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Qualitative research is one of the two major approaches to research methodology in social sciences. Qualitative research involves an indepth understanding of human behaviour and the reasons that govern human behaviour. Unlike quantitative research, qualitative research relies on reasons behind various aspects of behaviour. Simply put, it investigates the why and how of decision making, as compared to what, where, and when of quantitative research. Hence, the need is for smaller but focused samples rather than large and random samples. =ve meaning|meaning]] out of their experiences. It essentially is narrative-oriented and uses content analysis methods on selected levels of codicate periods of cold or warmth, but give little or no information as to the degree of temperature variation. Other indicators – dates of harvest, first flowering of plants – produce information somewhere between qualitative and quantitative. In non-technical terms, no matter what the context (whether scientific, philosophical, legal, etc) a narrative is a story, an interpretation of some aspect of the world that is historically and culturally grounded and shaped by human personality (per Walter Fisher). ...
Content analysis (also called: textual analysis) is a standard methodology in the social sciences on the subject of communication content. ...
History
Qualitative research approaches began to gain recognition in the 1970s. The very phrase 'qualitative research' was until then marginalized as a discipline of anthropology or sociology, and terms like ethnography, fieldwork, participant observation and Chicago school (sociology) approach were used instead. During the 1970s and 1980s qualitative research began to be used in other disciplines, and became a dominant - or at least significant - type of research in the fields of women's studies, disability studies, education studies, social work studies, information studies, management studies, nursing service studies, human service studies and others. In the late 1980s and 1990s after a spate of criticisms from the quantitative side, new methods of qualitative research have been designed, to address the problems with reliability and imprecise modes of data analysis.[Taylor, 1998] The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ...
Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphein = writing) refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. ...
Fieldwork refers to scientific activity conducted in the field, outside the laboratory, of subject matter in an as-found state, by anthropologists, geologists, botanists, archaeologists or others who study the natural or human world. ...
Participant observation is a major research strategy which aims to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals (such as a religious, occupational, or deviant group) and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment. ...
In sociology and, later, criminology, the Chicago School (sometimes described as the Ecological School) refers to the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere. ...
Womens studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. ...
Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field of study, which is focused on the contributions, experiences, history, and culture of people with disabilities. ...
A German classroom, circa 1930s. ...
Reliability concerns quality or consistency. ...
Data analysis is the act of transforming data with the aim of extracting useful information and facilitating conclusions. ...
Overview In the social sciences, qualitative research is a broad term that describes research that focuses on how individuals and groups view and understand the world and construct meaning out of their experiences. Qualitative research methods are sometimes used together with quantitative research methods to gain deeper understanding of the causes of social phenomena, or to help generate questions for further research. Unlike quantitative methods, qualitative research methods place little importance on developing statistically valid samples, or on searching for statistical support for hypotheses. The social sciences are groups of academic disciplines that study the human aspects of the world. ...
Quantitative research is based on the numerical representation of observations for the purpose of describing and explaining the phenomena. ...
A graph of a bell curve in a normal distribution showing statistics used in educational assessment, comparing various grading methods. ...
Instead, qualitative research focuses on the understanding of research phenomena in situ; that is, within their naturally-occurring context(s). One aim of the qualitative researcher is to tease out the meaning(s) the phenomena have for the actors or participants. Quantitative studies, however, may also observe phenomena in situ and address issues of meaning, and one criticism of this approach to qualitative research is that the definitions offered of it do not distinguish it adequately from quantitative research (for more on this issue, and about the debate over the merits of qualitative and quantitative approaches, see qualitative psychological research). In situ (in place in Latin), a term used in: biology, where it means to examine the phenomenon exactly in place where it occurs (without removing it in some special medium etc. ...
In the broadest sense qualitative research is research which uses only dichotomous data — that is, data which can take only the values 0 (zero) and 1 (one). ...
Generally (though there are exceptions), qualitative research studies rely on three basic data gathering techniques: participant observation, interview, and social artifact (usually, documents) content analysis (Wolcott, 1995, 1999). Each of these techniques represents a continuum of from less to more structured (Adler & Adler, 1987; DeWalt & DeWalt, 2002) Various studies or particular techniques may rely more heavily on one data gathering technique or another. Participant observation is a major research strategy which aims to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals (such as a religious, occupational, or deviant group) and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment. ...
interview An interview is a conversation between two or more people where questions are asked to obtain information from the interviewee. ...
Social artifact is any product of individuals or groups (social beings) or of their social behaviour. ...
Content analysis (also called: textual analysis) is a standard methodology in the social sciences on the subject of communication content. ...
Epistemologically qualitative methods insist that we should not invent the viewpoint of the actor, and should only attribute to them ideas about the world they actually hold, in order that we can truly understand their motives, reasons and actions.(Becker, 1996) It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Knowledge. ...
Applications Though it had its genesis in the fields of journalism, anthropology, and sociology, qualitative research has burgeoned into and been taken up by many fields. Anthropology contributed to the field with its development of the research method of ethnography — a type of cultural translation (Boas, 1943; Malinowski, 1922/1961). Qualitative research in sociology, especially in the U.S., has its roots in the Chicago School (Adler & Adler, 1987). Journalism is a discipline of collecting, analyzing, verifying, and presenting information regarding current events, trends, issues and people. ...
Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθÏωπος, human or person) consists of the study of humanity (see genus Homo). ...
Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ...
Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphein = writing) refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. ...
Some of the different methods included under the umbrella of qualitative research, therefore, include: ethnography, ethnology, oral life history, case study, focus groups, conversation analysis, and portraiture. Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphein = writing) refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. ...
Ethnology (greek ethnos: (non-greek, barbarian) people) is a genre of anthropological study, involving the systematic comparison of the folklore, beliefs and practices of different societies. ...
Case studies involve a particular method of research. ...
A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their attitude towards a product, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging. ...
Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated to CA), known in the U.K. as Spoken Discourse Analysis, is the study of talk in interaction. ...
Self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh A portrait is a painting, photograph, or other artistic representation of a person. ...
Qualitative research has gained in popularity, especially due to the linguistic or subjective turn taking hold across the globe (Giddens, 1990). The social sciences, especially, as well as laypeople, have more readily accepted a subjective (as opposed to an objective or objectivist) ontology. Its practitioners often believe that qualitative research is especially well-suited to getting at the subjective qualities of the lived world, although this belief is far from universally accepted. Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. ...
This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
Objectivity has several meanings: Objectivity (philosophy) Objectivity (journalism) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek , genitive : of being (part. ...
Many forms of qualitative analysis are labour-intensive. A number of software packages have been developed with the aim of reducing the load and systematising the task. Commercially available packages include Qualrus, Atlas.ti, NVivo, and NUD*ist; open source or free packages including AnSWR homepage and Transana. Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ...
Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
Because of its emphasis on in-depth knowledge and elaboration of images and concepts, qualitative methods have been viewed as particularly useful for the areas of social research like "giving voice" to marginalized groups, formulation of new interpretations of historical and cultural significance of various events and advancing theory as in-depth, empirical qualitative studies may capture important facts missed by more general, quantitative studies. Such investigations usually focus on a primary case, on the commonalities among separate instances of the same phenomenon identified through analytic induction, or on parallel phenomena identified through theoretical sampling. (Ragin, 1994). Social research refers to research conducted by social scientists (primarily within sociology, but also within other disciplines such as social policy, human geography, social anthropology and education). ...
Marginalized group in sociology refers to various groups that are outside of mainstream - like the homeless, geeks, punks, skinheads, as well as minorities (sexual, national, etc. ...
Analytic induction refers to a systematic examination of similarities between various social phenomena in order to develop concepts or ideas. ...
Theoretical sampling is a term coined by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss in 1967 in the context of social research to describe the process of choosing new research sites or research cases to compare with one that has already been studied. ...
References - Adler, P. A. & Adler, P. (1987). Membership roles in field research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
- Becker, Howard S., The epistemology of qualitative research. University of Chicago Press, 1996. 53-71. [from Ethnography and human development : context and meaning in social inquiry / edited by Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder]
- Boas, Franz (1943). Recent anthropology. Science, 98, 311-314, 334-337.
- Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research ( 2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
- DeWalt, K. M. & DeWalt, B. R. (2002). Participant observation. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
- Fischer, C.T. (Ed.) (2005). Qualitative research methods for psychologists: Introduction through empirical studies. Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-088470-4.
- Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). "Five Misunderstandings About Case Study Research." Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 2, April 2006, pp. 219-245.
- Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Kaminski, Marek M. 2004. Games Prisoners Play. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11721-7 http://webfiles.uci.edu/mkaminsk/www/book.html
- Malinowski, B. (1922/1961). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E. P. Dutton.
- Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research & evaluation methods ( 3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
- Charles C. Ragin, Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method, Pine Forge Press, 1994, ISBN 0-8039-9021-9
- Steven J. Taylor, Robert Bogdan, Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods, Wiley, 1998, ISBN 0-471-16868-8
- Wolcott, H. F. (1995). The art of fieldwork. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
- Wolcott, H. F. (1999). Ethnography: A way of seeing. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Howard Saul Becker was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 18, 1928. ...
Franz Boas Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 22, 1942) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the Father of American Anthropology. A German by birth, Boas worked for most of his life in North America. ...
See also Analytic induction refers to a systematic examination of similarities between various social phenomena in order to develop concepts or ideas. ...
Case studies involve a particular method of research. ...
INTRODUCTION: Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. ...
Grounded theory is a general research method for social sciences developed by the sociologists Barney Glaser (b. ...
Quantitative research is based on the numerical representation of observations for the purpose of describing and explaining the phenomena. ...
Qualitative research is a set of research techniques, used in marketing and the social sciences, in which data are obtained from a relatively small group of respondents and not analyzed with statistical techniques. ...
In the broadest sense qualitative research is research which uses only dichotomous data — that is, data which can take only the values 0 (zero) and 1 (one). ...
Morphological analysis is a technique developed by Fritz Zwicky (1966, 1969) for exploring all the possible solutions to a multi-dimensional, non-quantified problem complex. ...
A common misunderstanding about case study research is that one cannot generalize from a case study. ...
Theoretical sampling is a term coined by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss in 1967 in the context of social research to describe the process of choosing new research sites or research cases to compare with one that has already been studied. ...
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