Doing & Writing Qualitative Research

Adrian Holliday

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473968301
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Investigación y metodología de las ciencias sociales

With a strong focus on using less traditional forms of data, Doing & Writing Qualitative Research provides a new perspective on issues such as the role of the researcher and the impact they have on data, and also considers the impact of social, cultural, and political complexities across a range of disciplines. Approachable and logically structured, the new Third Edition expertly sets out the many roles of writing in research. From the more theoretical subjects (e.g. research strategies, data types, and writing styles) to the nitty gritty practicalities (e.g. conventions, taking notes, and writing questions), each chapter covers many common concerns writers face when attempting to transform complex data and real world research experiences into textual products.

With fully updated examples and case studies as well as a strong focus on using less traditional forms of data like photographs, personal narrative, and creative non-fiction, Doing & Writing Qualitative Research introduces students to modern opportunities in data collection and sourcing that adds depth to their research.

Find out how to:

- Establish and construct research questions, frameworks, and paradigms

- Engage with different styles and media of data

- Present ideas clearly and persuasively

- Approach sensitive issues of identity and avoid reductive judgements

- Discover your individual writing voice

Through its accessible advice and its exploration of social, cultural, and political complexities across disciplines, this book is appropriate for both novices and more experienced researchers and forms an essential tool for students engaging in qualitative research across a variety of fields.

1 Approaching qualitative research

Within the broad context of doing qualitative research, about which much has been written, I will focus quite a lot on writing. This is an equally problematic area for novice and experienced researchers alike; and there is much to be learnt about the process of doing research by keeping the issue of writing in mind. In this chapter I will begin with the broader context. I am establishing a state of affairs that will be referred to in the discussion of examples of writing from Chapter 2 onwards. From the start I will take the view that there is the potential for considerable rigour and discipline in qualitative research, that there is science within its complex nature, but that this rigour largely resides in the way in which the research is expressed in writing. I shall argue that qualitative research presents a statement about reality and social life that has to be continually argued and reaffirmed. It is this need for constant articulation that makes writing as important as other aspects of doing the research.

I shall begin with a standard comparison between qualitative and quantitative research, and then move quickly on to the way in which qualitative research has to be carefully managed as a social activity which is as ideological and complex as those it studies. Finally, in a brief tour of schools and approaches, I shall locate the writing task as presented in this book.

A point of terminology: in the ensuing chapters I will be basing my discussion of writing in qualitative research around examples of writing. They range from short undergraduate assignments to masters’ and doctoral dissertations and theses to published papers. For the sake of clarity, when I talk generally about the written product of research, I shall refer to all of these types of writing collectively as ‘the written study’.

Qualitative and quantitative?

It is fairly standard to introduce qualitative research by distinguishing it from quantitative research. This is an unadventurous way to begin, but necessary because, when asked ‘What is research?’ most people I think still refer to the more familiar, traditional quantitative research. Also, it is often argued that a major binding feature of qualitative research is its opposition to positivism, the philosophical basis for quantitative research. There needs however to be note of caution with regard to these distinctions here and throughout the book. Social research is a complex area, and attempts to divide it into hard categories will always suffer from oversimplification. Qualitative research will always involve quantitative elements and vice versa. I will look at this more complicated set of relationships in more detail later in the chapter.

Surveys and experiments

Quantitative research concerns counting. A straightforward example might be:

Example 1.1: Car survey

To find out the proportion of Ford cars to Peugeots in a particular country. This would entail counting the number of each. If it is not possible to find every single occurrence, a sample may be taken. Statistical analysis tells us both how many, or what percentage of each, and how valid the sample is in representing the whole.

The next example is not quite so straightforward:

Example 1.2: Car experiment

To test the hypothesis that more Ford cars will be bought if prospective first-time buyers are exposed to advertising that says they are safer. A sample of first-time buyers is exposed to the advertising; another sample is not; and the degree to which each group buys Fords is measured. A variety of techniques are employed to control variables to reduce contamination. For example, the age and social class of the subjects are kept constant.

Here we can see that a lot of effort is made to reduce the effect of variables other than that of exposure to advertising. The overall aim is to control so that the experiment can be replicated with different groups to test the hypothesis time and time again. However, this will always be difficult. The people taking part in the research would need to be isolated from all other influences on their attitudes to cars, influences that nowadays pervade every aspect of society, if contamination were to be totally prevented.

At first sight, the next example seems as straightforward as the car survey in Example 1.1:

Example 1.3: Eyes survey

To calculate the proportion of brown to blue eyes within a particular nationality. The occurrence of each is counted within a statistically valid sample.

However, on reflection, the definition of ‘blue’ and ‘brown’ is not as straightforward as the definition of ‘Ford’ and ‘Peugeot’ which have clear proofs of manufacture to distinguish them. Indeed, in different places and among different types of people, the meaning of and therefore distinction between ‘brown’, ‘blue’ and other colours of eyes may vary according to language and social values. Colour when related to human appearance is not neutral. This is certainly true of skin colour, which carries racial connotation for many people and is attributed poetic value by others. ‘Blond’ hair and ‘blue’ eyes are not neutral phrases for many people as they relate to images of popular beauty that resonate beyond simple physical descriptions. An apparently simple survey is therefore made complex and less reliable by the social qualities attributed to definitions of colour. The next example addresses this issue by trying to find out what these qualities are:

Example 1.4: Eyes questionnaire

Within the population in Example 1.3 to find out what people mean by, and what their attitudes are to ‘brown’ and ‘blue’, and what sort of social values underlie these meanings and attitudes.

