[Instructor] Hi, this is the first part
of the two-part qualitative research lecture.
Hello, everyone.
This is the lecture for qualitative research.
It's sort of a flyover of a number of methods,
including the first two that we'll be doing
as part of our research project in class,
building on our lit review.
The next two are observation and interviews,
and this is sort of a flyover on how to do it
and some of the key considerations of qualitative research.
By way of overview,
we're going to talk about how qualitative research
is part of mixed methods,
the balance between the insider
and the outsider view, grounded theory,
which is a way to develop theory from your data,
we'll talk about the interview and question structure,
some of the options that you have,
some pros and cons and guidelines,
we'll talk about semi-structured interviews,
which is maybe the most common type, and finally,
the strengths and weaknesses of qualitative research,
as well as a bit on how to provide evidence
of rigor in your work.
Qualitative methods often fit very well
into the kind of mixed methods approach
that we will be doing in this class.
A tried and true way is, to start off as we will,
with a lit review where you bring yourself
up to date on what we already know and try to build
on what's already been done,
identifying a research gap
and using mixed methods to fill in that gap.
Next, we use qualitative to sort of get our mind around it,
to understand what are the big issues
that we are dealing with,
and as well as to gain an understanding
of what key stakeholders,
what our research subjects think and believe,
to allow them to express it in their own words
so you can really get a sense
and a feel of what are the big issues out there,
and then in the third step,
you can use quantitative
to see how often do those themes that we identified
in part two arise, sort of count and correlate,
so count how many of a larger sample feel the same way,
as well as to start to look at correlations
between answers of how likely of someone who feels strongly
about one part of it
may or may not feel strongly about another.
By way of intro to qualitative research,
we all do this every day.
We look at what, we do observations,
we do informal interviews, we talk to people,
we try to understand things,
and so this is a process that most of us
are at least somewhat familiar with.
We ask people things
and we get their answers in their own words
and try to understand how they think and feel about things.
Qualitative research generally deals
with what are the perspectives of our research subjects?
What are the perspectives of people who are engaged
in the issue that we are studying?
We generally tend to look
at things like attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, opinions,
so our goal here is to really understand,
how are people experiencing the phenomenon
that we are studying?
There are considerations that must be made that,
since you are in the middle of the action so to speak,
that you're not doing a survey from far away.
When you're doing observations or interviews,
you are right there.
So there's many ways in which you could potentially bias
or upset the process.
If you're doing an observation,
you don't wanna make it obvious
that you're doing an observation and looking
over the person's shoulder and staring at them
and making notes when you are doing interviews,
that you don't wanna sort of lead them on
and have them answer the question
in ways that they think you wanna hear or will please you
or will make them look good,
that you really want them
to behave and to answer sort of truthfully and naturally,
and we'll talk about some
of the strategies that you can do to do that.
One way of thinking about it is two sorts of perspective:
the emic perspective and the etic perspective.
So the emic perspective is when you are truly immersed
and you really try to see it
from the point of view of the person,
so you sort of become an insider,
and you really try to immerse yourself in their experience
and try to understand it from their point of view,
and that's sort of the most valid perspective
and get the most valid information
because you're really immersing
and really understanding what they think is true
and how they experience things
versus the etic perspective where you are more
of an outsider and you wanna see
whether their perspectives would hold true
in other contexts and that therefore,
have a more reliable view,
and when we do observation,
I'm gonna speak about this a bit more.
Note that, in my view, objectivity is a direction,
it's not a destination,
that I believe that it is impossible
to be completely objective,
especially about any sort of complex social phenomenon,
but we can do our best to judge what they say
on their own merits,
use the reflexivity sort of approach
that we talked about a few classes ago,
and one thing that is important, again,
is how involved to be.
To what extent should you contradict
or, you know, say, "Well, actually, that's not right,"
versus just sort of understand what they think
and be sort of dispassionate about it?
And this makes me think of an experience that I had.
So I was not a qualitative researcher at the time,
but I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1990s.
Some of you may know that.
I was in Senegal, West Africa, and one day,
I was sitting there and talking
to my family and, well, I did on a number of occasions,
and two things emerged that it really shows
that what you believe to be true is really grounded
in your own experiences and your background.
So the first photo on top here that you see is
of an amulet, or of a juju,
it's like a charm,
and it's a leather pouch that they wear around their arms,
and it has a little bit
of the Quran written on it in a piece of paper,
and they believe that there are amulets such
that if you wear them, that you cannot be stabbed,
that it would stop a knife point from entering you,
that it would make you safe.
On the other hand, I was talking one night with my family,
we were outside looking at the beautiful stars and moon,
as with very little light pollution there
the skies were amazing, and was talking about, oh,
there have been humans on the moon.
In fact, many years ago, people from my country, the US,
went up in a spaceship,
that they didn't really know what that meant
so I said something like an airplane,
and walked on the moon,
and they were like, "No way.
Like, there's no way that that happened."
Like, they thought that I was completely full of crap,
and it's really interesting that,
I'm imagining that most
of you would probably see the world much like I do
because many of us were born in the same nation,
were raised under the same basic culture,
and I know that I think that
that amulet probably would not stop a knife blade,
and indeed that there were lunar landings
and that humans did walk on the moon,
but folks who lived
in another nation that grew up under another set
of knowledge and culture thought the complete opposite,
and so my point here is that your job, in many cases,
is not to hear the amulet story or the man
on the moon story and think,
these folks are so dumb,
these folks are so backwards,
but to really understand,
what do they believe and why,
and to to get a deep understanding of what they think
and judge it as data rather than judging it on,
(Instructor scoffing)
"Boy, aren't they dumb?"
Once you've collected the data,
then you can start to think
about how you will be analyzing it,
and we go back to a few classes ago,
the difference between deduction and induction.
So deduction, again, is this top down where we start
with some preexisting theory or hypothesis
and we see, do the data match
what we would deduce would,
our theory would suggest
would be the case, but more commonly,
we use induction where we start
with the data and see what sort of patterns emerge
and then base it on that,
build hypotheses and theories,
and this process of induction and developing a theory based
on the data is called grounded theory.
So grounded theory, I think it's something of a misnomer,
but I don't really love that term,
nobody asked me about it be before they started to use it,
but it's the idea that we use induction
and we create theory based
on ongoing analysis of qualitative data,
so we get data, we compare numerous incidents,
we see it from multiple viewpoints,
we step back and we reflect,
we try to find the relationships
among the themes and patterns within our data,
and try to come up with a theory
that is then grounded in the data.
So this method of induction
and finding a theory that is based on
the results of our research is called grounded theory.
This is the end
of part one of the qualitative research lecture,
so please go watch part two now.
Thank you.