Transcription
Hello everyone, and welcome to today's session, part of the business research methods. Today we're going to talk about the nature of qualitative research—arguably one of the most popular methods across many academic disciplines and an emerging one into business and management studies as well.
So the aim of this session is to provide you with a basic understanding of what we mean by qualitative research. What we mean by qualitative data. We'll talk about different types of qualitative research, and we'll focus on some of more recent criticism which has been placed about the validity and relevance of qualitative research in general.
So let's begin with simple definitions about what is qualitative. It's a research strategy that usually emphasizes words rather than quantification in the collection and analysis of data. We're much more concerned to find the meaning instead of finding some facts and figures about a particular phenomenon. Qualitative research is mostly rooted in the inductivist paradigm. It is interpretivist in nature. But qualitative research doesn't always subscribe to all of this. It is much more abstract. It is much more flexible in comparison to quantitative studies. Qualitative methods are used to understand people's beliefs, experiences, attitudes, behavior, interactions as well. And we tend to collect non-numerical data. Most of the data we collect is actually in the form of text, in the form of words.
The integration of qualitative research into many academic disciplines as a research strategy is gaining increased attention due to the potential of qualitative data and its opportunities to add to the quantitative data in many different dimensions. Qualitative research is very popular in social sciences and humanities. You would be able to find a lot of studies in psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies as well.
From a methods perspective, qualitative research allows for in-depth further probing, questioning of respondents. We collect rich and meaningful data which we can play with. Okay. So that's arguably the most important reason why qualitative research is popular, because of the data it can generate. Qualitative research tends to be concerned with words, not numbers. We've already said this. It is more inductive, which means that we don't test the theory. We don't necessarily need a single theory to begin our research. Instead, we will generate a theory as a part of our research and findings.
From an epistemological position, as we've already established, qualitative research is interpretivist. It means that the focus is on understanding of the social world through an examination of multiple perspectives, or as we would like to call them, multiple realities. The ontological position is constructionist, which implies that basically the phenomena that we study are out there and they're separated from those involved in the construction of the world around us.
Sometimes we tend to discuss qualitative research in terms of the ways in which it differs from qualitative research. This is kind of an issue because, in doing so, we imply that basically the role of qualitative research is to find what quantitative research isn't able to. Okay. But these two are actually two different strands. They serve different purposes, and they may be employed to study completely different things. So it's wrong to assume that we only have qualitative research when we cannot find what we want from quantitative research design.
So main characteristics of qualitative research: detailed in depth; we study people's experiences, motivations, behavior, needs; we are focused on a much smaller sample in comparison to quantitative studies where we want to study large populations. In qualitative research, we need a small sample, but we collect a lot of data from that small sample, and the data is understandable by the majority of the readers, which means we don't necessarily need to have specific knowledge about how to read it. In quantitative studies, for example, we do need that specific knowledge, especially when we see the results of t-tests, for example, or ANOVA analysis. Interpretation is required by the researcher, and very often that interpretation depends on the expertise and experience of the researcher in question. Qualitative research tools in general are used to describe, decode, translate the meaning of phenomena we study with the aim to gain in-depth, open-ended responses. So again, we're talking about the rich and meaningful data which we want to collect and not some facts and figures such as numbers.
Speaking of data, the data is descriptive. It's conceptual and usually collected through interviews, observation, questionnaires—qualitative questionnaires, not close-ended questions. Of course, analyzing qualitative data allows us to explore various ideas, to draw conclusions, and to simply collect different perceptions, different stories, different experiences of individuals or groups of people. If we do focus groups, for instance, qualitative data can be defined as data that approximates and characterizes. We also refer to it as categorical data because all of our findings are traditionally grouped into different categories, and we work with them to identify different patterns and themes which helps us draw the larger picture here.
Okay. So an example of what we do qualitatively is provided to you at the end of this slide. For example, if you have a case where a student is reading a paragraph from a book and we have a teacher who is observing the student, basically the teacher can provide some feedback in terms of how, in terms of fluency, intonation, tone of words, clarity, and pronunciation. All of this feedback is actually qualitative data and not quantitative, for obvious reasons.