There are well-known problems with questionnaires – how the mode of question influences the mood of response, how far people tell the ‘truth’, how far they understand the question anyway, how far the social impact of a questionnaire will influence perception. Again, the aim is to control variables as much as possible. The difficulties increase as researchers get into closer contact with the people they are researching, in interviews, or when questionnaires are delivered face-to-face. The following example from my own experience confirms this:

Example 1.5: Egyptian interview

I was sitting in an Egyptian university faculty common room listening to a lecturer answering survey questions about the timetable in her department. The American interviewer was going through the questions with her, perhaps to ensure good researcher–subject relations. Later on the lecturer confided in me that what she had told him bore little relation to reality, but that she had not wished to disappoint him by telling him that she could not answer most of the questions. This was part of a nation-wide survey carried out by a US curriculum agency, upon which policy decisions in educational aid were based.

I do not think that the lecturer felt that she was ‘lying’. I feel that she was sincere in her response to what she considered a social commitment to being polite which outweighed the fact that she did not have all the information the researcher wanted. On the other hand, in this particular context educational resources were scarce; and she probably did not wish to reveal to this outsider that the official course timetable could never be maintained because lecturers spent all their time travelling by bus from the capital. This is only my interpretation of her behaviour. The point I wish to make is that people’s reasons for responding in the ways they do to questionnaires and interviews can be both far from what the researcher expects and mysterious.

For readers not from that part of the world, the Egyptian setting of Example 1.5 might imply ‘foreign’ society and therefore ‘exotic’ behaviour. The strangeness it invokes gives credence to the notions that things may not be as they seem and that there is a mysterious element in human behaviour. It is, however, a major tenet of qualitative research that all scenarios, even the most familiar, should be seen as strange, with layers of mystery that are always beyond the control of the researcher, which need always to be discovered. To avoid cultural chauvinism, which I shall talk about in Chapter 8, we must apply the discipline of seeing all societies and settings, including our own, as equally strange and complex. Indeed, observing what the Egyptian lecturer in the example says may make a British researcher begin to realise that it is not so different to what might happen in her own university when reporting to external quality assurance agencies.

A particular example of what should be learnt from research carried out in unfamiliar environments relates to a comment from Qureshi, who suggests that there is a ‘relational’ aspect of social life in Pakistan that makes the application of Western research ethics problematic. She explains that ‘the range of choices and degrees of freedom available’ to the researcher ‘are determined by how s/he is introduced to community members and what relational category/categories are assigned to him/her’ (2010: 90). My response to this is that we need to learn from her experience of research in Pakistan to understand more about ‘relational’ aspects of the social contexts we are more familiar with. I shall discuss further how research ethics responds to social context in Chapter 7. It is a major principle of this book that if qualitative research methodology cannot learn from and then be applied to any social context it is failing as a methodology.

The qualitative areas of social life

I have moved quite a distance from the quantitative Example 1.4 to Example 1.5, which is in effect qualitative data in embryo, in that it describes actions within a specific setting and invites rather than tries to control the possibility of a rich array of variables. Example 1.5 presents research in terms of human relationships and invokes the need to discover as much about how research subjects feel about the information they provide as about the information itself. Indeed, the people about whom the research is carried out are less ‘subjects’ than just people who happen to be in the research setting. (See my discussion of ‘subjects’ and ‘participants’ in Chapters 7 and 8.)

It is these qualitative areas in social life – the backgrounds, interests and broader social perceptions – that defy quantitative research, which qualitative research addresses. Qualitative research does not pretend to solve the problems of quantitative research, but does not see them as constraints. Rather than finding ways to reduce the effect of uncontrollable social variables, it investigates them directly. So, examples of qualitative research about brown and blue eyes and Ford car buying might be:

Example 1.6: Eyes study

An exploration of what people mean by, and what their attitudes are to ‘brown’ and ‘blue’ eye colour, and of what sort of social values underlie these meanings and attitudes. The residents of three households of different class and ethnicity in a provincial town are studied. They are interviewed in groups on topics related to human attractiveness as displayed in their daily life, in advertising and in the media. The interviews are open-ended, allowing relevant topics and themes to be developed. They are followed up with further interviews to which the residents are invited to bring photographs of family and friends, advertising and the media as props, and with observation of interaction in settings that emerge as significant, e.g. wedding parties.

Example 1.7: Car study

An exploration of attitudes to Ford car adverts. A video of an advert is played in three public houses frequented by members of the target first-time-buyer group, and their comments recorded. This is followed up with group interviews which explore topics arising from the comments. The public houses are revisited one year later; and the same people are interviewed about which cars they bought and what this means to them.

The whole orientation of these two examples of qualitative research is quite different to that of the quantitative examples. Rather than controlling variables, these studies are open-ended and set up research opportunities designed to lead the researcher into unforeseen areas of discovery within the lives of the people she is investigating. Also, they look deeply into behaviour within specific social settings rather than at broad populations (Chapter 2). It also becomes apparent that the written study for qualitative research must account for how the research steps interact with the individual setting.

These differences can be summarised in the following way:

• Quantitative research has a tendency to count occurrences across a large population. It uses statistics and replicability to validate generalisation from survey samples and experiments. It attempts to reduce contaminating social variables.
• Qualitative research looks deep into the quality of social life. It locates the study within particular settings, which provide opportunities for exploring all possible social variables, and set manageable boundaries. An initial foray into the social setting leads to further, more informed exploration as themes and focuses emerge.

While quantitative research seeks to control and pin down, the qualitative mode maintains that we can explore, catch glimpses, illuminate and then try to interpret bits of reality. Interpretation is as far as we can go. This places less of a burden of proof on qualitative research, which instead builds gradual pictures. The pictures are themselves only interpretations – approximations – basic attempts to represent what is in fact a much more complex reality – paintings that represent our own impressions, rather than photographs of what is ‘really’ there. The...