Qualitative Research –Research DesignPIIA NÄYKKI, PHD.,

5.4.2016

GOALS

After the 1st lecture, you will be able to:

1. Understand the meaning of philosophical thinking in research.

2. Understand the meaning of research design.

3. Formulate own research interest in accordance to qualitativeresearch paradigm.

After the 2nd lecture:

1. Understand how to implement research design to collect data.

2. Know different types of data collection methods.

3. Formulate own research in accordance to qualitative data collection.

RESEARCHER’S OWN BACKGROUND

Research work since 2003

Main area of methodological interest/expertise• Design-based research & process-oriented approach & mixed-method

approach

• Video data observation – qualitative content analysis

• Stimulated recall interviews – qualitative content analysis

• Questionnaire studies

"We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

Werner Heisenberg

WHAT IS QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH?

METHODOLOGICAL NAIVISM

MAIN DISTINCTIONS SEEN BETWEEN QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE PARADIGMS

THE CONVENTIONAL AND CONSTRUCTIVIST BELIEF SYSTEM (Guba & Lincoln, 1989)

FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION Conventional beliefs Constructivist beliefs

What is the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality? –ONTOLOGY

REALISM RELATIVISM

What is the nature of knowledge and how one can acquire it? –EPISTEMOLOGY

OBJECTIVIST SUBJECTIVIST

What are the ways offinding out knowledge? –METHODOLOGY

INTERVENTIONIST HERMENEUTIC

MAIN DISTINCTIONS SEEN BETWEEN QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE PARADIGMS

MAIN DISTINCTIONS SEEN BETWEEN QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE PARADIGMS

Common dichotomies in methodological literature

QUALITATIVE QUANTITATIVE

Subjective Objective

Inductive Deductive

Participant observation Survey techniques

Hermeneutics Positivism

Understanding Explanation

Descriptive Predictive

Atheoretical Theoretical

* Bad Good

SOME CONSEQUENCES OF STRONG PARADIGMATIC VIEW

What it really means to talk about ’paradigms’ in the context of educational research and what are the consequences of paradigmatic view?

• Competition for dominance

• ’Paradigm blindness’

• Tight relationship between paradigms and quantitative/ qualitative researchmethodologies

THE ROOTS OF QUANTITATIVE – QUALITATIVE DEBATES

• Early debates• From 17th century to the first half of 20th centuries

• Prosperity of positivism and the domination of quantitative methods in social sciences

• From 1930s to 1950s

• The demystifying of logical positivism after World War II and the pervasiveness of the postpositivist position

• The end of 1950s and beginning of 1960s

• The ascendance of interpretivism and constructivism, followed by the ‘paradigm wars’:

• From late 1960s onwards

• Multimethod desings, mixed-methods approaches, triangulation of the data

• Current

THE PARADIGMATIC MODEL AS REPLACED BY A ’CONTINUUM MODEL’

RESEARCH DESIGN

WHAT, WHY, WHO, WHEN, HOW..

WHAT IS A RESEARCH DESIGN

• Comprehensive plan and procedure for assessing a research problem

• Researcher has a choice of designs, each of which will then contain worldviews, strategies, and methods.

• Factors affecting the choice are the research problem itself, the background and interests of the researcher, and the intended audience.

QUESTIONS GUIDING THE RESEARCH DESIGN

• What are the philosophical assumptions that underpin your research approach?

• i.e., what is the nature of the research? Identify what your worldview is.

• What factors from your personal/professional background inform your worldview?

• What is the methodological basis of your research approach?

• i.e., how will it be operationalised?

• Who is the intended audience of your research project?

• Identify the research method that is most appealing and state why.

WORLDVIEWS/PHILOSOPHIES

Where is the researcher coming from? What assumptions does s/he make? (The answer is never “none.”)

Major Worldviews:◦ (Post)positivism/Determinism/Empiricism

◦ Cause and effect/Scientific method

◦ Experimentation and measurement can reveal objective reality

◦ Constructivism◦ Reality is subjective and multiple

◦ Seeks to understand meaning as experienced by participants

◦ Advocacy◦ Seeks to change reality and not just describe or predict it

◦ Pragmatic◦ Mixes aspects of other worldviews to get at “what works”

GENERAL FRAMEWORK FOR EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

Methodological elements, which comprise the design of empirical study:

• Research problem (question, hypothesis, aim)

• Strategy (experiment, survey, case study, action research, grounded theory)

• Sampling (random sample, one case, many purposefully chosen cases)

• Data collection (structured questionnaire, unstructured/open interview)

• Data analysis (inferential/descriptive statistics, open coding, discourse analysis)

• Results/Conclusions (descriptions, empirical generalizations, theoretical inferences)

RESEARCH DESIGN

Research design have following parts

• Sampling designs: where does the data come from?

