Introduction
OK, you are thinking about your topic, refining your research question, fixing on a theoretical perspective, and considering the type of data that might lead to an answer to your question. The next question you will want to ask what methods are there to get the data I need to answer my question? This post will look at two of the most common methods used by qualitative researchers. But first, I need to clear up a common misconception.
Methodology or Methods?
The difference between a method and a methodology are often confused and sometimes, the words are used interchangeably. They are, however, quite different. Your methodology is the organisational structure of the project, the approach you take to gather and analyse your data. Future posts will look at many of these. The methods are the individual tools that you will use to generate and collect your data. Methods are methodologically agnostic and not restricted to any one methodology.
Interviews
Interviews are one of the most common methods in the qualitative space, and you could say they were characteristic of the approach. However, don’t think of the interviews you see on talk shows or in the news. An interview for qualitative research has some similarities – two or more people talking – but has some crucial differences. Let’s start with a definition:
Interviewing is a conversational practice where knowledge is produced through the interaction between an interviewer and an interviewee or a group of interviewees. (Brinkmann, 2008, p. 470)
Firstly, interviews are a conversation between you as the researcher and your participant. You ask questions, actively listen to responses, clarify, explore answers: all features of a conventional conversation.
Secondly, knowledge is produced in and through this conversation. “Produced” is not the same as “manufactured.” The knowledge we gain from interviewing participants comes about from the actual questions we ask, the answers our participants give and then the analysis and interpretation we give those answers. (1)
There are three broad types of interviews, structured, semi-structured and unstructured. In a structured interview, the questions are fixed and only those questions are asked. An unstructured interview is very open and useful for a life history, for example but by far, the most common form in qualitative research is the semi-structured interview. In this approach, you prepare a set of questions beforehand, but there is a certain flexibility to allow you to rephrase them according to your participant as well as follow leads that come up in the conversation.
One potential weakness of interviews is that they can be quite time consuming. Not just the doing of the interview, but the organisation, transcription, and analysis. Related to this is the amount of data they can generate all of which needs to be eventually analysed.
Text Analysis
Another common approach used by qualitative researchers is to analyse texts and I discussed this in more detail in another post in this series. For qualitative researchers, this can mean anything that carries meaning and conveys a message in some form. Depending on your research question, the analysis of the appropriate sources will generate the data to answer that question.
This method comes in a variety of other flavours. In content analysis, you would be analysing the frequency of elements in a text, counting words and phrases. Part qualitative and part quantitative, often providing raw material for deeper investigation. In discourse analysis, we examine ‘talk’ to see how ideas are organised, carried, and reproduced. Conversation analyses studies the way people structure and convey information in conversations. Document analysis looks specifically into the context, history, provenance, status, and related issues of visual or text documents.
Conclusion
Qualitative methods are diverse as these two common examples demonstrate. Yet beneath these two very different approaches lie the key features of qualitative research: human experience in context, an interest that is found throughout qualitative research.
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Reference
Brinkmann, S. (2008). In L. M. Given, The SAGE encyclopedia of qualitative research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd doi: 10.4135/9781412963909
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