Week 14 - Qualitative Inquiry

SOWK 459 Fall 2019 Planning: Class 14

Location: CBC Campus - Tuesday T-336 & SWL-220
Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:30-8:15
Week 14: 11/18/19 — 11/24/19
Reading Assignment: DeCarlo (2018) chapter 13
Topic and Content Area: Qualitative Research Methods
Assignments Due: Assignment 12: peer review research proposal is due Wednesday 11/20/19 at 11:55 PM via Moodle; Assignment 02: reading quiz for chapter 13 is due at 5:30 PM prior to class via My Heritage; Assignment 13: final paper literature review and research proposal is due Friday 11/22/19 at 11:55 PM via Chalk and Wire
Other Important Information: N/A

Agenda

• Students will describe the key elements of interpretive research including methods, sample selection, and data analysis.
• Students will analyze interpretive research.

The Interpretative Approach to Research

Positivistic Approach to Infidelity

Track the number of people who engage in infidelity and how often they stray.

Conduct a survey and look patterns among different variables defined at the start.

Interpretative Approach to Infidelity

Study the meaning attached to cheating and look for patterns and trends.

Interview cheaters:

• What comprises “cheating”?
• Is it sex, or texting someone of the opposite sex?
• Is there a continuum?
• What meaning do we make from these behaviors?

The Interpretative Approach to Research

Positivistic Approach to Prisons

Measure the conditions of federal prisons

Identify variables to measure conditions, such as square feet per inmate, number of hours in isolation, housing conditions,… etc.

Interpretative Approach to Prisons

Explore the experience of prisoners and/or guards and administrators.

Research participants would explain their experiences, and the researcher would assign meaning to them. She might look for themes across interviews to interpret the experiences of multiple research participants.

This is experience-near and in a context (prisons).

The Interpretive Approach to Research

http://www.ipia.utah.edu/imps/html/research.html

Interpretive methods focus on the meaning-making practices of human actors.  Rather than trying to define reality, interpretive methods explore how we make meaning, or interpret reality.

Called qualitative research in some disciplines, it is conducted from an “experience-near perspective” – the researcher does not start with concepts observed and measured with the senses. Rather, she allows concepts to emerge from encounters in “the field.”

Five Approaches to Interpretive Inquiry: Methodologies of Qualitative Research

• Case Study
• Ethnography
• Grounded theory
• Narrative inquiry
• Phenomenology

Five Approaches to Interpretive Inquiry: Methodologies of Qualitative Research

• Case Study
• Ethnography
• Grounded theory
• Narrative inquiry
• Phenomenology

Approach | Data Collection | Sample| Data Analysis | Final Product —- | —- | —- | —- | —- | —-

Narrative: Explore the life on an individual

• Interviews and documents
• Typically one (sometimes more) person
• “Restorying,” developing themes, often use chronology
• Narrative about the stories of an individual’s life

Phenomenology: Understand the essence of an experience

• Interviews, documents, observations
• Several individuals with the same lived experience
• Looking for significant statements, meaning units, describing the “essence”
• Description of the “essence” of an experience

Grounded Theory: Develop a theory from data from the field

• Interviews
• Typically 20 to 60 individuals
• Coding, looking for themes, tying themes into a theory
• Generation of a theory illustrated in a figure

Ethnography: Describe and interpret a culture-sharing group

• Primarily observations and interviews
• One culture-sharing group
• Deep description, identifying themes
• Description of how a culture-sharing group works

Case Study: Provide an in-depth description of a case or group of cases

• Multiple sources (interview, observation, documents, etc.)
• Event, program, or activity
• Describing the case, identifying themes (cross-case themes)
• Detailed analysis of one or more cases

Three Key Interpretative Methods

Participant Observation: The researcher observes participants in their natural environment, often times as a participant herself

In-depth Interview: The researcher asks several, open-ended questions to explore participants’ personal histories, experiences, and perspectives

Focus Group: The researcher asks in-depth questions of small groups of participants to explore their experiences, perspectives, and cultural norms

Characteristics of the Interpretive Approach

• Studies conducted in the “natural setting” of participants
• Variables cannot be controlled and experimentally manipulated
• The questions are not always completely defined when research begins
• Data collected are heavily influenced by the experiences and priorities of research participants (they participate in the process of research)
• Meanings are drawn from the data using processes that are natural/familiar (for example: observations and interviews rather than experiments)

Data Collection Principles

• Researcher must be aware of her own biases and intentional about describing them
• Data collection is often collegiate, where research participants share their stories and the researcher is up-front about her understanding/interpretation
• Many studies depend upon multiple sources of data (different groups of participants) and multiple collection methods (interviews and observation, and analysis of documents).

Methods for Making Meaning

The goal of an interpretive study is to identify relationships between the major themes that emerge from the data. How do we do this?

• Use diagraming and other visual techniques to spatially sort themes according to how related they are
• Look for missing links
• Count the number of times a theme appears
• Note contradictory evidence

Benefits and features of interviews

• Useful for exchanging complex information versus operational definitions
• You can ask follow-up questions
• People’s stories
• Lengthy explanations
• Participants can reflect out loud about their responses
• Studying processes

The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers

Interview Transcript – A Teacher’s Observations of Child Oppression

https://study.sagepub.com/node/31740/student-resources/chapter-5