So why is it important in business research? It's true that quantitative research prevails in the context of business research, and quantitative data studies dominate the body of literature. However, qualitative research is equally important. Qualitative data is there very often to help quantitative studies to make sense, to provide the meaning behind the figures.
Okay, just to give you a very randomly chosen example, in taking a quantitative approach, for instance, we may establish that out of 10 people in a room, five of them like carrot cakes and five of them like chocolate cakes. Okay, we may be able to find that chocolate cake is the preferred option for females while the carrot cake is the preferred option for males. Okay, but we don't know why. We don't have any details about any of this. If we take a qualitative approach, we may find out that basically carrot cake is more preferred because it's considered as a healthier option. Or we may find that four members, four people in the room do not like a chocolate cake because they just, they may have an allergy, or they may need special, or they may have special dietary requirements which may have not been followed. So with the qualitative data, we get the reasons, we get the details, we get those things which we cannot usually gather from figures and numbers.
Okay. So from a market research perspective, collecting qualitative data helps us in answering questions like who our customers are, what they want, and why they want it. Okay. So very often, as we said before, we conduct mixed methods of research that contains both qualitative and quantitative data and instruments, and this seems to be the preferred approach these days in business management studies.
Concepts in qualitative research. We talked about concepts earlier in one of our previous sessions. Within qualitative research, concepts are not that popular. Actually, we would like to think that concepts are pretty vague, and the way in which concepts are developed and employed here is rather different than in the quantitative research strategy. The researchers very often start out with a very broad line of understanding. So very broad concept in general, which is then devised and narrowed during the course of the data collection. The more data we collect, the more likely we are to devise and narrow down the concept.
So now it's time to focus more on the actual methods employed in a qualitative research context. As we said already, qualitative data collection is exploratory. It involves in-depth analysis, in-depth research about the phenomena which we're interested in. The methods employed here are focused on gaining insights, reasoning, motivations, and they go deeper in terms of research, in terms of what findings they want to gather. So some of the most popular data collection methods include interviews, direct or participant observation, and focus groups.
So let's start with arguably the most popular one: the interviews. It's one of the most commonly used data collection instruments, and typically we are more likely to employ some kind of interviewing in pretty much anything that we do qualitatively. So the interview is a simple process in which one researcher collects data from an interviewee. This could be done in a very formal and structured approach, but there is a relative freedom and flexibility here. We differentiate between three different types of interviews: unstructured interviews where we only know the topic, we only know the general broader line of interest; semistructured, which we have some kind of, you know, broader questions which to guide us the conversation; and structured, which we have, you know, a list of questions which we have to ask as a part of the interview. Usually we actually send those well in advance to our respondents. Mostly interviews are based on open-ended questions which may even be asked spontaneously. Sometimes this happens when we may have like follow-up questions because we're interested in what our respondent has just said. Interviews are usually recorded by using either a voice recording device or a mobile phone these days, and later we transcribe them either by using pen and paper or just digitally, for example, by using Microsoft Word.
So ethnography and participant observation—I've put this together because very often these are treated equally because they collect the same data and they use the same data collection instruments. So there is a difference between ethnography and participant observation, and very often, well in general, we shall assume that participant observation is part of ethnography and not vice versa. Okay. However, in terms of approaches to data collection, as we said before, they tend to have a very similar, if not identical, approaches. So an example of ethnography is, for example, when we have a researcher living with an indigenous community somewhere in South Pacific, South America, in Australia, Africa, researching local traditions, customs, and rituals. The researcher in this case will go and live there with the community for, let's say, a period of six months and will collect data from talking to people, observing their behavior, taking field notes, and most of the time keeping what we call a graphic diary as well. So qualitative research employing ethnography or participant observation typically engages in a substantial amount of qualitative interviewing or informal conversation. That's the whole ethnographic approach.
