The nature of qualitative research


Ed 714 Qualitative Research Methods in Education
Spring 2003
Copyright - Antonia D'Onofrio - 2000/2001/2002/2003

An overview of qualitative research

Prior to the mid to late 1980's, qualitative research was not mentioned as a discipline and for the most part did not exist as a course or distinctive academic offering.  This does not however mean that qualitative methods did not exist, but rather they were practiced in the disciplines that evolved from their application in the field.  For example psycholinguists wrote grammars, anthropologists conducted ethnographies, and biologists engaged in naturalistic inquiry.  In the case of anthropology, it was the practice of ethnography, and its systematic approaches to fieldwork, that contributed to the growth of anthropology as a discipline.

 
Jacob and the early qualitative traditions in educational research
Jacob  (1987) explores this very issue in his review of qualitative research traditions.  Jacob posits that qualitative research is not an alternative to conventional scientific and quantitative methods.  Rather it is an approach and it includes varied and numerous strategies for the collection of data, analysis and interpretation. He lists contemporary traditions of research:  ecological psychology, holistic ethnography, cognitive anthropology, ethnography of communication and symbolic interaction.  These are modern traditions that integrate a wide array of qualitative approaches to research and that have fairly clear applications to the practice of education.  Although each tradition relies on techniques that are commonly associated with qualitative research, what makes them alternatives to applied scientific methods is the way in which they conceptualize research and inquiry.

 
Ecological psychology understands behavior as situated in social contexts.  As such, behaviors have reciprocal effects.  The social setting has control over the exercise of behavior.  For example, institutional (district policies), program (curriculum) and human (teacher, family) components of context constrain how individuals will behave, insofar as the range of possible behavior is itself constrained by social understanding of context.  Behavior is bounded by setting.  The methodologies that inquire into educational problems represent this bounded quality by using narrative, specimen records and exhaustive descriptions of behavior settings, through surveys, observations and checklists.  Theoretically neutral, this approach extrapolates principles that explain problematic activity (truancy).

 
Holistic ethnographers have the goal of completely describing local cultures that are embedded in larger cultural experiences.  For example, classroom cultures within the larger community of the school.  Cultures are studied in terms of norms, institutions, traditions, language and ethnicity.  The aim of this approach is to describe unique ways of life, and then to show how unique realities can be understood through their connections with a surrounding social context.  Holistic ethnographers may or may not use formal theoretical concepts to organize their work.  They consider their approach a journey into the unknown.  The combine interview and observation to disclose patterns and systems of relationship that in turn are understood to define local cultural realities.

 
Ethnographers of communication also consider their work a journey into the unknown.  They have as their goal of inquiry the determination of the outcomes of social  interaction.  They employ observation and collections of taped communications to explore the cultural patterns that define a group and relate it to a larger social entity.  They may include film, artwork, dance or religious practices as part of their method.  They may infer theoretical structures after interpreting the findings of a study, or they may begin a study by organizing it in terms of formal models.  They may test specific hypotheses, or they may simply attempt a full description of social interactions that occur within a particular setting.  Studies of classroom discourse are good examples of how the ethnography of communication is implemented.

 
Cognitive anthropologists study categories of perception that are believed to describe reality that is culturally determined.  They seek complete and accurate descriptions of systems of belief.  The data they employ is usually linguistic, or symbolic information, which makes sense, because the focus of cognitive anthropology is to uncover systems of meaning and the connections that can be made with empirical experience.  Hence they emphasize the semantic character of thought.  For example, a cognitive anthropologist may investigate school climate in a suburban school district that is densely populated with newly arrived Asian families but where school employees are drawn largely from the local population, perhaps a group that tends to be white and originates with communities that have been settled in the region surrounding the school district for many generations.  Thus, dramatically different beliefs about the nature, purpose, value and goals of public education ask to be investigated because of the sharp cultural contrasts that have developed over time.

 
The ethnographer Spradley discusses how the data that is collected in this approach should be analyzed in terms of semantic domains that organize experiential meanings.

 
Symbolic interactionism explores the ways in which the meaning of experience is mediated by the interpretation of experience.  As the name symbolic interaction implies, reality is understood in terms of how it is symbolized, both as language and as patterns of social interaction. In this tradition behavior is believed caused by reflective and socially influenced processes.  Behavior is not determined so much as it is evoked by self conscious assessments of how the "Me" is meaningfully interwoven with the "Other".  A kind of economic exchange is set in motion, when individuals grapple with the reality of their own experience and how it must be interpreted by anOther, for it to be recognized and to become tangibly real.  Interviews of individuals and groups who are asked to reflect on all the ways in which they experience Me and Other predominate as a method of data collection  The social world of human relationships creates rules and institutions to uphold those relationships.  Rules and traditions do not independently provide support for a social organization and its way of life.  Reality is itself constructed through social exchanges.

 
 A summary table of these arguments from Jacob's (1987).  Qualitative research traditions:  A review.  Review of Educational Research, 37 (1), 1-50.

 
So Jacob has identified five traditions that are compatible with the needs of educational researchers.  What each approach shares with the others can be listed as follows:

 
1. Behavior needs to be understood in terms of the context that gives behavior purpose and direction.   Context is physical and behavioral, behavioral and social.
2. The researcher is a student of relationships, connections, interactions and transactions.
3. The methods are variable but they are techniques that allow one to explore the ways in which people make sense of their lives.
4. An investigation needs to be complete, detailed, deep and representative of the experience of individuals.
5. The 'insider's' point of view is key evidence.  Understanding by taking the perspective of another is fundamental to these traditions of research.
6. Culture is an overarching construct that shapes behavior, attitude and belief.

 
Fundamental weaknesses of poorly constructed  qualitative studies include: failure to capture sufficient detail, lack of focus on connections and interactions between people and between context and individuals, inability to represent varied points of view and perspectives; failure to account for the influence of culture and community on the experiences and the attitudes of individuals.

 
Common characteristics shared by contemporary traditions of qualitative research.

 
  • Samples that are small, purposively chosen, and carefully selected according to criteria that led to individuals who have meaningful stories to tell.

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