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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). In psychological research this definition has been restricted further. In psychology qualitative research has come to be defined as research whose findings are not arrived at by statistical or other quantitative procedures. The term qualitative research has different meanings in different fields, with the social science usage the most well-known. ...
Data is the plural of datum. ...
Psychology (ancient Greek: psyche = soul or mind, logos/-ology = study of) is an academic and applied field involving the study of mind and behavior. ...
The topics below are usually included in the area of interpreting statistical data. ...
This definition, however, is entirely negative, describing qualitative research by what it lacks rather than by what it possesses. Absence of a characteristic is not itself a defining characteristic — journalism, for example, does not estimate parameters or test null hypotheses, but one would scarcely claim that it is a form of psychological research. If qualitative research has some goal other than estimating parameters or testing, the important issue is what that goal is. Qualitative psychological researchers have described other characteristics of qualitative research which they believe also distinguish it from so-called quantitative psychological research. A parameter is a measurement or value on which something else depends. ...
In statistics, a null hypothesis is a hypothesis set up to be nullified or refuted in order to support an alternative hypothesis. ...
A parameter is a measurement or value on which something else depends. ...
Quantitative psychological research is psychological research which performs statistical estimation or statistical inference. ...
Goals attributed to qualitative psychological research
To many researchers the goal of qualitative psychological research is to develop hypotheses or theory. The crucial question here is the definitions of hypothesis or theory. If what is meant are hypotheses or theories which can be tested by quantitative statistical methods, then the definition is operational and objective. However, it is not universally accepted. Many practitioners reject quantitative methods outright. Other goals have therefore been proposed for qualitative research. In statistics, a null hypothesis is a hypothesis set up to be nullified or refuted in order to support an alternative hypothesis. ...
Theory has a number of distinct meanings in different fields of knowledge, depending on the context and their methodologies. ...
An operational definition of a quantity is a specific process whereby it is measured. ...
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. ...
For example, qualitative research is often said to be naturalistic. That is, its goal is to understand behaviour in a natural setting. However, quantitative research models and techniques may be used for the same purpose.
Two other goals attributed to qualitative research are understanding a phenomenon from the perspective of the research participant and understanding the meanings people give to their experience. Again, however, quantitative research may be conducted for the same purposes.
Qualitative research is sometimes said to have as its goal the understanding of the sample studied, rather than generalizing from the sample to the population. However, quantitative research may also refrain from generalizing to the population (in educational research for example, the ability to generalize is often extremely limited, and studies often restrict themselves to drawing conclusions about the sample studied). Furthermore, this goal does not account for the renunciation of statistical analysis, which helps researchers to understand samples. Educational research is research which investigates the behaviour of pupils, students, teachers, and other participants in schools and other educational institutions. ...
Giving voice to marginalized groups and interpreting historically or culturally significant events are two other goals attributed to qualitative research which do not distinguish it from quantitative research and to which statistical analysis is relevant.
Other descriptions which may be taken as descriptions of the goals of qualitative psychological research tend to stipulate that the research should be carried out in a certain way. That is, in these definitions qualitative research is not defined by its results (that is, functionally) but by its procedures (that is, causally).
Qualitative psychological research is often said to be inductive. This seems to mean that the research is non-evaluative rather than that it depends on inductive logic in the usual sense. However, a reasonable argument could be made that quantitative research is often non-evaluative in the same sense. This article is about induction in philosophy and logic. ...
Qualitative psychological research emphasizes fieldwork, and this emphasis has been offered as a distinguishing mark. However, quantitative researchers also do 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. ...
Qualitative psychological research is also described as holistic. That is, qualitative researchers believe in studying phenomena in their entirety rather than concentrating on narrow aspects of the phenomena defined as independent or dependent variables. However, this assertion is questionable. Karl Popper has argued that we cannot know that we are studying the totality of any phenomenon and that consequently we cannot study phenomena holistically. Certainly qualitative researchers have provided few examples of research which attempts to study a phenomenon exhaustively. For one thing, conducting such research would require an ability which no one has, specifically the knowledge of enough disciplines to conduct such research. For example, qualitative researchers do not necessarily assess the medical conditions of human participants, but those medical conditions may easily influence their behaviour. Holism (from holos, a Greek word meaning whole) is the idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its components alone. ...
In experimental design, a dependent variable is a variable dependent on another variable (called the independent variable). ...
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994), was an Austrian and British philosopher of science and a professor at the London School of Economics. ...
Other proposed distinctions between qualitative and "quantitative" (that is, statistically-based) psychological research are also questionable – that qualitative research is more intense, for example, that in qualitative research the researcher is the primary collector and analyst of data, that qualitative research is "richly descriptive" (statistical analysis which can position a phenomenon accurately within a distribution certainly has some claim to be considered richly descriptive), or that quantitative researchers assume that researchers do not influence their data (the influence of the experimenter on participants is an important research topic in quantitative psychology, as is the influence of test administrators on test-takers).
Qualitative psychological research is often treated as the opposite of quantitative research. Qualitative analysis, however, is at the very least still descriptive research, and relevant quantitative psychometric concerns such as its reliability and validity are critical to its utility. For information regarding the parapsychology phenomenon of distance knowledge, see psychometry. ...
Origins and methods The philosophical bases of qualitative psychological research are found in phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and naturalistic behaviourism. Its research methods are derived from ethnography and anthropology. Look up Phenomenology in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Phenomenology is a current in philosophy that takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as its starting point and tries to extract the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. ...
