Instructions are attached!

Instructions

Create a brief summary of the research method, and then design your plan to use to investigate your research topic.

Select a method and design appropriate for a PhD study.  PhD quantitative studies must demonstrate both internal and external validity (e.g., large, random samples, statistical power and representativeness). Qualitative studies must demonstrate validity within the context of the specific qualitative design (e.g., credibility, dependability, transferability, trustworthiness). Replication studies are not permitted. Your summary must address the following:

1. Note a specific method and design you plan to use in your research.

2. Describe and substantiate the appropriateness of the method and design to respond to the stated problem, purpose, and research questions.

3. Note how the proposed method and design accomplish the study goals, why the design is the optimum choice for the proposed research, and how the method aligns with the purpose and research questions. 

4. Provide appropriate foundational research method support for the proposed study design.

5. Explain the particular data gathering techniques and data analyses processes.  Sample size of the study population should be identified and must be appropriate and justified based on the nature of the study design. Quantitative analyses must include justified sample size determination. 

Length: 2-3 pages, not including title and reference pages

Your assignment should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards.

Doing Qualitative Research

Video Title: Doing Qualitative Research

Originally Published: 2015

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks, California, USA

ISBN: 9781506363448

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781506363448

(c) SAGE Publications Inc., 2015

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods.

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781506363448

JOHN CRESWELL: Well, let me talk a little bit about just doing qualitative research. [John Creswell,

Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska Lincoln] And I’m going to start with

what I’ve observed over the years of kind of the personal characteristics of people that make good

qualitative researchers. I actually put this into a talent test

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: for one of my classes. And I administered it the first night. And I found

out that was not a good idea, because people started dropping out the class. They felt they may not

have the talent. But I think there’s some characteristics of a talented qualitative researcher– some

personal ways of thinking about things.

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: For example, I think qualitative researchers are people that look for

the big picture. And my example is, if you’re standing at the entrance of the Rocky Mountain National

Park and you ask them, what do they see, the qualitative researchers are going to talk about the

panoramic view, the entire picture.

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: And the nonqualitative researchers are going to go to the individual

trees. So I think qualitative researchers are big-picture people. And they also would probably draw a

picture of this scene that they see. I think qualitative people are very visual people,

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: so that, in my books, I tend to include a lot of visuals for the qualitative

people. I think qualitative people see the detail that’s going on in life. They can construct how people

talk about something in great detail so that you’re almost placed

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: right in the setting. There’s even a qualitative word for this. It’s called

“verisimilitude.” And that is to make things absolutely real. So when you read a good qualitative study,

it’s as if you’re right there in the room. You know, if it’s a nursing home and you’re in the dining room

of a nursing home,

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: it’s just as if you’re right there and you can see the people seated

around. The portrait is so well detailed out that you’re transported to this new place. Qualitative

researchers like to write. And they’ve done a lot of writing.

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: So I often ask my students in the first class, how many of you keep

a personal journal for your writing? How many of you have joined a poetry group? What is the latest

nonfiction book that you’ve read, or fiction book?

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: Qualitative researchers like to do a lot of writing and can describe

situations in writing quite easily. Qualitative researchers also, I think, like making connections. In fact,

there was a well-known psychologist a few years ago

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: that wrote a study looking at the relationship between people that

were good qualitative researchers and how they tested on a test of the Miller’s analogy test, which

is where you start matching items up with lists. And the good qualitative people could do that quite

easily. I think they start looking for interconnections quite easily.

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: That’s a sign of good qualitative researcher. I think another sign of a

good qualitative researcher would be a person that allows things to emerge and unfold in research.

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Doing Qualitative Research

You know, none of this starting with hypotheses or a question and never varying from it, but starting

with a question

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: and then allowing it to change once they start learning from people.

That’s good qualitative research. So these are some of the kind of personal characteristics that I’ve

seen over the years. And then some people have written about,

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: what is qualitative research? What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research, I think, starts with wanting to listen to the views of the people that you’re talking

to. Setting aside the literature, setting aside your theories, setting aside what you expect to find,

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: and just listening to how people are talking about things. It’s the

participant view. Qualitative researchers also like the study to unfold in terms of emerging questions,

emerging data collection. You might start out with one question and, once you get out in the field,

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: find that it doesn’t work to answer what you want to learn. So you

change the question. You might even change the people that you talk to. That’s qualitative research.

So the question is very open-ended. What does it mean to participate in a school

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: in qualitative course? What does it mean? Very open-ended. And you

allow the participants to give responses back to that. Another thing about qualitative research is you

go out to the setting to gather your data. You know? It’s not this laboratory where you bring people in.

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: It’s not sending out a survey instrument 100 miles away that people

would fill out. No, you go to where the problem is occurring, to talk to people. We call that “going to

the setting” or the “context.” So you’ll go out into homes. You go out to places people work. Wherever

they’re experiencing this problem

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: that you’re looking at. That’s good qualitative research. Another thing

is, when you have this information from your– let’s say you do some interviews with people– how do

you go about analyzing that qualitatively? Well, in qualitative research what you do is you go from the

ground up– an inductive method

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: of data analysis. So you take your– you know, you do an interview.

You’ve got a transcript that was typed up after the interview, from the audiotaped interview. And you’ve

got this transcript. So you have the raw data of the transcript. And then what you do is you start

building broader and broader and broader

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: categories of information. Terms we use in qualitative research

would be you “code” the data. And then you can aggregate the codes into themes, and then maybe

the themes into larger dimensions. You see how I’m just kind of building up? Inductive reasoning,

inductive logic, in data analysis.

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: Another thing about qualitative research– it’s really quite fascinating–

is the researcher is present in the written report that comes together. In other words, you talk about

yourself and your experiences. You talk about your background and how that might have shaped the

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interpretation that you made. So they call qualitative research very “interpretive.”

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: Well, the researcher is looking at this transcript, shall we say, and

making some interpretation of what they see. And they talk about how their background shapes what

they see in that transcript and how it maybe informs their interpretation. So I’m a white male, and I’m

going

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: to bring maybe a male’s perspective to making an interpretation of

what’s in this transcript. There’s a term for this in qualitative research. It’s called “reflexivity”– being

reflexive. It’s a very important element of doing good qualitative research. And then one final thing

about qualitative

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: is, how do you write up the final report? You know, traditional

research is we have an introduction, we have a literature review, we have a methods, we have the

results, we have the discussion. Well, that format doesn’t always hold true in qualitative research.

