Qualitative research methods

Summary

Without any doubt, the most popular style of doing qualitative social research, is to interview a number of individuals in a way that is less restrictive and standardized than the one used for quantitative research.

ten Have, 2004, p. 5, emphasis original

A standard practice for qualitative research has become accepted in which interviews are conducted, the data are coded, and the results reported in the form of summaries written in formal language. In this chapter, I examine the practice of the qualitative research interview and explore the assumptions about language – and about people – that are embedded in its practices.

Interviews are a ubiquitous way of collecting data throughout the social sciences. Although qualitative researchers today work with a wide variety of perspectives and study an enormous range of phenomena – from rituals to the unconscious – the technique used to obtain data is overwhelmingly the interview (Potter & Hepburn, 2005). Verbal data are sometimes elicited in the form of solitary words or phrases, or brief statements or explanations, but interviewing has become a familiar, taken for granted component of qualitative research, as well as research in cognitive studies, developmental psychology, the learning sciences, and elsewhere. Qualitative approaches that are otherwise very different – grounded theory, thematic analysis, empirical phenomenology, and interpretative phenomenological analysis – all agree that interviews are the method of choice to obtain qualitative data (Table 2.1). Many qualitative research projects use only interviews as their source of empirical data.

We live today in what has been called “an interview society” (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997). On television, on the radio, and in newspapers and magazines, we watch, hear, and read interviews every day. Bogdan and Biklen suggest that “most of us have conducted interviews. The process is so familiar we do it without thinking” (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992, p. 96). Everyone knows what an interview is – or at least we think we do. Perhaps the very ubiquity of interviews prevents us from looking at them carefully.

Typically the qualitative research interview is “semistructured.” Other possibilities exist – focus group interviews, interviews that are completely unstructured, life histories, and so on – but the semistructured interview is the workhorse of qualitative research today.

Summary

[T]hese theories presuppose the prior existence of the question that they are seeking to resolve: that there is a yawning gulf separating the agent from structure, the individual from society. Now if there is no gulf, then sociological theory would find itself in the rather odd situation of having tried to provide ever more refined solutions to a nonexistent problem.

Latour, 1996, p. 232

If constitution goes on in the everyday practices of a form of life, then it makes sense that to answer questions about constitution we need to study these practices. One way would seem to be firsthand contact with the form of life through ethnographic fieldwork, but, as we have seen, ethnographic accounts that claim to describe what is “behind” everyday actions and events such as the cockfight, which are written for outsiders and are immediately removed from the form of life they represent, face insuperable problems of veracity. When fieldwork is understood as participating as a member and then writing a disinterested description of the order of a form of life, it is inherently dualistic.

Are there other ways to study practices? It might be objected that in considering only ethnography I have been unduly narrow in my exploration of the ways in which we could study constitution. Certainly other methods and conceptual frameworks exist for the study of practical interaction. In this chapter, I want to consider several of them, focused on exploring the relationship of constitution between individual and society, between member and form of life. First I consider critical discourse analysis (CDA) and conversation analysis (CA). Then I turn to the way conversation analysis has been extended to study “institutional talk,” and finally to the study of institutional modes of existence.

Proponents of critical discourse analysis have summarized its main assumptions as follows: it addresses social problems; treats power relations as discursive; sees discourse as constituting society and culture, as doing ideological work, as historical, and as a form of social action; sees the link between text and society as mediated; and offers a form of analysis that is interpretive and explanatory (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997).

Summary

Edit and interpret the conclusions of modern science as tenderly as we like, it is still quite impossible for us to regard man as the child of God for whom the earth was created as a temporary habitation…. Man is but a foundling in the cosmos, abandoned by the forces that created him. Unparented, unassisted and undirected by omniscient or benevolent authority, he must fend for himself, and with the aid of his own limited intelligence find his way about in the indifferent universe. Such is the world pattern that determines the character and direction of modern thinking.

Becker, 1932/1961, pp. 14–15

It seems common sense that each of us has a mind in which we construct conceptions of the world around us. Our “subjectivity” is not merely ideas in our heads; it is the way the whole world appears to us. The “mental” is taken to be something inner, personal, and subjective. In addition, an informationprocessing model is accepted throughout the social sciences. In this model, the brain is seen as a computer, actively processing data received through the sensory organs, forming complex internal models or theories about the external world, and deciding how to act on the basis of these models. This, too, has come to seem obvious and natural.

The problems with such views are not so obvious, but humans have not always thought about themselves in this way. Of course, no single person could be responsible for such a model, but one person in particular was a highly influential spokesperson: the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Although he wrote over 200 years ago, many still consider Kant the most important philosopher of all time. The accusation of dualism is usually directed towards Descartes (e.g., Burwood, Gilbert, & Lennon, 1999), but the model of human being that the social sciences assume, and the dualisms in which they have become caught, are due much more to Kant. This chapter explores Kant and his influence in order to see how this model arose and why, and how it both requires a process of “constitution” and trivializes this as something individual, primarily cognitive and intellectual.

