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Introduction to Qualitative

Research Methods

Video Title: Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods

Originally Published: 2017

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd

City: London, United Kingdom

ISBN: 9781473991958

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473991958

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods.

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473991958

[Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods]

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE: Hi, I'm Dr. Denise Pope. And I am a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford

University Graduate School of Education. [Dr. Denise Pope, Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of

Education] And today, we are going to do a tutorial which is an introduction to qualitative research

methods. The overview of the major components of the qualitative research process really breaks

down into five main components--

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: the research design and problem formation step, sample

selection, data collection-- and there's a lot of different ways to do that-- analysis, and then the data

representation and writing. These five components are used in all forms of qualitative research, and

they're basically the basic building blocks for students who want to learn how to read and understand

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: qualitative research. Those are kind of the components that

you're going to look for to know if someone did a good job, to know if it's a rigorous piece, as well as

what you would do if you were actually going to conduct qualitative research. [Research Design] The

first component is really the research design.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: And this is very similar to quantitative research, as well.

You have to think about, what is the problem I'm attempting to solve here? What are my questions?

Basically, a lot of folks start out with a topic. So I know I want to do a research question that has to do

with classroom engagement, or gender in the classroom for instance.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: But that's not a problem. That's not going to help you decide

which form of research to use. So then you have to think about, what are my research questions?

What am I interested in learning more about in that general topic area of gender in the classroom or

engagement in the classroom? And that's where you might go and do a literature review. You might

look at all the literature and all

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: the different research that's come before you, and you might

look for a gap in the literature as to what you would want to study. The other thing that you have to

think about-- and this is a little bit tricky-- is something that we call in the research field a conceptual

framework. A conceptual framework is also sometimes called a theoretical framework. It's the lens

that you bring to your research problem.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: So it may be a tentative theory that you or others in the field

use to explain the problem or the phenomena being studied. And I'll give you an example of that

because, that's kind of tricky. It's a lens that will help explain the problem that you're trying to find. So

if you're looking at gender in the classroom, let's say, there are a lot of different theories

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: on gender in the classroom. And you may pick somebody's

theory on how boys learn differently from girls, let's say, and look at your problem through that

framework, through that lens. It may be that your framework is undeveloped. And you want to kind of

keep that in mind, because when you come back and analyze the data,

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DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: you may come up with your own framework that someone

else may use later on to be their theoretical framework for their research. So at this point, you've gone

from your topic to what is the problem that I'm looking at, what are my research questions, and what's

the frame that I bring to it-- sort of whose ideas and theories am I using to help guide me? [Sample

Selection]

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: So the next piece is really to decide, OK, based on those

questions, I think I'm going to do a qualitative piece of research as opposed to a quantitative or mixed

methods piece. And really, the answers to the questions should be things like, I'm interested in this

phenomenon, so I need to understand more about it. It's not something that I can actually have a

hypothesis about and frame.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: It may be that I'm interested in learning more about the

actors in the setting and what they do and how they think. So when you decide on your problem

and your questions, you're going to decide, OK, who can help best answer these questions? Which

participants can best answer these questions? Who is it that I want to either look at or interview,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: and where might that happen? So when you're choosing a

site, you want to be respectful here and you want to be careful. You've got to find the gatekeeper.

You've got to find, who is it that has control over the site and that you can then get access and they'll

let you in? And that's gaining access. It's pretty simple.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: And then, who is the sample that you want to choose?

So in qualitative research we don't have very, very big samples, right? Because you're going to be

interviewing. You're going to be observing. You can't do that with hundreds and hundreds of people. It

will take you years. So you want to decide, how many people and how many settings is it that I want

to look at to help answer this question? And in qualitative research, it's OK to have an n of 1.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: It may be that you will learn a lot from one school or one

classroom or one teacher, or even one student. That's considered a case study, and usually it's in the

realm of anywhere from one to 20, maybe 30 is getting to be a big project-- but enough that you can

kind of say, I have a sense of the phenomenon that will help me answer the question.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: The next step if you are connected to a university is to

get approval from your institutional review board, which is a long process. And we don't have time

to explain that here. But just know that if you're working with human subjects, you need to have

institutional approval through the IRB process. And then once you get your approval,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: you go to your gatekeepers that we talked about and you

gain access. Your goal is you say, I'm here to basically do no harm. You may not tell them the actual

phenomenon that you're going to study, because it might actually change what they do in the setting.

So you might go back and just give them the topic, as we talked about. You might say, I'm here to

look at gender in the classroom.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: Or maybe, I'm just here to do a research study on the

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experience of kids in the classroom. Maybe you don't even say the word "gender"-- not to be

disingenuous, just to be honest enough to say that you don't want them to start changing their

behavior in the setting. And then many of us do pilot studies, a little baby study, with a few people,

maybe a few observations, a few interviews, just to see if that is the right place

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: and those are the right folks in the sample to help

you answer the questions. [Data Collection] The next stage is data collection. And in qualitative

research, there's really only certain ways to collect data. There's not that many, right? So you can do

observations, where you're actually looking.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: You're taking field notes. You're looking very closely at

action happening all around you. You can do interviews, which seems pretty obvious, right? You're

asking questions. A lot of times these are structured interviews, or in qualitative research it's usually

semi-structured so that you've got some leeway of where you want to go. It's different from giving a

quantitative survey to someone

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: where you ask the same questions with a very neutral

tone the whole time. This is really different. You're really trying to get at their perspective of the

phenomenon that you're studying. So you're going to ask sort of grand survey or grand tour questions,

with the goal to make the words fly. To really make the person comfortable, which is why you establish

rapport,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: you try to be yourself. You try to be warm and friendly. You