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: We may start with the personal experiences of the researcher. I

worked on a project looking at, how do people view transplants in their life? And it starts by the

personal experiences of the doctor working with the patient about transplants. The title of that piece

is called

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: “Waiting for a Transplant.” So the format doesn’t follow the traditional.

It could be more of a literary storytelling, where you’re actually starting with the beginning of the story

and moving through the middle and on to the end, towards the end of the story. So we have what we

call a “flexible” writing structure,

JOHN CRESWELL [continued]: in qualitative research, that is somewhat difficult to see at first and to

think about, because people are so used to that formal structure. But it’s there in qualitative research.

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Doing Qualitative Research

Doing Qualitative Research

Introduction to Qualitative

Research Methods

Video Title:

Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods

Originally Published: 2017

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd

City: London, United Kingdom

ISBN: 9781473991958

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473991958

(c) SAGE Publications Ltd., 2017

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods.

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473991958

[Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods]

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE: Hi, I’m Dr. Denise Pope. And I am a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford

University Graduate School of Education. [Dr. Denise Pope, Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of

Education] And today, we are going to do a tutorial which is an introduction to qualitative research

methods. The overview of the major components of the qualitative research process really breaks

down into five main components–

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: the research design and problem formation step, sample

selection, data collection– and there’s a lot of different ways to do that– analysis, and then the data

representation and writing. These five components are used in all forms of qualitative research, and

they’re basically the basic building blocks for students who want to learn how to read and understand

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: qualitative research. Those are kind of the components that

you’re going to look for to know if someone did a good job, to know if it’s a rigorous piece, as well as

what you would do if you were actually going to conduct qualitative research. [Research Design] The

first component is really the research design.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: And this is very similar to quantitative research, as well.

You have to think about, what is the problem I’m attempting to solve here? What are my questions?

Basically, a lot of folks start out with a topic. So I know I want to do a research question that has to do

with classroom engagement, or gender in the classroom for instance.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: But that’s not a problem. That’s not going to help you decide

which form of research to use. So then you have to think about, what are my research questions?

What am I interested in learning more about in that general topic area of gender in the classroom or

engagement in the classroom? And that’s where you might go and do a literature review. You might

look at all the literature and all

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: the different research that’s come before you, and you might

look for a gap in the literature as to what you would want to study. The other thing that you have to

think about– and this is a little bit tricky– is something that we call in the research field a conceptual

framework. A conceptual framework is also sometimes called a theoretical framework. It’s the lens

that you bring to your research problem.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: So it may be a tentative theory that you or others in the field

use to explain the problem or the phenomena being studied. And I’ll give you an example of that

because, that’s kind of tricky. It’s a lens that will help explain the problem that you’re trying to find. So

if you’re looking at gender in the classroom, let’s say, there are a lot of different theories

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: on gender in the classroom. And you may pick somebody’s

theory on how boys learn differently from girls, let’s say, and look at your problem through that

framework, through that lens. It may be that your framework is undeveloped. And you want to kind of

keep that in mind, because when you come back and analyze the data,

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Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: you may come up with your own framework that someone

else may use later on to be their theoretical framework for their research. So at this point, you’ve gone

from your topic to what is the problem that I’m looking at, what are my research questions, and what’s

the frame that I bring to it– sort of whose ideas and theories am I using to help guide me? [Sample

Selection]

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: So the next piece is really to decide, OK, based on those

questions, I think I’m going to do a qualitative piece of research as opposed to a quantitative or mixed

methods piece. And really, the answers to the questions should be things like, I’m interested in this

phenomenon, so I need to understand more about it. It’s not something that I can actually have a

hypothesis about and frame.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: It may be that I’m interested in learning more about the

actors in the setting and what they do and how they think. So when you decide on your problem

and your questions, you’re going to decide, OK, who can help best answer these questions? Which

participants can best answer these questions? Who is it that I want to either look at or interview,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: and where might that happen? So when you’re choosing a

site, you want to be respectful here and you want to be careful. You’ve got to find the gatekeeper.

You’ve got to find, who is it that has control over the site and that you can then get access and they’ll

let you in? And that’s gaining access. It’s pretty simple.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: And then, who is the sample that you want to choose?

So in qualitative research we don’t have very, very big samples, right? Because you’re going to be

interviewing. You’re going to be observing. You can’t do that with hundreds and hundreds of people. It

will take you years. So you want to decide, how many people and how many settings is it that I want

to look at to help answer this question? And in qualitative research, it’s OK to have an n of 1.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: It may be that you will learn a lot from one school or one

classroom or one teacher, or even one student. That’s considered a case study, and usually it’s in the

realm of anywhere from one to 20, maybe 30 is getting to be a big project– but enough that you can

kind of say, I have a sense of the phenomenon that will help me answer the question.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: The next step if you are connected to a university is to

get approval from your institutional review board, which is a long process. And we don’t have time

to explain that here. But just know that if you’re working with human subjects, you need to have

institutional approval through the IRB process. And then once you get your approval,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: you go to your gatekeepers that we talked about and you

gain access. Your goal is you say, I’m here to basically do no harm. You may not tell them the actual

phenomenon that you’re going to study, because it might actually change what they do in the setting.