Summary

Foucault's great achievement in my view was to see, and show, how we can have a history of this [self-constituting freedom]: that by describing the different techniques of the self, one can tell the story of different ways in which people have purposefully made themselves into certain kinds of persons, and therefore of the historically specific and definite (and of course always limited) forms which ethical freedom has taken.

Laidlaw, 2002, p. 324

My principal aim in this book has been to consider how social scientists can frame and answer questions that are important and relevant. We have examined typical practices with the tools of qualitative research – interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and analysis of discourse – with an eye towards their embedded ontological and epistemological assumptions. We have found a recurrent ontological dualism of subject and object, and an epistemology that contrasts subjective experience with objective knowledge. But we have also found important attempts to use these tools in new ways.

Dissolving Kant's Problem

In Part I, I argued that much qualitative research remains stuck in the dualism of subject and object. We began our examination of the practices of qualitative research with the semistructured interview, commonly viewed as central to the objective study of subjectivity, a view that Steinar Kvale summarized well: “If you want to know how people understand their world and their life, why not talk with them?” I questioned the combination of invisibility and confession in the qualitative research interview, and the practices of abstraction and generalization that are central to analysis through coding. The conduit metaphor for language, the view thatmeaning is contained in concepts and that experience is expressed in talk, contributes to a dualistic opposition between subjectivity and objectivity that ties this kind of research in knots. This approach maintains the same ontological dualism as empirical-analytic inquiry and ignores intersubjective phenomena: the material practices that form a background to our everyday actions and experiences. We began to consider different ontological assumptions and commitments, looking for the basis of a genuinely new program of inquiry in the social sciences. I suggested that when we interview a person we don't simply test our theories about them or find answers to our questions but encounter them and are challenged by them.

Summary

Consider that immortal ordinary society evidently, just in any actual case, is easily done and easily recognized with uniquely adequate competence, vulgar competence, by one and all – and, for all that, by one and all it is intractably hard to describe procedurally. Procedurally described, just in any actual case, it is elusive.

Garfinkel, 1996, p. 8

In this chapter, I want to change your ontology! We saw in the last chapter how Husserl, Schutz, Berger and Luckmann, Gergen, and Searle tried to study the kind of constitution that Kant had identified, in which individual perception and reason together form representations of an external reality. We discovered how their ontological dualism prevented them from doing more than study the experience of “reality” while, paradoxically, trying to bracket all claims about what actually is real. This chapter follows a different path, one that explores the conditions for the capacity to form subjective representations. I begin with Georg Hegel's response to Kant, then continue with Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Harold Garfinkel, and finally Bruno Latour. Their work amounts to a different kind of phenomenology, one that explores a nondualist ontology, a “radical realism.” Here constitution is viewed not as a matter of forming concepts or representations but as the forming of objects and subjects, an ontological rather than epistemological process. The focus shifts from conceptual knowledge, studied with a detached, theoretical attitude, to practical, embodied know-how, studied in an involved way. Know-how provides a way to see the world. By the end of the chapter, I hope to have convinced you to see people and objects as inextricably one with their forms of life, and to see reason and thinking as cultural, historical, and grounded in practical know-how.

The analyses in the last chapter started from the assumption that we are naturally creatures with minds, inner spaces in which representations are formed, and asked how these representations are structured and under what circumstances they are valid.

Yet the human and social sciences – in both their experimental and qualitative forms – have been unable to escape from a persistent anxiety that makes evident the problems in Kant's anthropology.

Summary

CHAPTER PREVIEW

Research questions come from a variety of sources and motivations, most of them arising from the investigator's curiosity. At the same time, our ideas develop within a social context. The questions we consider important develop because of the combination of our personalities, our histories, what society values, and other factors that may have little to do with the scientific research question per se.

Ideas arise in different ways. Sometimes, researchers notice an event that captures their interest, and they decide to create research to study it. At other times, researchers have a specific question to address or a problem to solve that leads to a research project. In some cases, researchers develop research ideas to test theories. No matter how the idea develops, researchers have to figure out the best way to investigate their questions.

To generate good research, investigators should be aware of the work of other scientists. This allows the investigator to advance our knowledge and to avoid simply repeating what others have done. Such knowledge will also help a researcher generate new questions. Sources of information include scientific publications and presentations at research conferences. As your exposure to research expands, you will learn effective and efficient means of searching for prior work that relates to your own research question.

Electronic databases provide easy access to descriptions of research in psychology. By conducting a systematic literature review, psychologists can learn about the work of others, devise their own research questions, and ultimately publish research articles or make presentations at professional conferences.

