Foundations of Qualitative Research

prepared by Jane M. Gangi, Ph.D.February 3,2011

What is Qualitative Research?

Denzin and Lincoln (2008):“Qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. It consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These practices transform the world. They turn the world into a series of representations, including field notes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings, and memos to the self….qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them” (emphases added, p. 4).

Textile Art: A canvas

Creswell (2007):“I think metaphorically of qualitative research as an intricate fabric composed of minute threads, many colors, different textures, and various blends of material. This fabric is not explained easily or simply. Like the loom on which fabric is woven, general worldviews and perspectives hold qualitative research together” (p. 35).

Multiple Approaches

Action ResearchCase StudyConstructionist Research Content AnalysisCritical Ethnography Critical Race TheoryDiscourse Analysis EthnographyFeminist Research Formative & Design ExperimentGrounded Theory Indigenist ResearchInternet Research Narrative InquiryOral and Life Histories Performance EthnographyPhenomenological ApproachesPortraiture, and more……………

Who Are Children, and How Do We Learn About Them?

Historically, philosophy and religion informed the way teachers taught:

• John Locke (16th century): Child is blank slate—tabula rasa• Comenius (17th century): Used metaphor of a printing press—the child a

blank piece of paper, the voice of the teacher the ink, and the discipline of the school the printing press.

• Puritans: Children are innately evil and must be snatched from the jaws of the devil through hard work and discipline, as evidenced by such publications as John Cotton’s Spiritual Milk for Boston Babies in Either England Drawn from the Breast of Both Testaments for their Soul’s Nourishment (1656); Day of Doom, which described the terrible things that awaited sinful children in hell; and, A Token for Children, “which told thirteen stories in which all the child protagonists die” (Gangi, 2004, p. 36).

Romanticism

• Rousseau (18th century): In his 1762 publication, Emile, the child is depicted as innately good; it’s institutions that corrupt.

• Rousseau influenced other Romantics: Pestalozzi (19th century) and, Pestalozzi’s student, Froebel

PositivismEnter Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the father of positivism, which Parpart, Connelly, and Barriteau, define as, “A philosophical doctrine contending that sense perception is the only admissible basis of human knowledge and precise thought. This doctrine became the basis of a hierarchy of knowledge emphasizing the sciences over theological or metaphysical inquiry” (p. 207)

It is a philosophy that assumes: Reality is stable and tangible; it can be fragmented into independent variables, which can be studied separately. The researcher can control and make predictions.

Could there be a science of education?

Edward Thorndike was positivism’s most enthusiastic follower.

Positivism guided most of educational research until the 1960s.

Thorndike Won (until the last few decades)

Lagemann (2000):“…what was best described as Thorndike’s triumph and John Dewey’s defeat was an important event in the early molding of educational scholarship. Limiting educational scholarship in ways that became more apparent over the years, Thorndike’s triumph and Dewey’s defeat were essential to the early educationists’ quest to define a science that could help them rationalize the public schools” (p. 22)

Approaching research with only one methodology (positivism) is like the story of the drunk who’d lost his keys and was looking for them under the lamplight. A bystander asked, “Is this where you lost your keys?”“No, but it’s where the light is.”

Similary, G.K. Chesterton wrote of “the clean, well-lit prison of one idea.”

The experience of life is vast; research requires multiple methods to capture multiple perspectives.

Qualitative Research

Roots in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and other fields before education, although Dewey had conducted lab schools at the University of Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century.

"When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.” --Lord Kelvin

“When you can measure it, when you can express it in numbers, your knowledge is still of a meagre and unsatisfying kind.”

--Jacob Viner

AnthropologyAnthropologist Gregory Bateson's explanation of "double description":

On the whole, it is a good thing to have two or more descriptions rather than one. That may sound truistical, but it has . . . deep roots and implications for any application of logical type theory to perception or action. . . . In binocular vision the combined report of the two eyes contains a species of information which you can only get from a single eye by using special sorts of collateral knowledge. With one eye you

may detect overlapping and so be able to say that something is closer than something else, but if you want depth perception you will need two eyes. . . . Depth perception stems from a combination of two versions of the outside universe very slightly different from each other. (as cited in Wolf 1992, p. 107)

A Few Theories That Inform Qualitative Research

• Symbolic Interactionism• Postmodernism, postcolonialism,

postructuralism• Ethnomethodology• Phenomenology

Symbolic Interaction

Karp (2001):“The most essential idea of this theoretical perspective is that nothing in the world—no object, event, or situation—has any intrinsic meaning. Rather, meaning is bestowed on everything by human beings. The social world is a product of people’s definitions and interpretations of it. Human beings, through communication with each other, define the meaning of everything. In this regard, all human experiences is an ongoing exercise in sense-making” (p. 271)

Symbolic Interaction, cont.

