Approaches for Qualitative Research

Despite we might like to be pragmatic and start our interviews right away, it is important to establish the meaning of the chosen approach for qualitative research, why it was used, and how the procedures of the study are standardized. This helps reviewers and beginning researchers.

Narrative Research

As a method, narrative research begins with the experiences as expressed in lived and told stories of individuals, also including the chronological ordering of meaning, or life course stages. A few defining features can be found in most narrative studies: they collect stories, whose style signals a distinctive collaborative taste between participant and researcher; they tell of individual experiences and how participants see themselves; gather data though interviews, but also through documents, observation, diaries, etc.; stories are told chronologically by researchers; they might be analyzed on what was said (thematically), the nature of the story telling (structural) or who the story is directed toward (dialogic/performance); they contain turning points, specific tensions or interruptions, and make the context a first-class citizen.

Narrative studies are usually one of the following types: biographical study, autoetnography study, life history, oral history.

Regarding the procedures, I, as a research, would have followed the paths below:

• Ensure the research problem fits narrative research; it captures detailed stories or life experiences of a single individual;

• Spend considerable time with the individual;

• Emphasize the collaboration between researcher and participant;

• Collect information about the context of these stories;

• Apply restorying, reorganizing stories around some general type of framework. This framework may consist of gathering stories, analyzing them for key elements of the story (e.g., time, place, plot, and scene), and then rewriting the stories to place them within a chronological sequence;

• Collaborate with participants by actively involving them in the research.

Phenomenological Research

The basic purpose of phenomenology is to reduce individual experiences with a phenomenon to a description of the universal essence (a “grasp of the very nature of the thing,” van Manen, 1990, p. 177). This human experience may be a phenomenon such as insomnia, being left out, anger, grief, or undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery (Moustakas, 1994). The research develops a composite description of the essence of the experience for all of the individuals.

There is a strong philosophical background to this; it draws heavily on the writings of the German mathematician Edmund Husserl.

Grounded Theory Research

The aim is to move beyond description and generate a theory, a “unified theoretical explanation” for a process or an action. The found theory (complete with a diagram and hypotheses) might help explain practice or provide a framework for future research. Theory is grounded in data from participants who have experienced the process. This qualitative design was developed in sociology in 1967 by two researchers, Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, who felt that theories used in research were often inappropriate and ill suited for participants under study. They elaborated on their ideas through several books (Corbin & Strauss, 2007; Glaser, 1978; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss, 1987; Strauss & Corbin, 1990, 1998). Later, they all disagreed on the procedures, and now we can find several different approaches to GT. Today, we mostly rely on the books by Corbin and Strauss (2007) who provide a structured approach to grounded theory and Charmaz (2006) who offers a constructivist and interpretive perspective on grounded theory.

Defining features of GT are as follows:

• Researcher focuses on a process or an action that has distinct steps or phases that occur over time.

• Generates a theory in the end, an explanation of something or an understanding that the researcher develops – drawing together, in GT, of theoretical categories that are arrayed to show how the theory works.

• Memoing helps develop the theory. The ideas in these memos attempt to formulate the process that is being seen by the researcher and to sketch out the flow of this process.

• Interview is pretty common; the research must constantly compare data with ideas about the emerging theory.

• Data analysis follow the pattern of developing open categories, selecting one category to be the focus of the theory, and then detailing additional categories (axial coding) to form the theoretical model. The intersection of the categories becomes the theory (selective coding).

The two most popular types of GT: systematic procedures of Strauss and Corbin or the constructivist approach of Charmaz.

My image for data collection in a grounded theory study is a “zigzag” process: out to the field to gather information, into the office to analyze the data, back to the field to gather more information, into the office, and so forth. The participants interviewed are theoretically chosen (called theoretical sampling) to help the researcher best form the theory.

Around the “core” phenomenon, we can establish other types of categories: they consist of causal conditions (what factors caused the core phenomenon), strategies (actions taken in response to the core phenomenon), contextual and intervening conditions (broad and specific situational factors that influence the strategies), and consequences (outcomes from using the strategies). These categories relate to and surround the core phenomenon in a visual model called the axial coding paradigm - questions during the interviews may focus on those categories as well. The final step, then, is selective coding, in which the researcher takes the model and develops propositions (or hypotheses) that interrelate the categories in the model or assembles a story that describes the interrelationship of categories in the model. This theory, developed by the researcher, is articulated toward the end of a study and can assume several forms, such as a narrative statement (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), a visual picture (Morrow & Smith, 1995), or a series of hypotheses or propositions (Creswell & Brown, 1992).

Grounded theory is a good design to use when a theory is not available to explain or understand a process. The literature may have models available, but they were developed and tested on samples and populations other than those of interest to the qualitative researcher. On the practical side, a theory may be needed to explain how people are experiencing a phenomenon, and the grounded theory developed by the researcher will provide such a general framework.

Etnographic Research

Ethnographies focus on developing a complex, complete description of the culture of a group, a culture-sharing group. As Wolcott (2008a) mentioned, ethnography is not the study of a culture, but a study of the social behaviors of an identifiable group of people.

Theory is relevant in focusing the researcher’s attention when conducting an ethnography. For example, ethnographers start with a theory — a broad explanation as to what they hope to find — drawn from cognitive science to understand ideas and beliefs, or from materialist theories, such as technoenvironmentalism, Marxism, acculturation, or innovation, to observe how individuals in the culture-sharing group behave and talk (Fetterman, 2010).

Ethnography is appropriate if the needs are to describe how a cultural group works and to explore the beliefs, language, behaviors, and issues facing the group, such as power, resistance, and dominance. The literature may be deficient in actually knowing how the group works because the group is not in the mainstream, people may not be familiar with the group, or its ways are so different that readers may not identify with the group.

Case Study Research

Case study research involves the study of a case within a real-life, contemporary context or setting. It explorer a case over time, through detailed, in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information, and reports a case description and case themes; it could be multiple cases (multisite) or a single case (within-site). The case study approach is familiar to social scientists because of its popularity in psychology (Freud), medicine (case analysis of a problem), law (case law), and political science (case reports).

A hallmark of a good qualitative case study is that it presents an in- depth understanding of the case. For this, you can’t rely on one source of data.

A complete findings section of a case study would then involve both a description of the case and themes or issues that the researcher has uncovered in studying the case. Case studies often end with conclusions formed by the researcher about the overall meaning derived from the case(s). These are called “assertions” by Stake (1995) or building “patterns” or “explanations” by Yin (2009).

A case study is a good approach when the inquirer has clearly identifiable cases with boundaries and seeks to provide an in-depth understanding of the cases or a comparison of several cases.