NOORMAIZATUL AKMAR ISHAK, Ph.D

School of Human Development and Techno-communication

Universiti Malaysia Perlis

Ice breaking

• Reflect on the following questions:

– What’s your research interest?

– What is your view of the social world?

– How does it influence the way you are researching?

What is your research interest?• Does your interest lie

– in the accumulation of new knowledge to explain facts/events?

– in understanding the complexities associated with those events?

– in application to problem solving?

What are your views on the following issues?

• Paddy planting

• Temperature

• Poverty

• Suicide bombing

• Digital lifestyle

• K-pop

• Do they exist independent of human existence?

• What proof do we need to justify the matter?

• What knowledge of these issues will you trust?

• How can we produce reliable and valid knowledge about them?

• How can we collect reliable data?

Perspectives..

Perspectives..

Perspectives..

Perspectives..

Qualitative Research

• Systematic analysis of socially meaningful action through the direct detailed observation of people in natural setting in order to arrive at understandings and interpretations of how people create and maintain their social worlds.

Neuman, 1997

Observation.. Experience..

Gravity makes things fall.

The apple that hits my head was due to gravity.

The apple hits my head.

Gravity works!

Research Process Onion

A Framework for Design – the interconnection of Worldviews, Strategies of Inquiry, and Research Methods (Creswell, 2009)

Philosophical Worldviews

* Postpositive

* Social construction

* Advocacy/participatory

* Pragmatic

Research Methods

* Questions

* Data Collection

* Data Analysis

* Interpretation

* Write-up

* Validation

Strategies of Inquiry

* Qualitative egethnography

* Quantitative egexperiments

* Mixed Methods egsequential

Research Designs• Qualitative

• Quantitative• Mixed Methods

Philosophical Worldviews• A basic set of beliefs that guide action (Guba, 1990, p.

17).

• Paradigms (Lincoln & Guba, 2000; Mertens, 1998).

• Epistemologies and ontologies (Crotty, 1998).

• Broadly conceived research methodologies (Neuman, 2000).

• Worldview (Creswell, 2009)

– Shaped by the discipline area of the student, the beliefs of advisers and faculty in a student’s area and past research experiences.

– The types of beliefs held by individual researchers will often lead to embracing a qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods approach in their research.

Four Worldviews

Postpositivism

• Determination

• Reductionisms

• Empirical observation and measurement

• Theory verification

Constructivism

• Understanding

• Multiple participant meanings

• Social and historical construction

• Theory generation

Advocacy/ Participatory

• Political

• Empowerment issue-oriented

• Collaborative

• Change-oriented

Pragmatism

• Consequences of actions

• Problem-centered

• Pluralistic

• Real-world practice oriented

What Do We Believe Exists? (Ontology - Interpretivism)

• The social world is very different to the natural world.

• Human consciousness is highly significant. People act consciously in order to create and recreate their social existence.

• It is not possible to make cause and effect statements about the social world that are “true for all time”. Limited – and very specific – causal statements can be made.

• The social world is experienced subjectively and has no objective existence that is independent of people’s everyday behaviour. Knowledge about the social world is created, not simply discovered.

• Human behaviour is the product of the way in which people interpret the social world. It is not determined by social structures.

What Proof Will We Accept of Valid Knowledge? (Epistemology – Interpretivism)

• Knowledge about the social world is based upon our ability to experience the world as others experience it. “Reality” in this sense, is created by people experiencing and interpreting the world subjectively.

• The task of science is not to try to establish causal relationships/laws (something considered to be almost impossible in the social world), rather, it is to understand how and why people interpret the world in various ways. This is a very different form of science to that advanced by positivist – mainly because of the difference in subject matter between the two worlds.

• The main objective of interpretivism is to understand the ways in which people create and experience the social world subjectively.

Interpretivist science• Reality is represented through the eyes of participants.

• The existence of external reality independent of our theoretical beliefs and concepts is denied.