So you might go back and just give them the topic, as we talked about. You might say, I’m here to

look at gender in the classroom.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: Or maybe, I’m just here to do a research study on the

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experience of kids in the classroom. Maybe you don’t even say the word “gender”– not to be

disingenuous, just to be honest enough to say that you don’t want them to start changing their

behavior in the setting. And then many of us do pilot studies, a little baby study, with a few people,

maybe a few observations, a few interviews, just to see if that is the right place

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: and those are the right folks in the sample to help

you answer the questions. [Data Collection] The next stage is data collection. And in qualitative

research, there’s really only certain ways to collect data. There’s not that many, right? So you can do

observations, where you’re actually looking.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: You’re taking field notes. You’re looking very closely at

action happening all around you. You can do interviews, which seems pretty obvious, right? You’re

asking questions. A lot of times these are structured interviews, or in qualitative research it’s usually

semi-structured so that you’ve got some leeway of where you want to go. It’s different from giving a

quantitative survey to someone

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: where you ask the same questions with a very neutral

tone the whole time. This is really different. You’re really trying to get at their perspective of the

phenomenon that you’re studying. So you’re going to ask sort of grand survey or grand tour questions,

with the goal to make the words fly. To really make the person comfortable, which is why you establish

rapport,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: you try to be yourself. You try to be warm and friendly. You

try to be really open to hearing their story, as opposed to forcing your view or your biases onto what

they’re saying. And then the last kind of data that you can collect is documents. That is, things from

the website, worksheets

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: that they hand out in the classroom, the student newspaper–

whatever it is that will help you figure out, again, answer those research questions. So between

observations– what am I seeing with my own eyes– interviews– what are the folks who are there

every day telling me they’re experiencing and feeling–

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: and then the document review– other pieces to help flesh

this out– you should have some nice data to help answer the question. [Analysis] And then the

question is, what do I do with all this data, right? This is where we get to the analysis stage. And in

analysis, there’s a lot of different ways to do this.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: And it sounds scary, and it’s very different from quantitative

because in quantitatives you have computer packages that you can kind of employ and push a button,

and they’ll do a lot of the analysis for you. In qualitative, you are the instrument. So you’ve collected

the data, and you’re

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: going to be analyzing the data. That’s not to say that there

aren’t some packages that will help you in coding the data, but for the most part you are making the

key decisions of, what do I call this piece of data? What do I call this piece of my field note? How do

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Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods

I name this? How do I file it in a way to help me remember and come up with themes?

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: So just like when you go to a supermarket– I know this

sounds crazy– but just like when you go to a supermarket and you’re picking out fruit, and you’re

examining the apple and you’re trying to decide, does this look like it’s going to taste good? Does it

have a worm hole? Does it have some bruises? Is it soft and smushy? Is it hard and crispy? You’re

looking at qualities. And you could make some decisions about shape, smell,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: taste, and you start to code and file those qualities. That’s

what you’re doing when you’re analyzing your interview notes, your transcripts, your field notes from

your observations, and the data that you’ve collected from the documents. What you’re going to do

is you’re going to start to label those. It’s like a filing system. And then you’re going to write yourself

some memos.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: Here’s what I think is going on. Here’s some of the themes

that I think I hear. And you’re going to say, this is what I think I saw. And then when I asked her in

her interview, this is what she said. That’s called triangulating the data, looking for places where the

evidence from the different pieces of data that you collect match up. And then you’re actually going to

take it and start

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: to form some very low-level propositions. I think what I

saw in that classroom– and let’s say you’re looking at gender in the classroom, or how boys learn

differently from girls– is that the boys were a little bit slower to catch on, or faster to catch on, or the

girls raised their hand more– whatever it is. And I think when I asked in the interview and the teacher

said,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: you know, I think more girls were raising their hand. I think

the girls in middle school are a little bit more mature and ready for this kind of information. I think

we’re going to form a proposition here about gender in the classroom and the differences between

boys and girls, because I’ve got my data that I’m triangulating. The reason why one of the ways to do

analysis

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: is called grounded theory is because it’s grounded in what

you’re seeing. It’s bubbling up from the field. It’s not top-down, where we go in with the hypothesis

and say, boys learn differently from girls and we’re going to prove it or prove the null. Instead, it’s what

do we see? What’s the story here that we’re seeing? And it may be a completely different story from

what you

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: thought you were going to find. Maybe you’ll go in looking for

something about how boys and girls learn differently, and instead you’re finding a completely different

story about classroom management and gender, for instance. Again, this is where in analysis, you

might go back and do the literature review. Now that I think I’m seeing classroom management,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: I’ve got to go back and review that literature on classroom

management and really make sure that I’m staying within my theoretical framework here. This is

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Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods

where you come back to your conceptual framework and say, this is how other people have looked at

it. This is what I saw. I’m going to put forth a new proposition with as much evidence as I can muster

here and kind of form

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: my own conceptual framework about what’s going on in

the classroom vis a vis gender. [Data Representation & Writing] Last piece that you have to think

about is how you’re going to convey what you found to your audience. And you do this through data

representation, and most often through writing, although there are definitely

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: different forms of qualitative analysis that people do through

film, et cetera. These are the things you have to think about. What is the purpose? What am I trying

to get across? Who’s my audience? What’s going to be most convincing to them? Then you make

an outline of all the propositions that you have with specific pieces of evidence from your field notes,

from your interviews, to help prop up those propositions.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: How much data to include depends on your purpose,

depends on your audience, depends on the length that the publication might allow. Just because it’s

qualitative doesn’t mean that you can’t have charts or graphs or other stylistic devices. Whatever it is

that’s going to convince people of what you saw and this is the story, that’s what you’re supposed to

use.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: So you have lots of representation options. You can put

in video snippets. You can put in audio snippets, depending on where this is going to be published

or shown. And you want to think about each of these things as you design your final piece. There

are some through lines, though, that go throughout the whole qualitative research process. Everyone

must use sound ethics and sound judgment.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: You’re dealing with real people here. If you’re going to do

something where someone is feeling very uncomfortable– where it’s getting sensitive, where you feel

like you’re going to cross over an ethical line– that’s where you have to stop. You have to examine

your own subjectivity, your own biases. I feel one way. Maybe if you think about this gender example,

I’m a woman. And that’s going to color how I look at things.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: You want to audit that subjectivity and make sure that you’re

saying, what else could be the story here? How am I not being so biased? You want to make sure

that there’s a sense of validity throughout the research, that you’re doing the best you can to collect

the best data– not company behavior from the participants, but what really happens on the ground.

And keep that rapport going so that they

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: feel comfortable being honest and open with you. You can

see from the image that is on the screen that this is not a straight line, that you’re going back and

forth between the different parts– that you might be collecting some data, you might be writing some

memos. You might be going back to your topic formation and your questions and rejigging. This is not

a straight line. It’s kind of a complex, jiggled process.