Where Research Ideas Begin: Everyday Observations and Systematic Research

If we read journal articles or listen to psychologists give presentations of their research, we get a coherent picture of what led them to do their research, how they accomplished it, and what their results mean. The final product is a nice package whose ideas flow logically; we can see how the ideas developed and how they progressed. Researchers who communicate well can weave a good story. But where do the research ideas come from?

Why do researchers study topics ranging from thinking and problem solving to social relationships to personality development? The answer is fairly simple: The researchers are curious, and doing the research is fun.

Summary

CHAPTER PREVIEW

You already know that planning your study is the most difficult and time-consuming phase of the research process. You must come up with a question about a phenomenon you are interested in, and then devise a method for investigating the question. As part of the planning process, you must also consider how you are collecting information. You must be able to quantify what you are doing and what will happen in the study in a way that provides quantifiable characteristics. In addition to quantifying what you are doing within the study, it is important that you describe the participants in your study.

Researchers describe who participated and what happened in the study by using statistics. A statistic provides a quantitative measure for a sample or a subset of a population. A parameter is very similar to a statistic except that a parameter refers to some value in the population. We usually use statistics to describe results from our studies because we conduct research with samples of people.

We can quantify information by using one of two types of statistics, descriptive or inferential measures. Inferential statistics depend on probabilities, and we use them to test hypotheses. Descriptive statistics allow us to summarize information so that readers can quickly understand the outcomes of our study. In this chapter we will discuss how descriptive statistics are derived and how you might use them in your research.

Using Statistics to Describe Results

Popular media frequently report interesting statistics about a host of events or perceptions. For example, we often read reports about the percentages of people who belong to a political party or the average number of auto accidents that occur annually. Statistics, such as those published in the media, are usually presented as a way of describing interesting facts and figures. When we describe demographic characteristics, behaviors, or outcomes of a study, we are using a particular type of statistic called descriptive statistics.

The earliest known use of descriptive statistics occurred in 1662 when John Graunt published Observations on Bills of Mortalities in London, England. In this work, he summarized and reported information about the people who died from the plague (Stigler, 1986). Although these descriptive statistics relay information about a morbid topic, demographic information about the people who died from the plague is important for understanding the epidemiology of the disease.

Summary

Most research reports in psychology appearing in journals have a standard format, which is specified in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). The use of a consistent style makes it easier for readers to know where to find information in the paper. In addition, once writers learn the basics of APA style, it can be easier to write up a report because it is clear where to put various kinds of information.

In general, APA style papers have the following components in this order:

Summary

CHAPTER PREVIEW

In the previous chapter we provided an overview of probability theory and statistical hypothesis testing. We can use statistical tests when we conduct experimental studies. Statistical tests are one part of applying experimental methods that allow researchers to establish a cause-andeffect relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable. Experimental designs employ random assignment, which allows us to establish cause-and-effect relationships. Random assignment ensures that each person has an equal chance of ending up in a group on the basis of an objective placement. In the simplest experiment, the researcher compares a treated group (experimental) to a control (nontreated) group. This simple two-group design, or independent measures design, allows the researcher to compare two different levels of the independent variable using two different groups of people.

Instead of using two different groups, we can also design an experiment using only one group and ask participants to engage in both the treatment and control conditions of the study. In this case, we are still testing two levels of the independent variable, but we are using one group of people and asking them to participate in both conditions. The repeated measures design, using one group of people in both conditions, allows us to test the effect of the two levels of the independent variable using only one group of people. In each of these instances we are using two levels of a single independent variable, and we are measuring a single dependent variable. In the first case, we are using an independent samples design or a two-group design, and in the second instance we are using a related-samples or repeated measures design.

In many research studies, we use several different levels of the independent variable. For example, we might test the effect of three different amounts of caffeine. The simplest design employs only two levels of the independent variable. In this chapter, we will describe how to use inferential statistics to test differences between only two levels of the independent variable. The independent samples t test is used to test differences between two groups. The related samples or repeated measures t test is used to detect differences when one group of participants experiences both levels of treatment.

Summary

Faculty and students often deliver results of their research at professional meetings. Several opportunities to present work are available at annual national meetings (e.g., American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science). In addition to these national venues, opportunities to present your work are available at many regional or local meetings throughout the year. You may also be asked to present your research in class, on campus during a research day, or at a local undergraduate research conference in your state. Regardless of the forum, it is important to develop a plan for presenting your research in a professional way.

Researchers may present their findings during a single session (usually an hour in length), as one member of a panel, or during a poster session. Regardless of the venue, presentations should be clear, concise, and professionally delivered.

It is important to remember that presenting your work orally is different than presenting the work in writing. You should tailor your presentation to meet the needs of a live audience. Remember, people don't want to listen to dry boring facts. Instead, people want to hear interesting information that is directly relevant to their interests. So, for example, if you are presenting results that indicate that positive reinforcement can be useful in helping people to quit smoking, then highlight the broader psychological phenomenon—positive reinforcement—while at the same time keeping the presentation lively and interesting.