• The role of language is emphasized:

– As object of study.

– As central instrument by which the world is represented and constructed.

• Meaning of experience and behaviour is viewed in context.

• Research process generate working hypotheses rather than immutable empirical facts.

• The emergent of concepts from data rather than impositions from a priori theory.

• Qualitative methods are more suitable.

Interpretivist science• The social world is produced and reproduced on a daily basis

by people going about their lives.– What is true now, in our society may not be true in the future or in

another society.

• Social reality is the product of meaningful social interaction.– Dynamic, constantly changing and evolving process that involves people acting

and reacting to the world and relationships around them.

• People are living, thinking, reflective, individuals who try, as best they can, to make sense of the world in which they live.

• People define situations and give meaning to their actions and those of others.– Understand the meanings people give to their actions.

– Get as close as possible to the people and situations we want to explain, to experience, in short, what they are experiencing.

Criticisms of interpretivists view of research

• Emphasis on the subjective nature of society to the exclusion of any objective social features.

• Societies do have objective features

– All known societies have some form of religious beliefs and institutions.

– All societies appear to be male-dominated.

– Some groups in society are more powerful than others.

– Some groups are able to impose their version of social reality onto society.

Unique and subjective knowledge (the interpretivist view)

• When interest is in understanding the complexities associated with facts/events in particular situation?– Multiple, sharing realities based on subjective experience (onto)

– Meaning exists in our interpretation; knowledge is interpretation of reality (epis)

Observer

Reality (participant)

Reality (participant)

Reality (participant)

Reality (participant)

Reality (participant)

Researcher’s

understanding and

interpretation of

participant’s view

on social reality.

Seeking understanding..

• In what ways political alliance influence academics’ sense of collegiality?

• How do families interpret messages about healthy eating?

• What belief systems influence farm-workers’ perceived risk of pesticide exposure?

• How do students describe academic procrastination?

• What processes are at work in forming an organizational identity?

Interpretive research

• Matching paradigm and research style.

• Let’s reflect

– Where do you situate your research interest?

– Describe the ontology, epistemology and methodology of your research.

Characteristics of interpretive research

• Natural settings as the direct source of data

• The researcher is the key instruments

• Descriptive

• Concerned with process rather than simply with outcomes or products

• Inductive analysis of data

• Essentially concerned with “meaning”

• Qualitative

• Emergent design

(Guba & Lincoln, 1985)

Natural settings• Concern for context.

– Crucial in deciding whether or not a finding may have meaning in some other context as well.

– Because of the belief in complex mutual shaping rather than linear causation.

• Action can best be understood when it is observed in the setting in which it occurs.

– In the context of the history of the institutions.

– Where, how, under what circumstances events come into being.

– “... Human behaviour is significantly influenced by the setting in which it occurs..”

(Bogdan & Bikien, 1992, p31)

Dian Fossey• Dian Fossey was an American zoologist,

primatologist, and anthropologist who undertook an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups over a period of 18 years.

• Dian Fossey was 53 when she was killed inside her tent in Volcanoes Park in Rwanda on December 27, 1985.

• The case of her mysterious death remains open.

The researcher is the key instrument

• Responsive to the environmental cues.

• Able to interact with the situation.

• Has the ability to collect information at multiple levels simultaneously.

• Able to perceive situations holistically.

• Able to process data as soon as they become available.

• Able to provide immediate feedback and request verification of data.

• Able to explore a typical or unexpected responses.

Descriptive

• Words, pictures

• Results contain quotations from the data to illustrate and substantiate the presentation

• Little attempts to reduce data to numerical symbols.

• Data are analysed with all their richness “as closely as possible to the form in which they were recorded or transcribed.”

• “Nitpicking”- nothing is trivial, everything has the potential of being a clue that assists better understanding of what is studied.

• Thick description.