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DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: But the more you do and the more back and forth you go,

the better the research. [Conclusion] So in summary, there are five main components used in all

qualitative research in one way or another. It’s not linear. You’re going to have to revert back and

forth, leap ahead,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: depending on the process you use. But the quality and rigor

of your research depends largely on how well you implement each of these components. If you don’t

collect data in a rigorous, thorough way, your conclusions are not going to be as valid. If you don’t

take the time to build rapport and really think about your interview questions and your field notes,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: your data is not going to be as valid, and then your final

points won’t be as valid. So you have to keep all of these in mind as you go through the qualitative

research process. Lots and lots of people have written about this. I just picked a few of my favorites

here for some further reading to give you a real general sense of the overall process. You can look at

Merriam and Associates, Qualitative research in practice;

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: Miles and Huberman, classics in the field, Qualitative data

analysis; and Taylor and Bogden, Introduction to qualitative research methods, which is one of the

texts that I use in my own classroom for this is very, very step-by-step process. Thank you for being

a wonderful audience. I really appreciate it, and I hope you enjoy doing qualitative research.

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Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods

Quantitative Research: Methods in

the Social Sciences

Video Title:

Quantitative Research: Methods in the Social Sciences

Originally Published: 2006

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc

City: Thousand Oaks, USA

ISBN: 9781483397160

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483397160

(c) SAGE Publications, Inc., 2006

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods.

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483397160

[Quantitative Methods] [Table of Contents– 1. Questions of Quantitative Research 2. Principles of

Measurement 3. Experiments 4. Surveys 5. Applications 6.Conclusion] [Segment 1 Questions of

Quantitative Research]

NARRATOR: Human behavior is complex. Understanding how, why, and to what ends human beings

do what we do is studied by social scientists through a variety of methods generally referred to as

“quantitative methods.” While there are different methods specifically, they each address certain kinds

of questions and adhere to certain principles of measurement.

NARRATOR [continued]: These include questions about cause effect and mitigating effects. What is

the effect of a given cause? What is the cause of a given effect? How do we mitigate a given effect

by manipulating a given cause?

BARBARA HUMMEL ROSSI: Quantitative methods are used when you have specific questions in

mind and good measures to measure the variables in question. For example, you might be looking

at the relation between achievement and intelligence. The question might be, what is the relation

between achievement and intelligence?

BARBARA HUMMEL ROSSI [continued]: Now we have good standardized measures to measure

both intelligence and achievement and we would use correlation analysis to look at the relation

between the two of them.

NARRATOR: The following example illustrates the essence of what quantitative methods seek to

address in whole or part.

X: I was trying to call you Saturday and you didn’t pick up. Where were you?

Y: Oh, yeah. I was out, just out with some friend of mine.

X: Where’d you go? What’d you do?

Y: Just to a bar. I was just hanging out with a girl named Sally. Yeah.

X: Who is she?

Y: It was just kind of like a date.

X: OK. So let me just try to get this straight. You went out with her Saturday night on a date without

even telling me, without even letting me know. And you apparently like her more than you do and now

you’re breaking up with me. Well, just try for the sake of knowing things, I just want to know what you

did with her. What went on that you’re keeping from me?

Y: It doesn’t matter.

X: No, to me, it matters.

Y: It doesn’t.

X: I want to know what you did with her behind my back. That’s what I want to know.

Y: It’s not about that.

NARRATOR: Those using quantitative methods to understand what happened between these two

people would want to know, what is X feeling? Did what Y said to X make her upset? If Y would have

said something more positive, would X be expressing a different emotion? [Segment 2 Principles of

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Measurement]

NARRATOR [continued]: When measuring these various causes and effects, social scientists are

careful that they measure what and how things occur in the real world, not the world as it exists in their

office, laboratory, or their own brain. This includes adhering to standards of internal validity, external

validity, and reliability.

NARRATOR [continued]: Internal validity is when an experiment isolates a causal connection

between two variables, eliminating all other explanations. External validity is when results of a

study can be generalized to a broader population. Reliability is when a phenomenon is measured

consistently

NARRATOR [continued]: in repeated studies.

BARBARA HUMMEL-ROSSI: Internal and external validity are really both critical for doing

experiments, particularly the experimental control situation. Internal validity refers to, does the

treatment make a difference? And you’d be concerned about such things interfering with the

treatment effect, such things as history.

BARBARA HUMMEL-ROSSI [continued]: As a person gets older, the construct under question may

change. You would be concerned about the effects, for example, of a pretest sensitizing the individual

to the intervention and the effects perhaps of differential mortality, that is, people leaving

BARBARA HUMMEL-ROSSI [continued]: the experiment differently in the control group and the

experimental group. With respect to external validity, this has to do with whether or not you can

generalize to other situations, for example, to another setting, to other people administering an

intervention. And they’re both very critical to experimental design.

BARBARA HUMMEL-ROSSI [continued]: [Segment 3 Experiments]

NARRATOR: One of the most often-used forms of quantitative methods is the experiment.

CHARLES MCILWAIN: The primary reason that experiments are used in social science research

is because it’s the best method for isolating causal relationships between human behavior. So for

instance, say I wanted to understand whether or not people’s attitudes about crime are changed by

the amount or the kind of television news

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: that they watch. An experiment allows the researcher to

manipulate the message, to measure the effect of people’s attitudes and opinions, and then be able

to tell whether or not the message was the actual cause of the change in their attitude or their opinion.

The one downside about using experiments

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: is that it is low in what social scientists refer to as external validity.

And that simply means that an experimental environment, the researcher controls everything that’s

going on. And we know that in the real world, we don’t always know what’s going to happen. And so

though we can test for the causal relationship,

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: we can’t always generalize to say that this is the way things are

likely to happen in any given scenario.

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NARRATOR: The following example illustrates how a typical social science experiment might be run.

This one seeks to ascertain the effects of racial messages in political campaign advertisements. First,

the experimenter describes to subjects in the experiment what they will be doing and asks for their

voluntary consent

NARRATOR [continued]: to continue participation.

CHARLES MCILWAIN: Please sign the form and I will collect them.

NARRATOR: Second, participants are asked to watch a series of political ads in which no racial

message is present.

DAVID JACKSON: What choice do you have in this election? You can choose a candidate who

believes parents should choose whether children will get the best education, instead of being forced

into failing schools. Or you can choose a candidate whose education plan means simply throwing

more money at schools and teachers who aren’t getting the job done. You can choose a candidate

who believes that the way

DAVID JACKSON [continued]: to strengthen our schools is to impose the tough standards of No Child

Left Behind. Or you can choose one who rewards failing teachers and schools who don’t meet high

standards of excellence. You have a crucial choice in this election. I’m David Jackson and I want to

be your choice because I’m the right choice.

