What is Qualitative Research?
A broad designation for a variety of approaches to evaluating social and educational programs, policies, projects, and technologies that make use of typically ‘qualitative’ methods for generating data (e.g., unstructured interviewing, observation, and document analysis) and non statistical means of analyzing and interpreting those data. Schwandt, T., (2001) Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Qualitative Research http://www.okstate.edu/ag/agedcm4h/academic/aged5980a/5980/qualrsch/QUALRSCH/ An Introduction to Qualitative Research http://www.uea.ac.uk/care/elu/Issues/Research/Res1Cont.html Qualitative Research Consultants Association http://www.qrca.org/default.
Qualitative research is a process of naturalistic inquiry that seeks in-depth understanding of social phenomena within their natural setting. It focuses on the “why” rather than the “what” of social phenomena and relies on the direct experiences of human beings as meaning-making agents in their every day lives. Rather than by logical and statistical procedures, qualitative researchers use multiple systems of inquiry for the study of human phenomena including biography, case study, historical analysis, discourse analysis, ethnography, grounded theory, and phenomenology. The three major focus areas are individuals, societies and cultures, and language and communication and include. Although there are many methods of inquiry in qualitative research, the common assumptions are that knowledge is subjective rather than objective and that the researcher learns from the participants in order to understand the meaning of their lives. To ensure rigor and trustworthiness, the researcher attempts
Qualitative research utilizes methods that seek to discern the quality — as opposed to the quantity — of its subject. It is, therefore, more often concerned with explaining the why and how of a phenomenon rather than the what, when and where. Qualitative research methods are most often utilized in fields such as anthropology, the humanities and sociology, although each of these fields can be studied through quantitative methods as well. Since qualitative research is exploratory and focuses on discerning the why of things, such as human behavior, rather than the what of the natural world, it is often criticized for being too subjective. Many make the counter-argument, however, that since qualitative methods are hypothesis generating, they are not only just as valuable as quantitative methods but necessary for the production of theoretical models which come to inform the direction of quantitative research methods. Data collection and analysis is another way that quantitative and qualitat
There is no universal definition of qualitative research. In the literature of social science and applied professional fields, such terms as interpretive, naturalistic, constructivist, ethnographic, and fieldwork are variously employed to designate the broad collection of approaches that we call simply qualitative research (Locke et al., 2000). Qualitative research methods were developed in the social sciences to enable researchers to study social and cultural phenomena ( Myers, 1997). It is data that is usually not in the form of numbers. Qualitative research is an inductive approach, and its goal is to gain a deeper understanding of a person’s or group’s experience. According to Ross (1999), qualitative approaches to research are based on a “world view” which is holistic and has the following beliefs: 1) there is not a single reality. 2) reality based upon perceptions that are different for each person and change over time. 3) what we know has meaning only within a given situation of
Qualitative research is a form of social inquiry. It is important to understand that qualitative research is not a single type of social inquiry. Qualitative research emerges from a number of different research traditions or disciplines. As a result, there is great variation in approaches for doing qualitative research, and these approach are often in conflict.
