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Qualitative Study

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4 views

Qualitative Study

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rakibmia019090
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Qualitative Study

 Immy Holloway states that Qualitative Research is “a form of social inquiry


that focuses on the way people interpret and make sense of their
experiences and the world in which they live”.
 Focusing upon the social reality of individuals, groups and cultures,
qualitative research is used in the exploration of behavior and the
perspectives and experiences of people studied.
 The basis of Qualitative Research lies in the interpretive approach to social
reality.
 Researchers who wish to explore the meaning or describe and provide an
in-depth understanding of human experiences such as pain, grief, hope or
caring, or phenomena such as female genital mutilation, would find it
difficult to quantify the data.
 The goal of qualitative research is to understand rather than explain and
predict.
 In these study designs, qualitative methods are used to gain access to the
study population, to comply with ethical concerns, to collect and analyse
data, and to interpret it.
 Qualitative Research is also called, naturalistic inquiry, field research, case
study approach, interpretive (or interpretative) research, participant
observation, interviewing and ethnography.
Key features of qualitative research include the following:
 Research is conducted in the real-life situation.
 The focus is more on the process, and less on the product.
 The purpose of qualitative research is an in-depth description and
understanding of peoples’ beliefs, actions and events in all their
complexity.
 The rationale of research is not to generalise the findings, but rather to
understand them in context.
 The research is often inductive in nature and generates further questions
and hypotheses.
 The researcher is seen as the main instrument and is subjectively involved
in the research process.
Purposes of Qualitative Methods:
 To emphasize on quality rather than quantity by understanding why do
people do the things they do.
 To find out how behaviors, systems and relationships are maintained or
change.
 To understand how social organizations function and ideology behind use
of qualitative/PRA techniques.
 To stimulate action-experience-learning cycle of participants and
community.
Types of qualitative research:
1. Phenomenology
 Phenomenological studies examine human experience through
descriptions provided by the people involved, and answer the
question: ‘What is it like to experience this or that?’ These
experiences are called ‘lived experiences’.
 The purpose of phenomenological research, then, is to describe
what people experience with regard to certain phenomena, as well
as how they interpret these experiences.
 Phenomenologists view the person as integral to the environment.
 The phenomena make up the world of experiences that are studied
as they are and as they occur. Like other quantitative and
qualitative approaches, the phenomenological research strategy
consists of a set of steps which guide researchers in their study of
phenomena.
2. Ethnography
 Ethnography is a qualitative approach which grew out of social
anthropology and the study of the culture and customs of groups of
people.
 The focus is thus the social and cultural world of a particular group.
 Ethnographies are the written reports of a culture from the
perspective of insiders.
 Ethnography requires spending considerable amounts of time in the
setting (or community) in order to observe and gather data of, for
example, aspects of the way of life of a particular culture.
 An underlying assumption is that people’s behaviour can only be
understood within the cultural context in which it occurs.
 This differs from phenomenology, which focuses on the meaning of
an experience rather than on the role of culture in shaping the
experience.
 However, the main techniques employed are participant
observation and unstructured interviews.
 Ethnographers interview people who are most knowledgeable about
the culture being studied.

3. Grounded theory
 Grounded theory research is an inductive research approach.
 Its findings are grounded in the concrete world experienced by the
participants and interpreted at a more abstract theoretical level
(Grove, Burns & Gray, 2013).
 Charmaz (2014) explains that grounded theory has a subjective
approach to knowledge development due to the involvement in the
subjective world of participants.
 Both researcher and participants contribute to the interpretation of
meanings and actions.
 As grounded theory is a qualitative metho d ology and inductive in
nature, the researcher does not begin the research with a
preconceived idea.
 In its simplest form, this theory emerges from data grounded in the
observation and interpretation of phenomena.
 Data collection techniques are the same as in most other forms of
qualitative research: participant observation and unstructured
interviews.
 Observations are made about the structure and patterns noted in
the social environment, and people’s interactions are studied
through interviews.

4. Philosophical inquiry
 Grove, Gray and Burns (2015) explain philosophies, as rational
intellectual explorations of truths or principles of conduct,
knowledge or being that describe different viewpoints on what
reality entails, which ethical values and principles should guide our
practice, and how knowledge is developed.
 The purpose of philosophical inquiry is to perform research using
intellectual analysis to clarify meaning, make values manifest,
identify ethics and study the nature of knowledge (Burns & Grove,
2011).
 Research which focuses on philosophical questions is difficult to
design and pursue.
 Many health sciences research textbooks do not include this type of
design, yet philosophical questions abound for healthcare
professionals.
 For example:
 What is nursing/physiotherapy/occupational therapy?
 What are the boundaries of these sciences, and which phenomena
belong to them?
 Which thoughts, ideas and values are important to these sciences?
 What is the meaning and purpose of human life, if any?
 How is free will to be interpreted?
 What is the significance of dignity, and what does it mean to be
compassionate and caring?
 Healthcare professionals confront many philosophical questions
relating to ethics, such as obligations, rights, duties, concepts of
right and wrong, conscience, justice, intention and responsibility.
 These questions can be divided into three categories: foundational
studies, philosophical analysis and ethical analysis.
 The philosophical researcher considers an idea or issue from every
possible perspective through exploring the literature, examining
conceptual meaning, raising questions, proposing answers and
suggesting the implications of those answers. The research is
guided by the questions.

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