NARRATOR: Third, participants are asked to fill out a brief questionnaire that asks, among other

things, how strongly they felt about each candidate and who they would most likely vote for. This

establishes a baseline to measure the effect of the messages to come. Next, the researcher repeat

steps one and two

NARRATOR [continued]: with a different group of participants. These participants then also view a

series of ads. This time, the ads have an explicit racial appeal.

JIM HERBERT: Some people have said that the difference between my opponent and me is the color

of our skin. That’s not the only difference. David Jackson’s education plan is to take money away

from folks like us to fund inner city schools that look like him. Jackson says his quota-based so-called

affirmative action in education plan is necessary to make the children in our two

JIM HERBERT [continued]: communities more equal. Jackson is a good man and we both believe in

equality. But does equality mean that it’s fair to take money from one group and give it to another just

because of the color of their skin? I’m Jim Herbert and I’m running for Congress because I believe in

an education policy that isn’t just black and white.

NARRATOR: Next, subjects are again asked to fill out a questionnaire that asks the same questions

about how they felt about each candidate and which of them they would more likely vote for. After this,

the experimenter analyzes data to see if there was a measurable difference in participants’ attitudes

between those who saw ads with no racial message and those who saw ads

NARRATOR [continued]: with explicit racial messages. In this brief example, the researcher

conducting the experiment will analyze the data, hoping to determine whether there is a causal link

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between a person’s exposure to racial messages and their perception of and likelihood to vote for a

particular political candidate.

CHARLES MCILWAIN: Conducting this experiment allowed us to find out a variety of interesting

conclusions regarding the way that racial messages affect voters. Most importantly, we found that

implicit racial messages seem to work well, in that when voters were exposed to a racial message or

an implicit racial message

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: by a white candidate, they tended to view that candidate more

favorably than the black opponent. However, we also found that explicit racial messages seem to

backfire on the sponsor of the message so that the white candidate who used an explicit racial

message, the voters tended to view that person more negatively

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: and the black opponent more positively. So we can see these two

outcomes as far as how these messages affect the attitudes and beliefs of the voters about these

candidates. But remember, when we’re talking about experiments in particular, we’re interested in

causation. What is the precise cause for the attitude

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: change in these voters? And in this way, we found that more than

the message itself, there was a greater predictor or causal variable for this attitude change and here,

that was political ideology. So a voter’s particular way of seeing political issues

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: had a greater predictive effect or greater causal effect on their

attitude change. [Segment 4 Surveys]

NARRATOR: Surveys are another form of quantitative method used by social scientists. We are all

familiar with and probably have responded to surveys that seek to measure everything from public

opinion on political issues to our use of commercial products to worker satisfaction with their jobs. All

surveys are the same, in that

NARRATOR [continued]: they seek information that allows researchers to probe the depth and/or

breadth of human attitudes and behaviors. However, they can be administered in different ways,

as questionnaires or interviews. Surveys seek to gain quantitative data about a large number of

individuals’ opinions

NARRATOR [continued]: or experiences. In questionnaires, individuals respond to written items that

ask them to self-report their attitudes and behaviors. In interviews surveys, a living person administers

a survey face-to-face to individuals, allowing a researcher to clarify responses.

INTERVIEWER: Of using surveys–

JACQUELINE MATTIS: In the social sciences, surveys are used as a way of providing broad

descriptions of phenomena. So for example, we have interest in describing patterns of illness, the

rates of incidence of certain kinds of events, and surveys provide a wonderful opportunity to get raw

data on a number of different people and a number of different experiences and from people

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: from different regions, locations, and social environments, et

cetera. But there are naturally positives as well as negatives with using survey research as a

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methodology for getting access to information. On the positive end, surveys provide, again, wonderful

opportunities to get data on a number of different people. Because they’re so easy to administer,

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: you have opportunities to reach people that you probably

wouldn’t be able to reach if you were using other technologies. On the negative end, there are a

number of different concerns with using surveys as a way of going about getting access to data.

First of all, researchers often devise surveys on their own without a great deal of discussion with

participants about their experiences,

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: about the way that they make sense of events, et cetera. And in

those situations, the researcher’s ideas and biases very often make themselves known and manifest

in the way that we ask questions, the specific questions that we ask, et cetera. Also on the negative

end, we have with surveys an interesting tendency to assume

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: that the kinds of questions that we can ask are broad enough and

detailed enough to really access a particular phenomenon. So we assume, for example, that if we’re

asking questions about depression, that depression means the same thing to all people, which may

not necessarily be the case. We assume that in 10 or 15 or 20 questions,

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: we can get access to the full phenomenon that we describe

as “depression.” And it’s really difficult sometimes to know whether or not we’re asking enough

questions, whether we’re asking detailed enough questions, et cetera. So there are always

drawbacks to using surveys as the way that we access information.

NARRATOR: We’ve seen people respond on their own to a questionnaire. In the following example,

however, the researcher is administering the survey in a structured one-to-one interview.

CHARLES MCILWAIN: First of all, if you are able to vote in the election between David Jackson and

Vincent Fox, who would you be most likely to vote for based on what you know of the two candidates?

Would you say you would vote for David Jackson or Vincent Fox?

WOMAN: David Jackson was the first?

NARRATOR: Notice how more nuanced information might be gained from this method of surveying.

In surveys, issues of validity and reliability have to do with three primary areas, sampling the process

of selecting survey respondents in order to generalize findings, question selection– questions

NARRATOR [continued]: are designed to elicit the desired information and are relatively free of bias–

and administration. Questions are asked consistently and in the same manner as an interview survey.

JACQUELINE MATTIS: Sampling is the term that we use to describe the people we choose to include

in a particular study. It also describes the places– the events that we choose to examine. So one of

the more important things to consider when it comes to making decisions about to whom we want to

address the surveys that we’re

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: interested in in distributing is the question of, what’s the

phenomenon that’s of interest here? And are there certain people who are more likely to experience

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a phenomenon than others? So for example, if women are more likely to experience a phenomenon

than men are, then we want to focus our attention on women.

