if successfully followed, allow a text to bear witness to its own validity. Hence a text is valid if it is sufficiently grounded, triangulated, based on naturalistic indicators, carefully fitted to a theory (and its concepts), comprehensive in scope, credible in terms of member checks, logical, truthful in terms of its reflection of the phenomenon in question. The text's author then announces these validity claims to the reader. Such claims now become the text's warrant to its own authoritative representation of the experience and social world under inspection.

Triangulation

In many instances, qualitative researchers work with not one but several sources of data within the context of the same study. In a research tradition where the focus is on the point of view of the experiencing actor, anything that allows for greater sympathetic introspection is seen as potentially useful. Moreover, a multimethod approach offers different lines of sight on the same social situation or process, thereby giving analysts an opportunity to triangulate. Interpretations and generalizations that emerge out of the analysis of one source of data can be checked against other sources, leading not only to richer accounts but also to accounts in which the analyst can have greater confidence.

Criteria for Assessing Qualitative Research Texts

Although it is generally agreed among qualitative researchers that the criteria for judging qualitative research are not validity, reliability, and generalizability in the ways those terms are understood in quantitative methodologies, the criteria for judging qualitative research are still under development. Triangulation, member checking, and audit trails that allow external researchers to reconstruct the research process are used in some qualitative methodologies. Criteria such as plausibility, persuasiveness, authenticity, and verisimilitude are under consideration. Resonance with the experience of readers is another criterion currently in use as a way to judge the quality of research.

A description of qualitative research

Qualitative and quantitative approaches to conducting research are often put into two different camps—one that uses numeric data and statistics, and one that uses mostly non-numeric data such as narrative text. Along with this division, there is an unwritten hierarchy in research circles, and quantitative research is considered to be more rigorous, more reliable, and more precise (Berg, 2009, p. 2). In the social sciences, qualitative methods often take a back seat to quantitative approaches. Berg suggests a number of reasons for this, in addition to the ones named above. Qualitative research can often be far more involved, intense work, and produce data that require hours of analysis that cannot be done solely by a software program (Berg, 2009, p. 2). These days, many in the role of teaching research methods emphasize the importance of selecting the correct approach for any given study, as opposed to being loyal to a particular category or design. Research practices that are integrative and combine both qualitative and quantitative activities oftentimes meet the needs of the researcher. Qualitative research can involve statistics and numbers, and quantitative approaches may include narrative descriptions and storytelling. So, at the end of the day, the main goal is to be open-minded in deciding what is most appropriate. The concept of triangulation (Nachimas and Worth-Nachimas, 2008; Wildemuth, 2009; Lee, 1991; Gable, 1994; Mingers, 2001; Ragin, 1987) highlights the importance of using a variety of approaches, depending on the nature of the research.

So how is qualitative research defined? “Qualitative researchers attempt to understand behavior and institutions by getting to know the persons involved and their values, rituals, symbols, beliefs, and emotions” (Nachimas and Worth-Nachimas, 2008, p. 257). Berg writes that “qualitative research focuses on innovative ways of collecting and analyzing qualitative data collected in natural settings” (2009, p. 2). “Qualitative research refers to the meanings, concepts, definitions, characteristics, metaphors, symbols, and descriptions of things. In contrast, quantitative research refers to counts and measures of things” (Berg, 2009, p. 3). Myers emphasizes understanding as a motivation for conducting qualitative research: “The motivation for doing qualitative research, as opposed to quantitative research, comes from the observation that, if there is one thing which distinguishes humans from the natural world, it is our ability to talk! Qualitative research methods are designed to help researchers understand people and the social and cultural contexts within which they live” (Myers, 2009). Elliot, Fischer and Rennie (1999) offer this definition:

The aim of qualitative research is to understand and represent the experiences and actions of people as they encounter, engage, and live through situations. In qualitative research, the researcher attempts to develop understandings of the phenomena under study, based as much as possible on the perspective of those being studied. Qualitative researchers accept that it is impossible to set aside one’s own perspective totally (and do not claim to). Nevertheless, they believe that their self-reactive attempts to “bracket” existing theory and their own values allow them to understand and represent their informants’ experiences and actions more adequately than would be otherwise possible. (p. 215)

In some texts, participant observation is emphasized as one of the key strategies for collecting qualitative data. In other texts, the practice of ethnographic research and field research are central. There are many variations on the most important elements within the qualitative spectrum, but there is one very central theme that they all share, and that is the importance of meaning. Statistics without context can really only convey so much. Berg (2009) refers to this additional layer of meaning as being related to the “quality of things,” by way of words, images, and descriptions (p. 3). Any method that allows the researcher to capture the worlds of others can be a valid qualitative technique.

9.5.1.3 Data saturation

Although a large part of the qualitative analysis is conducted after the data gathering, qualitative researchers also analyze their data throughout their data collection. For this reason, in qualitative research it is possible rely on data saturation to verify whether the size of a sample could be large enough for the chosen research purpose [10]. Data saturation happens in both direct data collection and indirect data collection, and occurs when the researcher is no longer seeing, hearing, or reading new information from the samples.

In both studies the number of data points—for example, reviews and possible interviewees—was much larger than any group of researchers could reasonably analyze. During analysis, when no new patterns were emerging from the data, saturation had been reached, and the researchers stopped introducing new data points and started the next stage of analysis.

Introduction

Focus groups serve a general-purpose method for collecting data, and as such, they can serve a wide range of purposes. In particular, qualitative researchers frequently use focus groups in a self-contained fashion, in that the groups are the sole source of data for a study. From a measurement perspective, however, focus groups are most frequently used as a preliminary method that generates insights into what should be measured and how those measures should be constructed.

Various forms of group interviewing have played a role in the development of social science measures from very early in the 20th century. The basic format for what are now known as focus groups arose subsequently, in the 1990s, from the work of Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, although their approach applied to both individual and group interviews. From the 1950s through the 1970s, focus groups were far more common in marketing research than in the social sciences. This changed as group interviewing began to play a more prominent role in creating survey instruments, from the 1980s onward. This strategy relies on a sequential approach that begins by using focus groups as an input to the creation of quantitative research instruments. This amounts to collecting focus group data to enhance the effectiveness of measures that will be used in survey or experimental research, especially in areas in which researchers want to take a fresh approach to well-studied topics and for new topics for which researchers lack basic information. As the following discussions show, however, the knowledge gained through such preliminary focus groups can also serve a variety of other related purposes.

Data Analysis

Data analysis included first an examination of the researcher’s positionality (Takacs, 2002) in relation to the phenomenon. In the tradition of phenomenological research, the concepts of bracketing and epoche (Bednall, 2006; Moustakas, 1994) were employed. Because the PI also experienced Hurricane Sandy and lost media technology during this time, the ability to “bracket” or put aside her own experiences and biases about the phenomena was attempted (Creswell, 2007). Qualitative researchers argue that this bracketing, or placing aside a researcher’s own experiences or perceptions in order to see a phenomenon with “fresh eyes,” may be nearly impossible; yet it is a common strategy in qualitative research (Merriam, 2009).

Following this examination, the data analysis utilized NVivo qualitative software to perform initial word frequency analysis, textual queries, and axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, 1998). Drawing from a phenomenological research tradition, horizontalization, reduction, clustering, and thematizing of data were performed. In addition to this qualitative analysis, quasi statistical analysis was performed to determine the amount of time participants typically used media technology daily and loss of access during Sandy. From these processes, a composite textual description capturing the essence of the phenomenon as told by the participants (Moustakas, 1994) was created.