Educational qualitative research is research relying on collected qualitative (i.e. non-numerical data) designed to explore or discover areas of interest. Since the data is often comprised of words, pictures, interviews, etc., this type of research follows a distinctly different path than does quantitative, numerically driven research. The findings are usually presented in narrative form with the results being induced through observation of real events.
Steps in a typical qualitative research study
In a qualitative research paradigm, 8 steps are identified and often depicted cyclically as shown below
Often researchers do not go in step-by-step order since new questions may arise from the fluid nature of the data gathering process, findings suggest other directions, or topics have to be further narrowed to conduct the research. However, most qualitative research eventually uses all of the steps and will generally fall into four major categories: Phenomenology, Ethnography, Case Study and Grounded Theory. The remainder if this writing strives to summarize the salient points of each category of qualitative research.
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Types of Ethnographic Research
ReplyDeleteEthnology
Ethnology is a comparative study of cultural groups where the goal is to uncover general patterns of a cultural group. For example, how does perception of school change through grades K-12?. Extensive field surveys of the culture's norms, values and beliefs helps shed light on how that culture may respond to and interpret a set of questions.
Ethnohistory
Ethnohistory is research that studies the cultural past of a people. Often ethnohistory is a building block of an ethnographic study and the two are often intertwined. Studying a culture's past can help the researcher to interpret data in the present and answer questions as to why responses and interviews generated the data they did.
Data Collection, Analysis, and Report Writing
Data collection in ethnographic research involves extensive fieldwork: observing behaviors over time, talking to people, observing their documents and artifacts, learning their ways. A good researcher will avoid ethnocentrism. that is, the judging of a culture through conventions and standards of the researcher's culture. Two distinct, not exclusive, perspectives permeate the ethnographers data collection. These are what are called emic perspective and etic perspective.
Emic perspective: The insider's perspective or "getting into the heads" of the group members. Therefore, emic terms are those terms used by the study culture. For a high school those terms descibing social groups on campus might be "nerds", "jocks", "stoners', etc. The goal for all emic perspective research is to avoid going native, that is to get so wrapped up in the culture of study that objectivity is lost.
Etic perspective: To use external scientific views that researchers use to answer etic terms (those that social scientists use) that are not part of the culture. The researcher can use etic terms to communicate findings to other researchers less familiar with the culture of study, but needs to be aware that not all external words can accurately or vividly describe the culture in ways that emic terms can.
Overall, a blend of both emic and etic perspectives can approach holism (the idea that the whole of a group's dynamics is greater than the sum of its parts). For example, the sum of members in a band is wholly different and removed from the music they play together.