Karp (2001), summarizing Blumer:“ 1. Human beings act toward things or situations on the basis of the meanings that the things or situations have for them.2. These meanings are derived from or arise out of the social interaction individuals have with others.3. These meanings are handled or modified through the interpretive process used by individuals in dealing with the things or situations they encounter” (p. 271)

Postmodernism

Lyotard (1987, p. 74): “I define postmodern as credulity toward metanarratives” (as cited in Howe, 2001, p. 202). Howe (2001) comments, “Briefly, a metanarrative is a grand legitimating story, one important feature of which is its abstraction from time, place, and culture. Metanarratives include grand epistemological stories, such as the inevitable progress of science, and grand political stories, such as Marxism and liberalism” (p. 202). (And, Gangi comments, fixed developmental stages, such as Piaget’s or Erickson’s or Gesell’s or…)

Postmodernism, continued

• Postmodernity “is marked by a view of the human world as irreducibly and irrevocably pluralistic, split into a multitude of sovereign units and sites of authority, with no horizontal or vertical order, either in actuality or in potency” (Bauman, as cited in Cole, 2001, p. 112).

Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism examines colonialism’s legacy, and the ways colonizing still occurs—mentally and physically throughout the world. To write Children’s and Young Adult Literature of Genocides Since 1945, I’ll rely on Said (1978), Bhabba (2005), and Spivak (1988).

Poststructuralism

Glesne (2011): “Viewing speech and human behavior as textual productions (not only written words), poststructuralists tend to focus on deconstructing texts, showing how they systematically include and exclude people and ideas” (p. 13).

St. Pierre: “’poststructuralism does not allow us to place the blame elsewhere, outside our own daily activities, but demands that we examine our own complicity in the maintenance of social justice’” (as cited in Glesne, 2011, p. 13).

EthnomethodologyKarp (2001):“…the study of the practical methodologies employed by everyday people. In a challenge to conventional sociological analysis, Garfinkel wrote that ‘Although sociologists take socially structured scenes of everyday life as a point of departure they rarely see, as a task of sociologoical inquiry in its own right, the general question of how any such common sense world is possible’ (p. 36)….all human beings are theorists, although they don’t think of their perceptions of the world this way. That being the case, sociology should be centrally concerned with discovering the implicit theories of human actors that make possible a sense of social life ordered, as something we can take for granted” (p. 279)

Phenomenology

Later in the semester we will spend a session on phenomenology. For now, Smith, Flowers, & Larkin (2009) provide a concise definition: “IPA is committed to the detailed examination of the particular case. It wants to know in detail what the experience for this person is like, what sense this particular person is making of what is happening to them. This is what we mean when we say IPA is idiographic. IPA studies usually have a small number of participants and the aim is to reveal something of the experience of each of those individuals” (p. 3).

Alfred Schutz’s PhenomenologyBernard (1994) on Schutz’s phenomenology:

“When you study molecules…you don’t have to worry about what the world “means” to the molecules….But when you try to understand the reality of a human being, it’s a different matter entirely. The only way to understand social reality…was through the meanings that people give to that reality. In a phenomenological study, the researcher tries to see reality though an informant’s eyes.

Phenomenologists try to produce convincing descriptions of what they experience rather than provide explanations and causes. Good ethnography—a narrative that describes a culture or a part of a culture—is usually good phenomenology, and there is still no substitute for a good story, well told—especially if you’re trying to make people understand how the people you’ve studied think and feel about their lives” (p. 15).

Whether or not you can observe a thing depends on the theory you use. It is the theory that decides what can be observed. –Albert Einstein

The Role of TheoryKarp (2001):“All human beings are theorists. We may not think of ourselves that we since we normally take our implicit theories largely for granted….We can only make collective and personal decisions about most things by theorizing.

As a social scientist, I’m obligated to treat my theorizing in a more self-conscious way than most people. It’s my responsibility to piece together carefully collected data in order to generate a persuasive and compelling theory about one or another aspect of social life. Even while exercising every possible safeguard in collecting systematic data, social scientists must nevertheless live with the recognition that because of the sheer complexity of social life their theories are always tentative. They are for-the-time-being theories, theories to depend on until more persuasive ones come along” (pp. 151-152).

Karp on the Role of Theory, cont.

“Despite the appearance otherwise in some social science discourse, we can never prove our theories. All we can do is gather data that allows us to embrace a theory as more or less plausible. In the face of uncertainty, confusion, and complexity all persons do the same thing as we social scientists. All of us proceed in life with multiple theories that direct our perceptions and actions. We simply cannot operate without these theories to guide us, however incomplete and tentative they may be” (p. 152).

ReferencesBernard, H. R. (1994). Research methods in anthropology. Thousand Oaks, CA; AlatMira Press.

Cole, M., & Hall, C. (2001). Breaking the line: New literacies, postmodernism, and the teaching of printed texts. Reading, 35(3), 111-114.

Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2008). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The landscape of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 1-43). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gangi, J. M. (2004). Encountering children’s literature: An arts approach. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Glesne, C. (2011). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Karp, D. A. (2001). The burden of sympathy: How families cope with mental illness. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

References, continuedParpart, J. L., Connelly, M. P., & Barriteau, V. E. (2000). Theoretical perspectives on gender and development. Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre.

Rousseau, J. J. (1979). Emile (A. Bloom, Trans.). New York, NY: Basic Books. (Original work published in 1762.)

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Stake, R. (2010). Qualitative research: Studying how things work. New York, NY: Guilford.

Wolf, S. A. (1992) Learning to act/acting to learn.Unpublisheddissertation. StanfordUniversity.