PR1 UNIT 2: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND ITS IMPORTANCE TO DAILY LIFE

UNIT 2
Qualitative Research and Its Importance to Daily Life

Content Standard
The learner demonstrates understanding of:
1. The value of qualitative research; its kinds, characteristics, uses, strengths, and weaknesses.
2. The importance of qualitative research across fields of inquiry.

2.1 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Definition of Qualitative Research

o Research type that puts premium or high value on people’s thinking or point of view conditioned by
their personal traits.
o It is interested in knowing people’s ideas, views, feelings, attitudes or lifestyles.
o Usually takes places in soft sciences like social sciences, politics, economics, humanities, education,
psychology, nursing and all business – related subjects.
o Subjectivity is true because of the researcher’s personal involvement in every stage of the
research (Coghan 2014)
o Things and variables are studied in their natural setting.
o An act of inquiry in real – life events.

Characteristics of Qualitative Research

1. The researcher has an important role in qualitative research.

2. Qualitative data are gathered and presented in a form of words, descriptions, pictures, or meanings,
and not in numbers.
3. Qualitative researcher is concerned with the process involved.
4. Inductive reasoning is used in analyzing qualitative data.
5. Qualitative researcher is concerned with meanings and interpretations.

Major Characteristics of Qualitative Research

Naturalistic Inquiry Studying real – world situations as they unfold naturally; non manipulative, non-
obtrusive, and non-controlling; openness to whatever emerges – lack of
predetermined constraints on outcomes.

Inductive analysis Immersion in the details and specifics of the data to discover important categories,
dimensions, and interrelationships; begin by exploring genuinely open questions
rather than testing theoretically derived (deductive) hypothesis.

Holistic perspective The whole phenomenon under study is understood as a complex system that is
more than the sum of its parts; focus on complex interdependencies not
meaningfully reduce to a few discrete variables and linear, cause-effect
relationships.

Qualitative data Detailed, thick description; inquiry in depth; direct quotations capturing people’s
personal perspective and experiences.

Personal contact and The researcher has direct contact with and get close to the people, situation, and
insights phenomenon under study; researcher’s personal experiences and insights are an
important part of the inquiry and critical to understand the phenomenon.

Dynamic systems Attention to process; assumes change is constant and ongoing whether the focus is
on an individual or an entire culture.

Unique case Assumes each case is special and unique; the first level of inquiry is being true to,
orientation respecting, and capturing the details of the individual cases being studied; cross-
case analysis follow from and depends on the quality of individual case studies.

Context sensitivity Places findings in a social, historical, and temporal context; dubious of the
possibility or meaningfulness of generalizations across time and space.
 PR1 UNIT 2: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND ITS IMPORTANCE TO DAILY LIFE

Empathic neutrality Complete objectivity is impossible; pure subjectivity undermines credibility; the
researcher’s passion is understanding the world in all its complexity—not proving
something, not advocating, not advancing personal agendas, but understanding;
the researcher includes personal experience and empathic insight as part of the
relevant data, while taking a neutral nonjudgmental stance toward whatever
content may emerge.

Open to adapting inquiry as understanding deepens and/or situations change;

Design flexibility avoids getting locked into rigid designs that eliminate responsiveness; pursues new
paths of discovery as the emerge.

Types of Qualitative Research

1. Case Study – this involves a long - time study of a person, group, organization, or situation. It seeks
to find answers to why such thing occurs to the subject
2. Ethnography – the study of particular cultural group to get a clear understanding of its organizational
set-up, internal operations and lifestyle.
3. Phenomenology – refers to the study of how people find their experience meaningful. Its primary
goal is to make people understand their experiences about death of loved ones, care for handicapped
persons, friendliness of people, etc.
4. Content and Discourse Analysis – requires an analysis or examination of the substance or content of
the mode of communication (letters, book, journals, photos, video recordings, SMS, online messages,
emails, audio – visual materials, etc.) used by a person, group, organization, or any institution in
communicating.
5. Historical Analysis – examination of primary documents to make an understanding of the connection
of past events to present time.
6. Grounded Theory – discovering a new theory to underlie a study at the time of data collection and
analysis.
7. Narrative Research – this study narrates the life experiences of an individual told to the researcher or
from available document or material

Advantages or Strengths of Qualitative Research

1. It adopts a naturalistic approach to its subject matter, which means that those involve in the research
understand things based on what they find meaningful.
2. It promotes a full understanding of human behavior or personality traits in their natural settings.
3. It is instrumental for positive societal changes.
4. It engenders respect for people’s individuality as it demands the researcher’s careful and attentive
stand toward people’s world views.
5. It is a way of understanding and interpreting social interactions.
6. It increases the researcher’s interest in the study as it includes the researcher’s experience or
background knowledge in interpreting verbal and visual data.
7. It offers multiple ways of acquiring and examining knowledge about something.

Disadvantage or Weaknesses of Qualitative Research

1. It involves a lot of researcher’s subjectivity in data analysis.
2. It is hard to know the validity or reliability of data.
3. Its open – ended questions yield “data overload” that requires long – time analysis.
4. It is time-consuming.
5. It involves several processes which results greatly depend on the researcher views or interpretation.