Ethnomethodology (literally, the study of peoples methods) is a sociological discipline which focuses on the way people make sense of the world and display their understandings of it. ...
Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is an approach to psychology based on the proposition that behavior is interesting and worthy of scientific research. ...
Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphein = writing) refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. ...
Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθÏωπος, humane) consists of the study of humankind (see genus Homo). ...
In psychology, the research methods commonly classified as qualitative include:
The data collected by researchers using these techniques consist of: Participant observation emerged as the principal approach to ethnographic research by anthropologists in the twentieth century. ...
interview An interview is a conversation between two or more people where questions are asked to obtain information about the interviewee. ...
Case studies involve a particular method of research. ...
Content analysis (also called: textual analysis) is a standard methodology in the social sciences on the subject of communication content. ...
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. ...
- the results of open-ended interviews
- notes of direct observation
- written documents (answers to questionnaires, diaries, program records, and so on)
After collecting data quantitative psychological researchers then organize them into themes, categories, and case examples. Their goal is to examine their data in depth and in detail without being constrained by predetermined analytical categories. interview An interview is a conversation between two or more people where questions are asked to obtain information from the interviewee. ...
Most psychological researchers probably use both types of method. In particular, qualitative methods are widely used as exploratory methods; the results of qualitative analysis are used to design quantitative research which tests null hypotheses derived from the qualitative observations. In statistics, a null hypothesis is a hypothesis set up to be nullified or refuted in order to support an alternative hypothesis. ...
Arguments against quantitative psychological research Nevertheless, many other psychological researchers reject statistically-based research in favour of qualitative research. They argue that statistically-based research is invalid because it ignores context and concentrates on tiny parts of phenomena rather than on the phenomena as wholes. They also argue that quantitative research assumes a unitary reality which does not exist, since every researcher's perception of reality is influenced by his or her unique perceptions and predispositions.
The validity of these criticisms of quantitative research may be questioned. For example, much research on intelligence is conducted without the researchers assuming that they are actually measuring a real entity called intelligence. Instead they are assessing a hypothetical construct, and the value of their assessment will depend on the utility of the construct. On the other hand, many quantitative researchers, and especially many studying intelligence, have represented and interpreted their research as if it was research about an actual entity. Intelligence is usually said to involve mental capabilities such as the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn. ...
Popper's argument against the possibility of holism is also relevant here. but if the qualitative researchers' assertion is taken simply as an assertion that qualitative research studies more aspects of a phenomenon than quantitative research an empirical assessment of the claim could be made.
Quantitative psychological researchers often incorporate large numbers of independent variables in multiple linear regression studies, so establishing this claim empirically might be difficult. However, multiple linear regression studies may demonstrate another deficiency which qualitative researchers ascribe to quantitative research. Researchers using multiple linear regression often ignore such context as interactions between the independent variables, and ignoring these interactions reduces the stability of their findings. Such studies constitute classic examples of a deficiency which qualitative researchers ascribe to quantitative research, although the adequacy of qualitative methods in analyzing large numbers of variables has not been substantiated. And regardless of the deficiencies of many quantitative researchers, it is still possible to use multiple linear regression analysis judiciously. In statistics, linear regression is a method of estimating the conditional expected value of one variable y given the values of some other variable or variables x. ...
Many qualitative psychological researchers reject the traditional psychometric idea of validity — that is, the idea that measures should reflect differences in other logically related measures. Since they deny the existence of an external reality independent of personal interpretation they consequently reject the idea of assessing differences in it. However, many people have concluded that accepting the premisses of this argument leads to the logical conclusion that research of any kind is futile, and other qualitative researchers have developed non-quantitative criteria for assessing reliability and validity.
These criteria, however, are based on debatable assumptions. For example, the traditional psychometric concept of reliability has been rejected by many qualitative researchers in part because some types of reliability require repeated observation, which the qualitative researchers consider impossible in any useful sense. They have proposed a qualitative analog called dependability, which requires researchers to explain how changes in context produced changes in observations.
However, claiming that repeated observation is impossible does not demonstrate that the traditional psychometric concept lacks utility, even if repeated observation is in fact impossible. Furthermore, requiring researchers to explain how changes in context produced changes in observations raises the psychometric issues of reliability and validity again — researchers cannot explain changes with invalid measures (including classification systems), and valid measures must be reliable by definition.
Confirmability is a qualitative concept analogous to the concept of objectivity in quantitative research. It is the degree to which research results can be confirmed by other researchers, while objectivity is the obtaining of identical results by different investigators. A quantitative test is objective, for example, if different testers assign the same scores to the same test-takers. Again, quantitative techniques of correlation would seem to be relevant to the assessment of confirmability. In probability theory and statistics, correlation, also called correlation coefficient, is a numeric measure of the strength of linear relationship between two random variables. ...
Transferability has been proposed as a qualitative substitute for psychometric validity. Research findings are transferable to the extent to which they can be generalized to settings other than the one in which they were made. This definition, however, does not imply that conventional psychometric methods of assessing validity are not useful for this purpose, nor that they are less useful than qualitative methods.
Status in psychology The prevailing opinion in psychology is probably that both approaches offer important benefits, that rejecting one or the other means renouncing some of those benefits, and that the most useful debate is about the circumstances in which the two approaches may most profitably be used.
See also 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. ...
External links - Qualitative methods of social research
- Dr. Isadore Newman an authority on Regression, Research and Testing Techniques
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