Bogdan & Biklen, 1992

“ The researcher constantly asks such questions as: Why are these desks arranged the way they are? Why are some rooms decorated with pictures and others not?... Is there a certain reason for certain activities being carried out where they are?”

“Data or evidence is not searched to prove or disprove hypotheses asserted before entering the study.”

“Theories emerge from bottom up, from many disparate pieces of collected evidence that are interconnected.”– Grounded theory

Focus on understanding constructed meaning

• Unlike positivist researchers who assume that phenomena are best understood from an objective standpoint.

• Meaning and knowledge are constructed in a social context.

• Effort to understand research participants’ subjective perspectives.

• Offen accomplished by including research participants as members of the research team, i.e action research.

Deduction and Induction

• Deduction

– Theory observations/findings

Is a process by which we arrive at a reasoned conclusion by logically generalizing from a known fact.

• Induction

– Observations/findings theory

Is a process where we observe certain phenomena and on this basis arrive at conclusions.

The process of deduction and induction

Deduction Induction

Theory

Hypothesis

Data Collection

Findings

Hypotheses confirmed or rejected

Revision of theory

Compare Theory

Develop Theory

Look for patterns

Form categories

Ask questions

Gather information

Types of qualitative research

Atkinson, Delamont & Hammersley (1988)

Denzin & Lincoln (1994)

• Symbolic interactionism

• Anthropology

• Sociolinguistics

• Ethnomethodology

• Democratic evaluation

• Neo-Marxist ethnography

• Feminism

• Case studies

• Ethnography

• Phenomenology and ethnomethodology

• Grounded theory

• Biographical method

• Historical social science

• Participative inquiry

• Clinical research

Narrative research

• The description of the lives of individuals, the collection of individuals’ stories of their experiences, and a discussion of the meaning of those experiences.

• It purposes is to attempt to increase understanding of central issues related to teaching and learning through the telling and retelling of participants’ stories.

Phenomenology

• A theoretical view point which believes that individual behaviour is determined by the experience gained out of one’s direction with the phenomena.

• It rules out any kind of objective external reality.

• Husserl and Schutz.

• During interaction with various phenomena, human beings interpret them and attach meanings to different actions and/ or ideas and thereby construct new experiences.

• Therefore, the researcher has to develop empathic understanding to know the process of interpretation by individuals so that she can reproduce in her mind feelings, motives and thoughts that are behind the action of others.

Ethnomethodology

• Garfinkel.

• It deals with the world of everyday life.

• Theoretical concerns centres around the process by which common sense reality is constructed in everyday face-to-face interaction.

• This approach studies the process by which people invoke certain ‘take-for-granted’ rules about behaviour which they interpret in an interactive situation and make it meaningful.

• They are mainly interested in the interpretation people use to make sense of social settings.

Symbolic interactionism• Dewey, Cooley and Mead.

• Emphasizes the understanding and interpretation of interactions that take place between human beings.

• The peculiarity of this approach is that human beings interpret and define each other’s actions instead of merely reacting to each other’s actions.

• Human interaction in the social world is mediated by the use of symbols like language, which help human beings to give meaning to objects.

• By only concentrating attention on individuals’ capacity to create symbolically meaningful objects in the world, human interaction and resulting patterns of social organizations can be understood.

• As a result, not only human beings change themselves through interaction, but also bring in change in societies.

Case study

• The case is the situation, individual, group, organization, neighbourhood, innovation, decision, service, programme that we are interested in.

• “A strategy for doing research which involves an empirical investigation of a particular contemporary phenomenon within its real life context using multiple sources of evidence” (Yin, 1994).

Types of Case Study

• Individual case study – detailed account of one person

• Set of individual case studies

• Community study

• Social group study

• Studies of organizations and institutions

• Studies of events, roles and relationships

• Multiple case studies

Every enquiry is a kind of case study

• “Many flexible design studies, even though not explicitly labelled as such, can be usefully viewed as case studies. They typically take place in a specific setting, or small range of settings, context is viewed as important, and there is commonly an interest in the setting in its own right.”

