Flashcards
PSR Lecture 4 - Qualitative data generation
Cards in this deck (7)
- 1What is qualitative research? o A focus on text as data, and on what people say and do i.e., in interviews o Focuses on what people say in interviews and focus groups o Also focuses on what people do through observing them o Aims to describe action from the participants’ point-of-viewo Aims to describe ‘what is going on’
o Qualitative research asks ‘why?’ and ‘how?
o Quantitative (survey) research measures ‘how much?’ and ‘to what extent?’ - 2—Both are crude characterizations, and the world of research is much more complex than a comparison between positivism on the one hand and interpretivism on the other. But they're useful as a way of contrasting how qualitative and quantitative methods might differ in their approach.
Social sciences are more associated with interpretivism. - 3When to use qualitative methods? o The topic is relatively new – hypothesis generating o The topic is a complex social question – unpacking puzzles o The topic is not amenable to experimentation or quantificationKey orientating features in qualitative approaches
o A focus on interpretation and understanding (less a focus on explanation or testing)
o Recognition of multiple perspectives on the world, on risk and health, on health practices on interventions and what they mean, and so on out there. Rather than a singular, universal truth there is a multiverse of realities, a multiverse of interpretation, and qualitative research enables us to map, describe and learn from these.
o A focus on situation and context, and how these alter perspective and interpretation and how the meanings of action are very much context based rather than universal
o An interest in process, in how things emerge, in how things become and how fluidity according to their situation and context - 4Methods of data generation: o interviews o group interviews, focus group discussions o observations o documents o visualisations and mappingIt's not necessarily possible to maintain neutrality or to erase any influence between the researcher and the participant. There's always interaction going on of some kind. And so it's perhaps more important to be aware of that, to be reflective to that and to make a note of what impact it might be having on the data, which is co-produced.
- 5o What data do interviews produce? Accounts of perspective and experience as well as data on how contexts shape talk and action o How are interviews and their data shaped by their contexts? Accounts are always coproduced, shaped by the interactions and relations between participants as well as the interview occasion and setting, and social context.Generating data:
-Focus group interviews
-Walk and talks
-Mapping (experience/emotion and body maps)
-Mixed methods - 6Different methods both conceal as well as reveal different aspects of the phenomena under study. And so by joining methods up in combination or working across different methods of data generation, we can generate deeper and richer understandings of a topic. Jennifer Mason concludes that by combining different methods which co-produce and generate data in slightly different ways, helps produce a multidimensional picture of, in this case, family life.
- 7In summary: o Interviews capture the social meanings of actions ‘in context’ from participant perspectives o Data is generated through social interaction as well as shaped by setting and situation o Interviews comprise what people say about what they think, experience and do, and thus function as ‘accounts’ o Qualitative research seeks to generate hypotheses as well as concepts, and sampling therefore proceeds theoretically, T Qualitative data are always accounts of action which are generated in a particular context. And overall, I would like to emphasize, therefore, how qualitative research has an exploratory as well as hypothesis-generating flavour in terms of how it proceeds.
Information
- Description
- Flashcard 1
- Created by
- -- --
- Views
- 0
- History
-
- Created by -- -- · Dec 19, 2021
- Copied by -- -- · Dec 19, 2021
- Rating