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: If we want to examine whether or not something is representative

for African Americans versus Asian Americans, we want to make sure that we sample enough people

from those different backgrounds to make sure that what we’re getting is a broad enough overview

of the phenomenon of interest than we would normally get if we only focused on certain groups of

people.

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: The wording that we use in developing any particular question

is extremely important. One thing that we know from doing social science research is that people

use very different language to describe their experiences. So what one person might describe as

“depression” another person may describe using completely different language.

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: And if we assume that one particular word or kind of wording is

representative of an experience for everyone, we often are making mistakes. So the wording of a

question is extremely important. We also have to consider in constructing items whether or not we

have enough questions to really capture a phenomenon that we’re interested in.

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: So sometimes, one question is perfect. In many situations,

especially when it comes to the social sciences, we need multiple questions to get at various aspects

of an experience. So again, if we’re looking at depression, depression includes emotions. It includes

behaviors. It includes thoughts. And so we want to make sure that we have enough questions that

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: get at emotions or thoughts or behaviors to really capture the

phenomenon as well as we can. We also have to consider issues like ethnicity and language. And

so the wording of a particular question, certain ethnic groups may use certain ways of describing or

discussing a phenomenon and we have to be sensitive to that in the way

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: that we word the items on any particular survey. The final issue

that we have to keep in mind is the order in which items may appear on a survey. If you ask an item

that will bias people to think a certain way or to experience a certain thing, you want to make sure

that you ask those kinds of questions late in a survey rather than early

JACQUELINE MATTIS [continued]: so that you don’t bias people too early on in the process.

[Segment 5 Applications]

CHARLES MCILWAIN: One of the areas of application for quantitative methods is in the area of

marketing, where the makers or producers of products try to understand what it is their audience or

consumers want. And so they seek to measure what it is those people desire,

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: as well as being able to understand how to best persuasively

target that market in order to consume those products. And so quantitative methodology is used

in this area to be able to see whether or not a persuasive message is working. Is it successful in

persuading consumers to buy a particular product or set of products?

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: Another application of quantitative methodology is in assessing

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social programs. For instance, if a government or a private agency is trying to set up a program aimed

at curing a social problem, let’s say for example, drug abuse, where participants might come into a

treatment program, I want to be able to measure

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: at the end of that program the success or failure of the treatment.

And so quantitative methods are used in this particular instance to be able to look at the end and say,

was this particular treatment effective in declining the drug use or dependency of drug users in these

situations?

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: Another area where quantitative methods are applicable is in the

area of government and politics because in this country in particular and others, the government is

supposed to be responsive to the people that it represents. Government officials, politicians, often

seek to understand what citizens’ attitudes are, what

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: their beliefs about particular public policies are so that they can be

more responsive to those needs. And so often, quantitative surveys and so forth are used to measure

public opinion, how different groups of people view a particular social issue or political policy, what it

is that they want or don’t want

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: or what they expect or don’t expect from their government. And

measuring these allows then government officials and politicians to again be more responsive or at

least to know what it is their citizens want. Another example in which quantitative methods are applied

is in the workplace. Business owners, owners of companies,

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: often know and realize that the success of their company, the

success of their product, is in having a workforce, having employees that are satisfied with their work,

satisfied with the physical conditions of their workplace, satisfied and motivated about the products

that they’re selling or the services that they are giving.

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: And so often, employers use quantitative methods, surveys, focus

groups in order to measure what we call “job satisfaction,” to be able to tell whether or not their

employees are indeed getting what it is that they need from their work and in turn, the degree that

they’re allowing that to be channeled

CHARLES MCILWAIN [continued]: into the selling of their particular product. [Segment 6 Conclusion]

NARRATOR: Whether using experiments, surveys, or a variety of other possible methods,

quantitative researchers or social scientists are able to find causal connections between human

behavior or make inferences about how human beings act, think, and feel about their everyday

actions and interactions with others.

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Quantitative Research: Methods in the Social Sciences

David Silverman Discusses
Qualitative Research

Video Title:

David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research

Originally Published: 2017
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd

City: London, United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781473992771

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473992771

(c) SAGE Publications Ltd, 2017
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods.

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473992771

[SAGE video experts] [David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research]

DAVID SILVERMAN: Hi, My name is David Silverman. I’m the Emeritus Professor of Sociology at

Goldsmiths College, University of London. I also have a couple of visiting professorships in Australia,

where I visit every northern winter. I’m the author of a couple of bestselling textbooks on qualitative

research, doing qualitative research, which

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: is essentially a guide to writing up a piece of research, and

interpreting qualitative data, which is about different ways of analyzing qualitative data. I’ve also

written a short book. In fact, it’s called A Very Short Book, which is more a polemic about my ideas

about qualitative

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: research, which are rather different from some other people as you’ll

see in a minute. Apart from writing textbooks these days, I also run workshops for graduate students

and faculty at a number of European and Australian universities. [Introduction: Minority and Majority

View] Qualitative research, as I will show you,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: contains many competing perspectives. I’ll talk about a majority

perspective and a minority perspective. Now, which perspective you choose is ultimately up to you in

terms of the kind of topics you want to study and how you want to study them. But you owe it to your

audience, as I’ll argue, to show why you’ve chosen the particular perspective

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: that you have, and what things you’re gaining by it, but also what

things you’re losing by it. Many years ago, the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, talked about

different sciences, some of which, he said, had paradigms, or agreed ways of looking at the world,

and others, which didn’t have any such agreement.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And he called these pre-paradigmatic. Now in many respects,

qualitative research fits into this second box of Kuhn’s. It’s pre-paradigmatic. There is no agreed

perspective in qualitative research. What I want to try and show you now is there is a majority view

and a minority view.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: In fact, the majority view is a large majority if you look at articles that

are published in journals. The majority of articles, the vast majority of articles, that are published in

journals involve open-ended interviews, which are analyzed often using an approach called grounded

theory, which uses something called thematic analysis, which I’ll mention in a minute.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Only a tiny minority of published research in the qualitative area

actually looks at what people are doing in real life situations rather than asking them questions.

And that’s the minority view, which I’ll expand on in a minute. And I’ll explain why I believe it has

advantages compared to the majority view.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: [The Majority View & Thematic Analysis] So let me talk a bit about

this majority view, which is in a majority, as I’ve said already, because if you look at published research

in qualitative research, around about 90% of research follows this position. What features does the

majority view have?