Ethnography

• Interpretive approach for describing, analysing and interpreting a culture-sharing group’s shared patterns of behaviour, beliefs, and language that develop over time.

• Examines groups, not individuals.

• Not to generate theory.

• Prolonged engagement.

Culture

• “Everything having to do with human behaviour and belief.” (LeCompte, Preissle & Tesch, 1993).

– Language, rituals, economic, political structures, life stages, interactions, communication styles

• To understand culture, the ethnographer spends considerable time ‘in the field’ interviewing, observing, examining documents, to provide detailed descriptions of the culture.

Grounded Theory

• Theory generation

• Inductive

• Emphasizes the use of data analysis steps of open, axial and selective coding, and the development of a logic paradigm or a visual picture of the theory generated.

• Constant comparative method.

Example of grounded theory study

• “Educating every teacher, every year: The public schools and parents of children with autism.”

• “Orang Asli Females: A theory of educational aspiration.”

Designing Interpretive Research

Stating the research problem (Creswell, 2002)

• Justify the research problem– Personal experience (used in naturalist research, i.e action research).

– Experiences in the workplace

– Suggestions made by other researchers

• Identify deficiencies in the evidence– Deficiencies in the research may require a need to extend the

research, replicate a study, explore a topic, or lift voices of marginalised people.

– Deficiencies in practice means that good and workable solutions have not yet been identified.

• Relate the discussion to audience– The importance of the study to the audiences

– How will addressing what we need to know help researchers, educators, policy makers, and other individuals?

Linking theory and research topic

• Start with a clean sheet?

• But in most real world studies time is at a premium and there is advantage in not delaying theory development.

(Robson, 2002, p61)

Research questions

Examples:

• How do marketing practitioners select the ‘most appropriate’ variables for the purpose of market segmentation?

• How have marketing practitioners responded to the opportunity to utilise increasing volumes of data within the development of their segmentation solutions?

• How do managers operationalise and implement market segmentation in practice?

• What are the strategic needs and priorities of managers, which may inform the specific development of an organizational approach to market segmentation?

• In what sense are managerial, strategic needs and priorities applicable to those aspects of normative market segmentation which underpin its conceptual development?

Conceptual frameworks

• Not often present in interpretive inquiries, especially not at the inception of the study.

• Should there be a preexistent conceptual framework? (Miles & Huberman, 1984, p27).

– Social realities are perceived too complex, too relative, or too exotic to be approached with conventional conceptual maps or standardized instruments.

– The conceptual framework should emerge empirically from the field in the course of the study.

– It is developed after data analysis.

Should there be a pre-existent conceptual framework? (Miles & Huberman, 1984, 27)

• The conventional image of field research (naturalistic research) assumes that

– The most important RQs will become clear only later on,

– The most meaningful settings and actors cannot be predicted prior to fieldwork,

– Instruments, if any, should derive from the properties of the setting, and from the ways its actors construct them.

Should there be hypotheses?

• In quantitative research, a theory explains why a particular answer is predicted.

• Talking in terms of hypotheses, best fits positivist design where we should be in a position to make predictions before the data are gathered.

• In qualitative research (naturalistic) we are likely to be in this position only after, and as a result of, the data gathering.

• The outcomes can be used to support the existence of particular mechanisms in the context studied, even it they could not be predicted.

(Robson, 2002, p69)

Sample size (Morse, 2000)

• An estimate of the number of participants needed to reach saturation depends on:

– The scope of the study• The broader the scope the greater the sample.

– The nature of the topic• When topic is clear, fewer participants are needed.

• If it is difficult to “grab”, or if participants find it difficult to talk about the issue, you need more.

– Quality of the data• “if data are on target, contain less dross, and are rich and experiential,

then fewer participants will be required to reach saturation.”