2.2 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN DIFFERENT AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE

Subject Area Research Approaches

 Research studies happen in any field of knowledge

 Belonging to a certain area of discipline, one may have the option to choose one from these three basic
research approaches: positive or scientific, naturalistic and triangulation or mixed method.
 The scientific approach gives stress to measurable or observable facts instead of personal views,
feelings or attitudes.
 The positive or scientific approach allows control of variables or factors affecting the study (Laursen
2010).
 To become positivist or scientific in conducting the research study, one must collect data in controlled
ways through questionnaires or structured interviews. (quantitative data)
 The naturalistic approach, on the other hand, is people oriented.
 Data collected, in this case, represent personal views, attitudes, thoughts, emotions, and other
subjective traits of people in a natural setting. (qualitative data) (Babbie 2013)
 Having the intention to collect data from people situated in a natural setting, social researchers use
unstructured interviews and participant observations.
 These two data gathering techniques yield opinionated data through the use of open ended questions
and actual participation of the researcher in the subjects’ activities.
 PR1 UNIT 2: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND ITS IMPORTANCE TO DAILY LIFE

All in all, from a social science researcher’s viewpoint, these qualitative data resulting from naturalistic
approach of research serves as the basis for determining universal social values to define ethical or
unethical behavior that society ought to know, not only for the benefit of every individual and
community but also for the satisfaction of man’s quest for knowledge. (Sarantakos 2013; Ransome
2013)

Hard Sciences vs. Soft Science

 Just like in other subjects under soft sciences such as marketing, man’s thoughts and feelings still take
center stage in any research studies.
 The purposes of any researches in any of these two areas in business are to increase man’s
understanding of the truths in line with markets and marketing activities, making him more intelligent in
arriving at decisions about these aspects of his life.
 Research type that are useful for these areas are the basic and applied research. (Feinberg 2013).
 A quantitative or qualitative kind of research is not exclusive to hard sciences or soft sciences.
 These two research methods can go together in a research approach called triangulation or mixed
method.
 This is the third approach to research that allows a combination or mixture of research designs, data
collection and data analysis techniques.

2.3 ACTIVITIES IN A QUALITATIVE STUDY

 In qualitative studies, the progression is closer to a circle than to a straight line.

 Qualitative researchers are continually examining and interpreting data and making decisions about how
to proceed based on what has already been discovered.

CONCEPTUALIZING AND PLANNING A QUALITATIVE STUDY

Identifying the Research problem

- Qualitative researchers usually begin with abroad topic area, often focusing on an aspect o a topic that
is poorly understood and about which little is known.
- They therefore may not pose refined research questions at the outset.
- Qualitative researchers often proceed with a fairly broad initial question that allows the focus to be
sharpened and delineated more clearly once the study is underway.

Doing a Literature Review

- Qualitative researchers do not all agree about the value of doing an upfront literature review.
- Some believe that researchers should not consult the literature before collecting data.
- Their concern is that prior studies might influence the conceptualization of the phenomena under study.
- According to this view, the phenomena should be elucidated base on participants’ viewpoints rather
than on prior information.
- Others believe that researchers should conduct at least a brief literature review at the outset.
- In any case, qualitative researchers typically find a relatively small body of relevant previous work
because of the type of questions they ask.

Selecting and Gathering Entrée into Research Site

- Before going into the field, qualitative researchers must identify a site that is consistent with the
research topic.
- For example, if the topic is health beliefs of the urban poor, an inner- city neighborhood with a
concentration of low-income residents must be identified.
- In some cases, researchers may have access to the selected site, but in others the need to gain entrée
into the site.

Gaining entrée typically involves negotiations with gatekeepers who have the authority to permit entry into
their world.

Developing an Overall Approach

- Quantitative researchers do not collect data before finalizing the research design.
- Qualitative researchers, by contrast, use an emergent design—a design that emerges during the
course of data collection.
- Certain designs features are guided by study’s qualitative studies rarely have rigidly structured design
that prohibit changes while in the field.

Addressing Ethical Issues

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 Qualitative researchers, like quantitative researchers, must also develop plans for addressing ethical
issues—and, indeed, there are special concerns in qualitative studies because of the more intimate
nature of the relationship that typically develop between researchers and study participants.

Conducting a Qualitative Study

 In qualitative studies, the tasks of sampling, data collection, data analysis, and interpretation typically
take place iteratively.
 Qualitative researchers begin by talking with or observing people who have first-hand experience with
the phenomenon under study.
 The discussions and observations are loosely structured, allowing participants to express a full range of
beliefs, feelings, and behaviors.
 Analysis and interpretation are ongoing, concurrent activities that guide choices about the kinds of
people to question next and the types of question to ask or observations to make.
 The actual process of data analysis involves clustering together related types of narrative information
into a coherent scheme.
 As analysis and interpretation progress, researchers begin to identify themes and categories, which are
used to build rich description of theory of the phenomenon.
 The kinds of data obtained become increasingly focused and purposeful as the theory emerges.
 Concept development and verification shape the sampling process—as a conceptualization or theory
develops, the researchers seek participants who can confirm and enrich theoretic understandings, as
well as participants who can potentially challenge them and lead to further theoretic insight.
 Quantitative researchers decide in advance how many subjects to include in the study, but qualitative
researchers’ sampling decisions are guided by the data themselves.
 Many qualitative researchers use the principle of saturation, which occurs when themes and categories
in the data become repetitive and redundant, such that no new information can be gleaned by further
data collection.
 Quantitative researchers seek to collect high- quality data by using measuring instruments that have
been demonstrated to be accurate and valid. Qualitative researchers, by contrast, are the main data
collection instrument and must take steps to demonstrate the trustworthiness of the data while in the
field.
 The central feature of these efforts is to confirm that the findings accurately reflect the experiences and
viewpoints of participants, rather than researchers’ perceptions.
 One confirmatory activity, for example involves going back to participants and sharing preliminary
interpretations with them so that they can evaluate whether the researchers’ thematic analysis is
consistent with their experiences.
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 Qualitative researchers also strive to share their findings at conferences and in journal articles.
PR1 UNIT 2: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND ITS IMPORTANCE TO DAILY LIFE