So focus groups is when we have a group of individuals which we have selected carefully and put them together to discuss and comment on a particular subject or a topic. Focus groups are essentially a form of group interviewing, but it's not exactly the same as interviewing. Okay. With focus groups, we rely on the interaction within the group based on the topics supplied by the researcher, and we want to study the group dynamics. We want to see how the group responds together, what kind of questions may emerge as a result of the group interaction. Typically each focus group is comprised of between six and ten people, and this in turn means that when we collect the data we may need more than one researcher to be present in the room. So the main purpose of the focus group is to draw upon respondents' attitudes, feelings, beliefs, experiences, and again to study that dynamics and to stimulate the people in the room to engage in active conversations and discussions. We may follow up from the focus group and still interview selected individuals on the basis of their participation. Compared to individual interviews, focus groups elicit multiplicity of views and emotional processes within a group context, and this is what makes them valuable.
On this slide, you can see here the main steps of how we conduct qualitative research. We first generate the research questions. We select the sites and sub-subjects which we're going to study. We collect the data which we need, and then we analyze the data. What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative studies, as you see in the next session, for example, is the conceptual and theoretical frameworks. With the qualitative data and qualitative research, we generate the conceptual and theoretical frameworks as a result of the data collection process. So we draw on our findings to devise the conceptual and/or the radical frameworks. With the quantitative data, this is already being done at the very beginning, and this is what informs the research questions and hypothesis. The last process is, of course, writing up the findings and drawing the conclusions.
So this takes us to the criticism of qualitative research. The main criticism is that qualitative research is subjective. It depends on the ability of the researcher to analyze the data collected. Another criticism is that qualitative findings rely too much on un-systematic views. We don't have systematic evidence like tests, for example, in quantitative studies or statistical figures to show us the real truth. Yeah. Another concern is that very often each qualitative research is unique. It's almost impossible to conduct two applications since there are hardly any standard procedures to be followed. Every case study is unique in its own nature, and all the questions, for example, are unique to the researcher who's asking them.
Last but not least, it is generalization that we're concerned with. It's often suggested that the scope of the findings of qualitative investigations is restricted. This is largely due to the relatively small sample size, which makes it difficult to generalize the findings upon a certain population. For example, if we interview ten people, we will end up with each meaningful data about their perceptions. But if these ten people are part of a larger community of one million, we cannot generalize the findings for all of those one million people living in the same place.
So a significant concern is the lack of transparency. It is very difficult to establish from qualitative research what the researcher has actually done and how we have arrived at the conclusions. Qualitative reports are sometimes unclear about what was precisely done, what data was precisely collected, how this was done. Okay. This is a concern mainly for quantitative research. If we still have a very rigorous process in terms of how we establish the credibility and validity of qualitative data, and it is the analysis that is often unclear, but good qualitative studies provide robust analysis from different perspectives. So these issues are increasingly being addressed, and in the majority of the newly emerged studies we can see a lot on research methods. Previously, even the research methods as a section did not exist in qualitative studies.
To summarize, there is a disagreement over what precisely qualitative research is. To an extent, qualitative research does not lend itself to the delineation of a clear set of line steps. We don't have, you know, strict procedures in comparison to the quantitative research. It is more open-ended. It is more flexible. We aim to collect rich and meaningful data; theories and concepts are viewed as outcomes of the research process and not as ones that drive how the research process is going to be conducted. Most qualitative researchers actually employ different research instruments, but at the end of the day, the data which we tend to collect is non-numeric and it is text and words in particular.
So this takes us to the end of today's session. We still need to discuss a little bit about reliability and validity in qualitative research, which we're going to do in some of the next sessions as well. So please have a look at class 9 readings, which you can see here on this slide and also in the syllabus. In next, in the next session, we'll continue to what we started today, but we'll compare qualitative research with quantitative research. So we are going to define what we mean by quantitative research. We'll discuss validity and reliability, which is much more robust here, and also draw some comparisons, of course, between and qualitative research methods.
So that's all for me for this session. Thank you so much for your attention, and I shall see you in the next one. Thank you.