Qualitative Methods Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Methodological debate is at the heart of much discourse about the state and direction of sociology. This essay describes qualitative methods, exploring epistemic and practical features, often in contrast to quantitative approaches.

For any research question, there are a number of possible strategies for exploration. One may wish to know how mortality is affected by poverty. To answer this question, the researcher might collect data to see if these are statistically correlated. If as the rate of poverty increases the mortality rate also increases, we may have good reason to assert that mortality is predicted, at least partly, by poverty. However, another researcher may want to understand how death is understood among that population. Here, the question concerns what death means, rather than what predicts it. For these questions, one must gain an intimate knowledge of people and their culture, how they view death in particular and the world in general. While quantitative methods can answer the first question, qualitative methods better address the second.

Fluid dialogue and development of a partnership between the researcher and respondent highlight an important aspect of qualitative research: the researcher is a fundamental part of the research, not only the proctor of a questionnaire. Beyond the ostensible subject matter of the interview, qualitative researchers must pick up on markers such as subtle passing remarks, tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. The ability to follow these lines of inquiry is partly what enables qualitative research to achieve depth.

Quantitative approaches can compare large numbers of people using structured techniques. Qualitative research is not usually able to make such concise comparisons, but rather the researcher must interpret individualized responses. Qualitative research is therefore seen as inductive. That is, there is nothing concrete to indicate what the data mean. For example, a quantitative researcher might ask how often someone had trouble paying bills and quantify responses. But the qualitative researcher would follow this same question with probing statements such as, ”Tell me about that,” in order to explore the intimate features of that experience. In the quantitative version, the respondents who ”often” have trouble paying bills are assigned the number ”4” and those who never do are assigned a ”0”. This type of data minimizes interpretation; four is greater than zero. Some assert that this controls researcher bias, which remains problematic for qualitative methodologists. However, many suggest that quantitative research is by no means deductive. The quantitative researcher still must ultimately speculate about whether one phenomenon causes another or whether they simply are correlated, and also whether the statistical measurements of a concept actually measure that phenomenon (e.g. whether trouble paying bills actually measures socioeconomic status).

Based on these fundamentally different approaches, quantitative and qualitative methods often are seen as resting on different epistemological foundations. Qualitative methods mostly are conceived as founded on interpretivism, the notion that all knowledge is fundamentally dependent on human observation and conceptualization. Quantitative methods often proceed from positivist foundations asserting that there is a reality independent of human observation that can be known using scientific methods. However, the interpretivist-positivist dichotomy does not neatly overlay the qualitative-quantitative one. For example, early ethnographic work (e.g., Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) was based on decidedly positivist epistemology, interpretivism does not preclude the use of quantitative methods, properly contextualized.

The interpretivist underpinnings of qualitative methodology and its lack of structured research techniques are the focal point of criticism. Because the data collected cannot be easily compared between respondents in the study or between various different studies, nor can they be deductively generalized, critics charge that the results from qualitative work amount to little more than the researcher’s subjective impressions.

Responses to these criticisms have been varied. Some researchers have quantified qualitative data, for example by counting up references to particular concepts. While this provides comparable data, it does little to address the subjectivity in the interview process, the coding process, or the interpretation of subsequently quantified data. Another response has been to use an experimental design for qualitative studies. Others simply have been unapologetic about their interpretive episteme. These researchers assert that quantitative work is equally plagued by subjectivity. While a valid retort, proactively addressing the question of bias seems to be the foremost challenge for qualitative research.

Even if subjective bias cannot be eliminated, perhaps it can be overcome by exposing it to the audience. This is the thrust of reflexive ethnography, where researchers actively analyze themselves as a fundamental part of the research. If these biases are exposed, they not only become less problematic, but can actually be informative. Some even locate the researcher as the central object of analysis, an approach labeled by Hayano (1979) as autoethnography.

Additionally, while the qualitative interview is relatively unstructured, qualitative researchers still utilize a conceptual framework. For example, Harrington (2003) asserts that various issues of population access and researcher-participant interaction can be organized under conceptual frameworks of social identity and self-presentation. If multiple studies were similarly organized, these frameworks could provide structure that would allow comparison of researcher narratives.

Grounded theory suggests a relatively formalized process for analyzing qualitative data, which does not rely on quantification. Grounded theory is a method for generating theory rather than testing it, which is the thrust of quantitative work, and it works by coding data into concepts in a hierarchical and dialogical fashion so that insights emerge from the data rather than being supposed in advance. This comparative transparency exposes biases in the analytical process.

Grounded theory provides a systematic method for deriving concepts, but not conceptual structures; we can delineate the concepts of health and poverty, but theory is produced by explicating their relationship not just their mutual existence. Researchers are beginning to address this by utilizing non-linear logic to understand and model the complex phenomenon of social life. Fractal logic for example illustrates how social systems can be investigated qualitatively in a systematic way, without dulling the depth and complexity that are the hallmarks of qualitative work.

Sociologists largely recognize that the split between qualitative and quantitative methodologies is dogmatic and somewhat arbitrary. Still, this dichotomy often frames disciplinary practices. Perhaps the most important future challenge for sociology as a whole will be overcoming its methodological divide, a goal often discussed and rarely acted upon.

Bibliography:

Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (2007) The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In: Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (eds.), Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 1-44.
Glaser, B. G. & Strauss, A. L. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine, New York.
Harrington, B. (2003) The social psychology of access in ethnographic research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (32): 592-625.
Hayano, D. (1979) Auto-ethnography: paradigms, problems, and prospects. Human Organization (38): 113-20.