• Methodological design: how the data will be collected?

• Analytical design: how the data will be treated, analysed etc?

• Operational design: how the results will be operationalised as a written form?

RESEARCH DESIGN CATEGORIES

1. Quantitative: numbers, closed-ended, data hypotheses, experiments, deductive

• A means for testing objective theories by measurement of variables

• Use when research problem calls for understanding of causality/influence, results of intervention, prediction of outcomes.

2. Qualitative: words, open-ended, interviews, ethnography, inductive• A means for exploring meaning ascribed to social or human problems

• Use when problem is not well-understood and requires in-depth exploration

3. Mixed – can be a combination of Quantitative and Qualitative in parallel, series, or transformational combination

• Use when problem can not be accurately assessed using only one design.

MIXED METHODS APPROACH

THE COMBINED USE OF QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES

PURE DESIGNS

• Purely quantitative or qualitative designs (may involve the use of severaldata sources and/or data gathering instruments from the same approach).

MULTIMETHOD DESIGNS

• Designs where both quantitative and qualitative approaches are used, butthey remain relatively independent until the integration stage.

MIXED METHOD DESIGNS

• Designs where elements of quantitative and qualitative approach arecombined in various ways within different phases of the study.

EXAMPLES

EXAMPLES

EXAMPLES

THE POTENTIAL PROBLEMS

• The lack of information about the analysis (especially about qualitative analysis) - proposed results are weakly grounded.

• The use of inferential statistics and/or introduction of generalisationsnot grounded by the chosen strategy and sampling techniques -inconsistency of design.

• The lack of or the fuzziness of description concerning the relationship between different components of study.

• Low integration between qualitative and quantitative aspects of study as well as of different types of data - potential to rise the value of using the combined design instead of pure design.

YOUR THESISHOW TO IMPLEMENT KNOWLEDGE YOU GAINED FROMTHIS LECTURE IN YOUR MASTER THESIS?

…COMMENTS, QUESTIONS?

MOTIVATION OF YOUR STUDY

Why is (thesis) study important?

◦ Possible replies:

◦ ’This is a new phenomenon’

◦ ’This is under-researched’

◦ ’Previous research is ambiguous’

◦ ’We don’t know enough about it’

◦ But how to establish such propositions?

◦ Do a sound literature review

◦ Learn strategies from published research papers

LITERATURE REVIEW

Do a literature review ◦ identify keywords

◦ skim abstracts and use the relevant keywords

◦ use the available facilitites for tracing forward citations

Are you new to the field?◦ Start with encyclopedia articles, reviews, handbooks.

Make short summaries of central articles ◦ Problem area, focus of study, case, conclusion

TASK – THE RESEARCH PURPOSE STATEMENT

Could for example look like this:

The purpose of this ____ (fill in: strategy of inquiry, such as ethnography, case study or other) study is to _____ (understand? describe? develop? discover?) the ________ (central phenomenon being studied) for _____ (the participants, such as the individual, groups, organization) at _____ (research site).

At this stage in the research, the _____ (central phenomenon to be studied) will be generally defined as ____ (provide a general definition).

RESEARCH DESIGN IN YOUR MASTER THESIS

Think now or later (in your own time):

1. What are the philosophical assumptions that underpin your research approach?

• What your worldview is (do you want to: i.e. explore, understand, change?)

2. What is the methodological basis of your research approach?

• i.e., how will it be operationalised?

• Identify the research method that is most appealing and state why.

SUMMARY

RESEARCH DESIGN

• Creswell, J.W. (1998). Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Traditions. Thousand Oaks CA, Sage Publications.

• Creswell, J.W. (2009). Research Design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks CA,Sage Publications.

• Creswell, J.W. & Plano Clark, V.L. (2007) Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods research. Thousand Oaks CA, Sage Publications.

DESIGN-BASED RESEARCH

• Anderson, T. & Shattuck, J. (2012). Design-based research: A Decade of progress in education research? Educational Researcher,41, 16–25.

• Barab, S. (2006). Design-Based Research. A methodological toolkit for the learning scientist. In R.K. Sawyer (ed), The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. New York NY, Cambridge University Press, 153–169.

• Barab, S. & Squire, K. (2004). Design-Based research: Putting a stake in the ground. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(1), 1–14.

• Brown, A.L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological issues in creating complex intervention in classroom settings. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2), 141–178.

• Collins, A., Joseph, D. & Bielaszyc, K. (2004). Design research: Theoretical and methodological issues. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13, 15–42.

• Confrey J (2006) The evolution of design studies as methodology. In: Sawyer RK (ed) The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. New York NY, Cambridge University Press: 135–151.

THANK YOU!• Questions and comments?

• You have a task in the blog: http://letstudies.org/2016/04/04/quali-first-live-lecture-tomorrow/

• We will continue in next lecture with the topic of:

Data collection