Sample size (Creswell, 2002)

• No set of guidelines, but typically:

– Study one cultural-sharing group in an ethnography

– Examine 3-5 cases in a case study

– Interview 15-20 during a grounded theory study

– Explore the narrative stories of one individual in narrative research

– Do until the data is saturated.

Purposeful sampling (Patton, 1980)

• Extreme or deviant case

• Typical case

• Maximum variation case

• Critical case

• Convenience

• Snowball

• Homogeneous

Data collection methods

• Typically, qualitative researchers rely on:

– Participation in the setting

– In-depth interview

– Direct observation

– Analysis of documents and materials

Data collection methods

Types and styles of interviews

• Fully structured interview

• Semi-structured interview

• Unstructured interviews

• Individual

• Focus group discussion

Observation

• Participant observation

• Non-participant observation

• Structured observation

• Informal observation

Ethical issues• Deploying self

– Degree of participantness

– Revealed or concealed

• Negotiating entry– Identify and present aspects of self that will be useful

– Respect participants’ right not to participate

– Be sensitive to their reluctance to participate

• Interpersonal relationship

• Building trust– Anonymity and confidentiality

– Right to privacy

• Reciprocity

• Informed consent

Guarding against biasness

• Triangulation

• Avoid “going native”

• Make clear own research dispositions

• Detail the process of collecting data

• Rigour

Analysing through constant comparative method

• Gather data, sort into categories, collect additional information, compare new information with emerging categories.

• Inductive – from indicators (small segments of information) to several codes to abstract categories.

• Comparing one incidents to other incidents, incident to categories, categories to other categories.– To ground the categories in the data.

– To eliminate redundancy.

– To develop evidence for categories.

Trustworthiness of interpretive research (Guba & Lincoln, 1985)

• Credibility– How credible are the findings of the study?

– By what criteria can we judge them?

• Transferability– How transferable and applicable are these findings to another setting

or group of people?

• Dependability– How can we be reasonably certain that the findings would be

replicated?

• Conformability– How can we be certain that the findings reflect the participants and

the inquiry itself rather than a fabrication from the researcher’s biases or prejudices?

Techniques to establish credibility Patton, 1990

• Rigorous techniques and methods for gathering high-quality data.

• Careful analysis.

• Attending to issues of validity, reliability and triangulation.

• Philosophical belief in research paradigm that guides the research conduct and coherence.

Guba & Lincoln, 1985

• Prolonged engagement

• Persistent observation

• Triangulation– Methodological (i.e combining

quantitative & qualitative approaches)

– Use more than one method of data collection

– Use multiple theories

– Employ several observers on similiar phenomenon

– Location, time

• Referential adequacy– An activity that makes possible checking

preliminary findings and interpretations against archived raw data.

– Using video & movie cameras to capture the episodes in the settings.

Transferability

• Thick description (Geertz, 1973)

– To provide a detailed description of the...

• Context in which the research takes place

• Design and methods

• Data collection and analysis

– So that the readers would be able to make judgments as to..

• Whether they are adequate and make sense

• How well the findings are transferable to other situations.

Dependability

• An attempt to account for

– Changing conditions in the phenomenon chosen for study.

– Changes in the design created by an increasingly refined understanding of the setting

• Audit trail

– To keep a full record of all activities while carrying out the study

– Raw data, research journal, details of coding and data analysis.

– To ensure the dependability of procedures, findings and conclusions.

Confirmability

• In qualitative research, the researcher is interested in providing evidence to allow readers to confirm results of his/her study.

• Do the data help confirm the general findings and lead to the implications?

• Some of the techniques used in establishing confirmability are audit trail, triangulation, member checking, and reflexive journal.

Let’s reflect

• Has today’s experience facilitate you in thinking about the way you do research?

• In what ways have the paradigms enabled you understand your own research?

• How will you shape your own research study?

“This is for those who want to say something sensible about complex, messy, poorly

controlled natural social settings.”

(Robson, 2002)

THANK YOU