150818 DISCUSSION The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research

QUALITATIVE RESEARCHTHE DISCIPLINE AND PRACTICE OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH | DENZIN & LINCOLN

Report for AS 210 by Clarissa Camaya


QUALITATIVE RESEARCH• Means different things in different points of history.• Involves a variety of empirical materials

• Case Study• Personal Experience• Introspection• Life Story• Interview• Artifacts• Cultural Texts• Historical

• Describes routine/ problematic moments and meanings in individuals’ lives

• Interconnected interpretive practices

“…qualitative research in sociology and anthropology was born out of concern to understand the other.”

WHY QUALITATIVE?


The general issue for qualitative research is where do you place the author in the analysis.

QUESTIONS:

1. Is it the author’s culture speaking?

2. Is it the author’s gender speaking?

3. Is it the author’s training speaking?

4. How objective can a researcher be?

5. For whom is the author doing the study for?

Connecting qualitative research to hopes, needs, goals, and promises

of a free democratic society

LOCATING THE AUTHOR



PARADIGMA worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject[Oxford Dictionary]


HOW IT WORKS

School of Thought

Method

Gathered data

PARADIGM!


BRICOLAGECLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

1966

“A bricoleur is a Jack of all trades or a kind of professional do-it-yourself

person.”

Bricolage is a process of using multiple methods that see different versions of reality. The aggregate is a complex view of the subject.


FILM SHOWING!The Battleship Potemkin (1925)

PRESS TO PLAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJ_1P-Py2k


TRIANGULATIONAn alternative to validation.

You cannot capture objective reality.

Socially constructed nature of reality vs. Value-free, causal relationships

QUAL VS QUANT


+ISM

POSITIVISMObjective accounts

of the world is possible.

POSTPOSITIVISMYou can only see parts of reality.All methods are flawed.



-ISMS, ETC.• Foundationalism | We can have an ultimate grounding for our knowledge

claims about the world. It involves the use of empiricist and positivist epistemologies.

• Structuralism | Holds that any system is made up of a set of oppositional categories embedded in a language.

• Semiotics | Science of signs and systems

• Poststructuralism | Language is an unstable system of referents. It is impossible ever to capture completely the meaning of an action, text or intention.

• Postmodernism | A contemporary sensibility, developing since WWII that privileges no single authority, method or paradigm.

• Phenomenology | A complex system of ideas. Basically dealing with consciousness from the first person. The experience is intentional.

• Humanism | Refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of human freedom and progress. (Non-theistic)

• Epistemology | Deals with how we conceptualize our reality and our images of the world. Knowledge of knowledge.


HISTORY• 17th Century : Early Ethnography

• Confirmed the racial and cultural diversity of peoples throughout the globe.• Diversity Theories about origins

• 17th to 19th Century : Colonial Ethnography• Focused more on colonial pluralism• Left natives on their own as long as their leaders can be co-opted by the

colonial administration.• Late 19th to early 20th Century: American Indian as “Other”

• Study from the perspective of the conqueror• “Saving the Indians”

• Early 20th Century to 1960s : Ethnography of the “Civic Other”• Community studies and study of American Immigrants

• Midcentury through the 1980s : Studies of ethnicity and assimilation• Postmodern and Poststructural Challenges: The qualitative researcher does

more than observe history, he plays a part in it.


SEVEN MOMENTS• “Objective”, complicit to imperialism, monumentalism• Power of researcher to represent the subjectTraditional

• Formalizing qualitative research, attempted to do studies of important social processes

• Postpositivism – but bridging qualitative to quantitative valuesModernist

• Pluralistic, interpretive, open-ended perspective (Geerttz, 1973)• Central task: to make sense of a local situationBlurred Genres

• Called into question issues: gender, class, race• New models of truth, method, representation were sought

Crisis of Representation

• Making sense of the 3 crises: Representation, Legitimation, Praxis• How to represent the “other”Making Sense

• Sought to connect writings to the needs of a free democratic society.Postexperimental

• What’s next?The Future


THE TRIPLE CRISIS

Representation• How to capture

reality/ lived experience

Legitimation• Acceptance of

social system/ aspect

• Support of those who participate

Praxis• Theory enactment/

embodiment/ realization possible?


MORAL OF THE STORY1. Each of the historical moments still exists.2. Choices. Choices. Choices.3. We are in a moment of discovery and rediscovery of new

ways of looking, interpreting, arguing, writing…

Qualitative research can no longer be viewed within a neutral or objective positivist perspective.

DOUBLE-FACED GHOST

Qualified, competent observers can report

on their own observations of the

social world, and the experiences of

others.

A real subject who is present in the world can report on his or her own experiences.

Researchers could blend their own observations with self-reports from subjects through interviews and life

story, personal experience, etc.Report for AS 210 by Clarissa Camaya

THE RESEARCH PROCESS



1 | THE RESEARCHER• A researcher speaks from a particular

class, gender, racial, cultural, and ethnic community perspective.

• A researcher approaches the world with a set of ideas, a framework (theory, ontology), a set of questions (epistemology), and examines in specific ways (methodology, analysis).

• A researcher speaks from within a distinct interpretive community that configures the multicultural, gendered components of the research act.

a biographically situated researcher


2 | INTERPRETIVE PARADIGMS

• Each interpretive paradigm makes particular demands on the researcher, including the questions he or she asks and the interpretations the researcher brings to them.

• Credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability instead of internal and external validity, reliability, objectivity are valued.

• Poststructural feminist: problems with social text and logic, multivioced text grounded in the experiences of oppressed people.

• Cultural studies/ Queer theory: use methods strategically for producing resistances to local structures of domination.


3 | STRATEGIES OF INQUIRY

• A research design describes a flexible set of guidelines that connect theoretical paradigms first to strategies of inquiry, and second to methods for collecting empirical material.

• Specifies how the investigator will address representation and legitimation.

• A bundle of skills, assumptions, and practices that the researcher employs as he or she moves from paradigm to the empirical world.


4 | METHODS OF COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

• Ways of managing and interpreting documents, data management methods, and computer-assisted methods of analysis.

• Methods of reading and analyzing interviews, text content, narrative, semiotics.


5 | INTERPRETATION AND PRESENTATION

• Qualitative interpretations are constructed.

• The final tale: confessional, realist, impressionistic, critical, formal, literary, analytic, grounded theory, etc.

• The interpretive practice of making sense of one’s findings is both artistic and political.

• Program evaluation is a major site of qualitative research.


OTHER COMMENTS1. Based on my experience in Market Research, the corporate might be

classifying Qualitative and Quantitative Research very differently.2. In corporate/ market research, the philosophies of the qualitative

methods were never an issue. [Very functional]3. However, I think the 1st lesson about Qualitative Research in MR still

holds true in academic research—you cannot conclude definitive causal relationships in Qualitative analysis.

4. It’s fascinating how the Qualitative Research went through a history that added methods to address possible biased analysis (and until now qualitative methods still have that stigma) yet the conclusion we got here is “You can never be completely and absolutely without bias.”

5. That’s why the lesson on the bricolage matters– if multiple methods (of possibly multiple writers) used on a single subject is used, and the results make sense together and the results “agree” then the research is up to something.

Data & Analytics

150818 DISCUSSION The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research