Chapter 4: Introducing
qualitative research
OUTCOMES FOR THIS
CHAPTER
After studying this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
• Critically distinguish qualitative research as a research
paradigm from other research paradigms
• Locate the emerging debates in qualitative research within a
new emerging world view
• Formulate your own stance based on ontological and
epistemological considerations when using a qualitative
research approach
• Conceptually describe a number of qualitative research
approaches
INTRODUCTION
Research methods are the tools that researchers use to collect data.
Research is concerned with truth and how we can find it.
Ontology: What is truth?
Epistemology: How can we find or get to know the truth?
Conceptualisations: Different strands of qualitative research that identify how the
research defines and comes to know the truth.
People give Things, such as words, pictures or symbols, meaning, which means
these things can differ by culture, age, gender, and context.
This creates difficulty in developing one universally agreed meaning for things.
METHODS, METHODOLOGY AND PARADIGMS
Figure 4.1 Conceptualising theory, methodology and methods
Qualitative researchers use theories etc through the process of methodology to
develop a research method.
TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
Qualitative Research:
• Use words or pictures rather than numerical data;
• Use Meaning-based rather than statistical forms of data analysis;
• Use Naturalistic settings where human interactions occur;
• Focus on how humans arrange themselves and their settings;
• Focus on how inhabitants of these settings make sense of their surroundings
through symbols, rituals, social structures and roles etc.;
• Asks open-ended as opposed to closed-ended questions;
• Is attentive to all aspects of the research process;
• Is “Inductive” in nature, meaning it starts from specific cases or observations to
develop broader generalisations for the population.
TYPES OF RESEARCH APPROACH IN
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Descriptive:
• To describe a group of people or phenomena;
• Asks “What?” research questions
Exploratory:
• To explore a topic when there isn’t a lot known about a phenomenon, group,
process, activity or situation;
• Does not always depart from a fixed theoretical framework, but can work
towards developing a theory based on the data (grounded theory)
Philosophical/theoretical:
• Theories attempt to explain the cause and effect of human behaviour, which
traditionally was thought to facilitate control over people;
• Researchers now understand that human life is complex and interdependent
and based on mutual causality;
• So no developed theory is universal, meaning it can only be valid for specific
situations and populations
UNDERSTANDING THE PHILOSOPHICAL
GROUNDING OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Ontology (What is reality?)
Postpositivism:
• All knowledge is fallible, but not equally fallible;
• Reality is multifaceted, subjective and mentally constructed by individuals
Interpretivism:
• Human life can only be understood from within;
• Social life is a distinctively human product;
• The human mind is the purposive source or origin of meaning;
• Human behaviour is affected by knowledge of the social world;
• The social world does not “exist” independently of human knowledge
Symbolic interactionism:
• Overlaps with interpretivism;
• Meaning is attached to an object or phenomenon;
• This meaning affects our interactions with such objects, but can set a motion of
change in progress (such as self-fulfilling prophecy)
UNDERSTANDING THE PHILOSOPHICAL
GROUNDING OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Ontology (What is reality?)
Critical theory:
• Social reality is created on an ongoing basis;
• Identity is formed within the political and power field of knowledge;
• Every historical period creates rules about what counts as scientific fact;
• There is no neutrality in traditional data gathering, and only supports the ideology of
the time;
• Valid knowledge arises from a critique of the social structure and systems in society
Postmodernism:
• Rejects the emphasis on rational discovery through the scientific method;
• Views “facts” and “values” as interactive;
• Rejects the notion of objective knowledge;
• Rejects the idea of a fixed, universal and eternal foundation of reality;
• A research method doesn’t just uncover reality, but constructs it in the process