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DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: The first is the assumption that qualitative research is about

something that people call lived experience. By that they seem to mean something about the need to

understand what is inside people’s heads to understand how they see situations.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And the most commonly way used to access this lived experience

is by means of open-ended interviews. And so in the majority view, you contrast quantitative

research, which typically uses pre-prepared survey questions, with open-ended interviews, where the

interviewer

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: may only have a general question and then encourages the

interviewee to speak more usually by using things like, mm hmm, which usually generates more talk,

the aim being, without too much structure, to get inside people’s heads and see how they see things.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: It’s one thing to gather data. There’s also the issue of how you

analyze that data and the majority view has an overall version of what is the most effective way of

analyzing what people say. And it’s called thematic analysis. And thematic analysis, as the name

suggests,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: involves looking at interviewees’ responses and picking out certain

themes, which are often coded– and there are often software methods to do this– and then relate

it. So the argument is, you can get a systematic understanding of what people are thinking by this

thematic analysis.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: [The Appeal of the Majority View] Why should so much qualitative

research follow this majority view? Well in one sense, I think because it fits a popular conception of

what qualitative research is all about. You think of qualitative research very often,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: and you think of somebody of an interviewer with a clipboard who’s

going through questions, which they’re asking somebody else, or maybe– an approach that I haven’t

mentioned so far– a focus group, where you gather a group of people together and give them some

stimulus and encourage them to talk about that stimulus.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And the second reason for this appeal of the majority view, it

establishes a very neat division of labor. We say– the majority people say– quantitative research,

which we don’t do, is studying people’s behavior. What we offer instead is an in-depth analysis

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: of people’s experience. So quantitative research is about studies

of behavior, sometimes in laboratories, sometimes by other means. Qualitative research is about

people’s lived experience, often understood through interviews or focus groups. [What are the

limitations of the majority view?]

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What I want to show you is that ultimately, at least in my view, the

majority view of qualitative research derives not from social science, but from the everyday world in

which we live. That ultimately, its appeal is to our common sense assumptions about what society

looks like.

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DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Let me try and demonstrate that to you in a number of ways.

Firstly, think about the issue of experience, which is so dear to the majority view. Now put that word

“experience” in inverted commas or scare marks. And think about whose topic is “experience.”

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Once we think about it that way, we think about how so many of us

are involved in the social media. And what is the social media concerned with other than narrating our

experience to ourselves and to other people? Then think about television coverage of news events

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: and the way in which, so often, that’s organized around interviews

with people who were involved, sometimes, to my mind, to a distressing extent. So for instance, no

scene of a disaster, it seems to be the case, is complete without interviews with bereaved families

talking about their experience.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: But then something curious happens if you think systematically

about it– and I’ve studied this rather morbid subject myself– people roughly say the same thing. It

turns out this is almost a social fact, because it’s so recurrent. That everybody who dies in a tragic

circumstances is nearly always a hero or heroine. That’s how we talk about bereavement.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Callously, I might say, it would be interesting in a news interview

if somebody who was bereaved had said, oh, that’s great, because now I can let out their room.

That would be newsworthy. But instead we get this endless repetition of people telling these stories

of heroes and heroines. So the whole topic, it seems to me, of “experience,” in inverted commas,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: can be seen to be part of our world, not part of social science. It

doesn’t mean to say social science can’t study experience, but not trying to get inside people’s heads

and asking what they really feel, but rather studying the ways in which this term “experience” is

actually used in the media and by ourselves in the social media.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Now the second reason, and it’s a related reason, why I think the

majority view has a common sense origins is that we live in something that I called, in a paper with

Paul Atkinson, an interview society. We see truth somehow in the world in which we live as residing

within the interview, hence all these TV news programs, which largely consists

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: of interviews with people. So it’s hardly surprising that qualitative

researchers should buy in to a version of doing qualitative research by means of the interview, since

it’s central to the world in which we live. Now we come on to some more technical issues, which I

believe are further faults in the majority view.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: I’ve talked about how in the majority view, thematic analysis is used,

picking out themes within what people say in interviews. Now the question I would want to ask such

researchers is, how easy is it to pick out themes in what people say? Do you really need social

science skills

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: in order to be able to do that? Or isn’t this a common sense activity?

And part of what is happening in this business of finding themes when we analyze interviews or focus

groups, is that a large part of what goes on in the interview or focus group gets lost. If you look at

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research papers based on these kinds of data,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: you often find that the interviewer’s question isn’t there. You just get

the interviewees response. So ultimately what I would say in my critique of the majority view is that

it derives from something about the world in which we live, what I call the interview society. And its

pursuit of experience arises

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: not from a position within social science, but arises from that world

in which we live. [How does the minority view differ?] Above all, it differs because IT believes that

rather than studying primarily what is inside people’s heads, we should study what people actually

do.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: A great American qualitative researcher of the 1970s, called Harvey

Sacks, once took this to an extreme level. When he was teaching his students in an introductory

class, he said, I gather a lot of you are interested in understanding people’s experience.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What I would say to you is this. If you’re interested in getting inside

people’s heads, what I suggest to you is that you give up social science. Go into medicine, and

become a brain surgeon. So the minority view primarily argues that the first place we should go to in

any qualitative research study is what can be called naturalistic data, data that

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: would be out there even if we weren’t asking questions or forming

focus groups. [What are the strengths of the minority view?] Jonathan Potter, a great discourse

analysist, has argued for what he calls the Dead Social Scientist Test.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What does he mean by that? He means that we should prefer data

that would still be available even if we, as a researcher, got run over on our way to the office that

morning. Now if we got run over on the way to the office that morning, we couldn’t do an interview, or

we couldn’t hold a focus group.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: But the world, the social world, would still continue. So Potter’s way

of summarizing this appeal of naturalistic data is to apply the Dead Social Scientist Test to any kind

of data you’re thinking of gathering, and see if it passes it. Of course, gathering rich data, as I believe

naturalistic data is, is not the be all and end all.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What ultimately matters in all research is whether you have rigorous,

systematic ways of analyzing that data. Data never speak for themselves. The minority view has, as

such, a systematic way of analyzing data. The first thing it demands is rather than cutting off

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: an instance of behavior or talk from other instances of behavior and

talk, that we see how it fits into a particular sequence of actions or talk. And sequences are all around

us in the world in which we live. This is not something peculiar to qualitative research.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: So for instance, just to take an example, I think you would all

understand if somebody asked you, what are you doing on Saturday evening? That if you say, nothing

much, what’s going to happen next is you’re going to get an invitation. And so that’s a very skillful

question, what are you doing at Saturday evening, because it’s a pre-invitation.