Keep the message simple. Your audience is not reading your paper. So, people are not able to easily reference complicated details, and if you provide too much detail, you may lose people. Try to focus on presenting two or three key points. Keep the presentation of these points short, succinct, and direct.

As you are planning your presentation, follow the same general structure of your paper. Introduce your research with an interesting idea. For example, you might begin by presenting the audience with a question like: How can we reduce smoking? Then state your specific hypothesis and the general approach that you used in your study. You can then provide the audience with information about the participants, specific methodology, and results. Keep your presentation broad and don't focus too much on details. Present only the most important results. For example, if you found two or three important outcomes, then focus on those points.

Summary

CHAPTER PREVIEW

If you want to study behavior, it is useful to be able to describe and predict behavior, but it will be more satisfying to know why people act the way they do. It is relatively easy to observe different kinds of behavior and, from there, to make predictions about other behaviors. Most of us have a general sense of how people are going to act in certain circumstances (although we are fooled often enough). The next goal in psychology is to understand the causes of behavior.

In research, we choose experimental designs when we want to discover causation. Descriptive approaches can be quite useful for making predictions about behavior, but they do not inform us about the underlying reasons for those behaviors.

In the simplest experiment, the researcher creates a treatment group that will be compared to an untreated, or control, group. If the two groups start equal but end up different, we presume that the treatment made a difference. In practice, most studies employ more than two groups, but the logic is the same regardless of the number of groups.

Complications arise in any research project because small details of the research situation often have effects on participants’ behaviors that we don't anticipate or even recognize. Further, because an experimental session involves an interaction between people—an experimenter and a participant—social effects can contribute to changes in behavior.

Choosing a Methodology: The Practicalities of Research

In psychology, the word experiment has a specific meaning. It refers to a research design in which the investigator actively manipulates and controls variables. Scientists regard experimental methods of research as the gold standard against which we compare other approaches because experiments let us determine what causes behavior, leading to the ultimate scientific goal—control. In general, researchers often prefer experiments over other methods such as surveys, observational studies, or other descriptive and correlational approaches even though studies that describe and predict behaviors provide important information about thought and behavior.

Summary

CHAPTER PREVIEW

In this chapter we will cover some techniques that deal with different types of research questions than we have encountered previously. The approaches here are typically employed by researchers with questions that involve in-depth study of people.

Each of these domains has developed its own traditions that sometimes differ from the ones we have already covered. This research may also answer different types of questions. Both of them have added to our understanding of behavior.

Psychologists who study development across time make use of longitudinal research. In this field, we have to deal with change over a long period, sometimes years and decades. As a result, there are special considerations to ponder. When our studies are temporally compact and can be created and completed within a matter of weeks, we think differently from when our studies will not be over for a very long time.

A second specialized research design involves single-participant research. In applied fields, particularly in psychotherapeutic settings, and in theoretical work, we may be interested in studying a single individual in depth. We can do so in a quantitative way, with N of 1 randomized clinical trials and experimental analysis of behavior that often entails animal research. We can also use the relatively rare case study approach that tends to be more qualitative.

Longitudinal Research

If you observe people long enough, you will see that they change in predictable ways. Sometimes the changes take place fairly quickly. Infants 1 year old are very different than they were even a month or two before. College students become much more sophisticated thinkers between the start of their college careers and their graduation. More mature adults show consistent developmental changes as they progress from being the “young-old,” the “old,” and finally, the “old-old.”

Psychologists have developed techniques to study people at different stages in their lives. One such approach is called longitudinal research. In psychology, longitudinal research refers to the study of individuals over time, often using repeated measurements. It is similar in many ways to the other methods you know about, but there are also some elements that are unique because of the time span of such projects.

Within psychology, developmental psychologists make greatest use of longitudinal research. A developmental psychologist, or developmentalist, is interested in the nature and causes of change.

Qualitative research methods

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PART I - The Objective Study of Subjectivity

2 - The Qualitative Research Interview

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Contents

10 - Studying Ontological Work

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Frontmatter

7 - Dualism and Constitution: The Social Construction of Reality

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15 - A Historical Ontology of Ourselves

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Name Index

8 - Constitution as Ontological

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3 - Planning Research: Generating a Question

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5 - Organizing Data with Descriptive Statistics

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Appendix E - Statistical Tables

Appendix A - Writing a Research Report

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8 - Looking for Differences Between Two Treatments

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Part V - Culture and Research

Subject Index

Appendix B - Developing an Oral Presentation

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Part II - The First Steps in Conducting Research

6 - Conducting an Experiment: General Principles

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13 - Research in Depth: Longitudinal and Single-Case Studies

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Qualitative research methods

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