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DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And both the potential giver of the invitation and the recipient of it

can head off the invitation, and the embarrassing features of turning down an invitation, by answering

the question, what are you doing on Saturday evening, by saying, oh, I’m busy washing my hair or

whatever. And so and invitation that’s going to be turned down never has to be offered.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Now this is showing you how sequences are part of the world

in which we live. So it’s very curious in the majority view, particularly when they just do thematic

analysis, they’re leaving out the sequences which are central to the social world in which we live.

That’s why I was arguing that if you’re analyzing interviews,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: that you have to look at how what the interviewee is saying is

shaped by what the interviewer has said and doing, even mm-hmm and another continuers. But you

also have to look at the way what the interviewer is saying is shaped by what the interviewee has

said. And you can’t pick out a theme without looking at sequences.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And the final feature I want to talk about of this brief summary of the

minority view is that it attempts to do rigorous analysis of these sequences in a very specific way.

Firstly, it looks at one or two examples of data you’ve gathered from a particular setting, say this

private doctor consultation.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And it tries to generate hypotheses about what’s going on in these

sequences in these one or two examples. This is what I call intensive analysis. As a result of this

intensive analysis, you generate hypotheses, which still need to be tested.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And the way in which you do that is to work with a large body of your

data. Maybe if you’ve got 20 consultations rather than one or two, you look at all 20 and transcribe

them. And what you’re doing in this extensive analysis is trying to find deviant cases, not to prove that

your hypothesis is right,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: but on the contrary, trying to find examples that don’t fit your

hypothesis, so that you can refine it, or abandon it, or develop new hypotheses. And having

discovered these deviant cases, you go back to what I’ve called intensive analysis, in this case, of

these deviant cases. Until you’ve reached a situation where

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: you can generalize in a way that covers 100% of the variance of

your data. In this respect, qualitative research is stronger methodologically than quantitative research.

Because in quantitative research, in my dim understanding of statistical method, you’re often talking

about, and satisfied with, 95% of the variation of your data.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: The beauty of qualitative research with well-transcribed and well-

analyzed, systematically analyzed data, is that you can talk about all the variation in your data and

come up with a generalization that works across all your data. So that’s what I see as the strengths

of what I call the minority view.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: [Minority View and Quantitative Research] Let me give you a brief

example of how qualitative people and quantitative people can work together. Some years ago, I

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Page 6 of 8 David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research

was asked to speak to a demography department at London University. And one of the things that

concerned me was that they were quantitative people,

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: and they wouldn’t like qualitative work. But I actually talked through

what qualitative research could do with their data. And they started to see how it could be relevant to

the kinds of things they were interested in. Demographers work with official statistics very often, like

mortality statistics.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: And I gave them the example of a qualitative researcher called

Lindsay Prior, who had actually studied how these official statistics actually get collated and noted

down in a computer. He watched what civil servants actually did in their offices when they were in

certain receipt of death certificates and showed how they picked out particular features

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: on those death certificates to enter into their computers. And their

procedures weren’t at all in common. Some picked out the first cause of death on the death certificate.

Others picked out the second. Sometimes a combination of both. So what this ultimately meant was

that what appeared in the official statistics was, in some sense, a social construction.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Now, because the demographers were not dopes, they realized that

official statistics were not perfect. But they couldn’t access the ways in which these features that I

described actually happened. The only way they could study behavior, because they were quant.

people, was in a laboratory with all the problems that laboratory studies have. Lindsay Prior’s work

gave them real insight

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: into the way in which qualitative research could be compatible with

their own work and add to their own work. The strength of qualitative research that Prior showed is the

way in which it can access social phenomena unavailable to quantitative researchers. [Conclusion]

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: What you’ve heard in this talk is more or less a polemic about the

right way and the wrong way to do qualitative research. And you may be thinking, well, this is not what

I’ve heard from my professor. It’s not what I’ve found in my textbooks. What point is there in listening

to someone

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: who’s very much in a minority? What I want to do at the end of this

talk right now is to suggest that, actually, there are implications of what I’ve been saying, even if you

choose to use an approach quite different from mine. Firstly, no method or approach is inherently

wrong.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Any approach has advantages and disadvantages. And secondly,

even if you’ve gathered what I see as good quality data, you’re only a little way along in the path to

doing good research. Ultimately, everything depends on how effective is your analysis of your data.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: So if I had to choose between a well-analyzed interview study and a

poorly-analyzed observational or document study, I would choose the well-analyzed interview study.

So this talk has been about systematic analysis as much as the kind of data you’re working with. The

important thing is to be aware of the choices that

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Page 7 of 8 David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: face you and not assume that you can only go down one particular

path. So often I read research sections of methodology papers where people say, the approach

chosen was this, and put everything in the passive voice

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: as if they weren’t making choices. What I’m always looking for in

methodology sections is writers being aware of the logic of their choice and what they’re gaining and

what they’re losing by that choice. And that’s quite rare. So if you can do that, you’re doing well. And

the final point I wanted to make is think about how you formulate your research topic.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Because when you’re formulating a research topic, you can make

choices which you’re not aware of. For instance, if you say, what I want to study are the experience

of managers in dealing with their workforce, you’re already formulating your topic in a way which

presupposes that you’re going to use interviews or focus

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: groups to gather your data and rules out naturalistic data. So in

formulating a topic, think about what implications arise in setting up your topic in that particular way.

And maybe try and put off formulating your research topic until you’ve got some sense of the field

that you’re going to study.

DAVID SILVERMAN [continued]: Hold off formulating your research topic as long as you can, or as

long as your university department will allow you, until you’re more familiar with what you’re studying.

So good luck in your research, but be aware of the importance of choice. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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Page 8 of 8 David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research

David Silverman Discusses Qualitative Research