try to be really open to hearing their story, as opposed to forcing your view or your biases onto what

they're saying. And then the last kind of data that you can collect is documents. That is, things from

the website, worksheets

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: that they hand out in the classroom, the student newspaper--

whatever it is that will help you figure out, again, answer those research questions. So between

observations-- what am I seeing with my own eyes-- interviews-- what are the folks who are there

every day telling me they're experiencing and feeling--

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: and then the document review-- other pieces to help flesh

this out-- you should have some nice data to help answer the question. [Analysis] And then the

question is, what do I do with all this data, right? This is where we get to the analysis stage. And in

analysis, there's a lot of different ways to do this.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: And it sounds scary, and it's very different from quantitative

because in quantitatives you have computer packages that you can kind of employ and push a button,

and they'll do a lot of the analysis for you. In qualitative, you are the instrument. So you've collected

the data, and you're

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: going to be analyzing the data. That's not to say that there

aren't some packages that will help you in coding the data, but for the most part you are making the

key decisions of, what do I call this piece of data? What do I call this piece of my field note? How do

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I name this? How do I file it in a way to help me remember and come up with themes?

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: So just like when you go to a supermarket-- I know this

sounds crazy-- but just like when you go to a supermarket and you're picking out fruit, and you're

examining the apple and you're trying to decide, does this look like it's going to taste good? Does it

have a worm hole? Does it have some bruises? Is it soft and smushy? Is it hard and crispy? You're

looking at qualities. And you could make some decisions about shape, smell,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: taste, and you start to code and file those qualities. That's

what you're doing when you're analyzing your interview notes, your transcripts, your field notes from

your observations, and the data that you've collected from the documents. What you're going to do

is you're going to start to label those. It's like a filing system. And then you're going to write yourself

some memos.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: Here's what I think is going on. Here's some of the themes

that I think I hear. And you're going to say, this is what I think I saw. And then when I asked her in

her interview, this is what she said. That's called triangulating the data, looking for places where the

evidence from the different pieces of data that you collect match up. And then you're actually going to

take it and start

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: to form some very low-level propositions. I think what I

saw in that classroom-- and let's say you're looking at gender in the classroom, or how boys learn

differently from girls-- is that the boys were a little bit slower to catch on, or faster to catch on, or the

girls raised their hand more-- whatever it is. And I think when I asked in the interview and the teacher

said,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: you know, I think more girls were raising their hand. I think

the girls in middle school are a little bit more mature and ready for this kind of information. I think

we're going to form a proposition here about gender in the classroom and the differences between

boys and girls, because I've got my data that I'm triangulating. The reason why one of the ways to do

analysis

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: is called grounded theory is because it's grounded in what

you're seeing. It's bubbling up from the field. It's not top-down, where we go in with the hypothesis

and say, boys learn differently from girls and we're going to prove it or prove the null. Instead, it's what

do we see? What's the story here that we're seeing? And it may be a completely different story from

what you

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: thought you were going to find. Maybe you'll go in looking for

something about how boys and girls learn differently, and instead you're finding a completely different

story about classroom management and gender, for instance. Again, this is where in analysis, you

might go back and do the literature review. Now that I think I'm seeing classroom management,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: I've got to go back and review that literature on classroom

management and really make sure that I'm staying within my theoretical framework here. This is

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where you come back to your conceptual framework and say, this is how other people have looked at

it. This is what I saw. I'm going to put forth a new proposition with as much evidence as I can muster

here and kind of form

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: my own conceptual framework about what's going on in

the classroom vis a vis gender. [Data Representation & Writing] Last piece that you have to think

about is how you're going to convey what you found to your audience. And you do this through data

representation, and most often through writing, although there are definitely

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: different forms of qualitative analysis that people do through

film, et cetera. These are the things you have to think about. What is the purpose? What am I trying

to get across? Who's my audience? What's going to be most convincing to them? Then you make

an outline of all the propositions that you have with specific pieces of evidence from your field notes,

from your interviews, to help prop up those propositions.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: How much data to include depends on your purpose,

depends on your audience, depends on the length that the publication might allow. Just because it's

qualitative doesn't mean that you can't have charts or graphs or other stylistic devices. Whatever it is

that's going to convince people of what you saw and this is the story, that's what you're supposed to

use.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: So you have lots of representation options. You can put

in video snippets. You can put in audio snippets, depending on where this is going to be published

or shown. And you want to think about each of these things as you design your final piece. There

are some through lines, though, that go throughout the whole qualitative research process. Everyone

must use sound ethics and sound judgment.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: You're dealing with real people here. If you're going to do

something where someone is feeling very uncomfortable-- where it's getting sensitive, where you feel

like you're going to cross over an ethical line-- that's where you have to stop. You have to examine

your own subjectivity, your own biases. I feel one way. Maybe if you think about this gender example,

I'm a woman. And that's going to color how I look at things.

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: You want to audit that subjectivity and make sure that you're

saying, what else could be the story here? How am I not being so biased? You want to make sure

that there's a sense of validity throughout the research, that you're doing the best you can to collect

the best data-- not company behavior from the participants, but what really happens on the ground.

And keep that rapport going so that they

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: feel comfortable being honest and open with you. You can

see from the image that is on the screen that this is not a straight line, that you're going back and

forth between the different parts-- that you might be collecting some data, you might be writing some

memos. You might be going back to your topic formation and your questions and rejigging. This is not

a straight line. It's kind of a complex, jiggled process.

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DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: But the more you do and the more back and forth you go,

the better the research. [Conclusion] So in summary, there are five main components used in all

qualitative research in one way or another. It's not linear. You're going to have to revert back and

forth, leap ahead,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: depending on the process you use. But the quality and rigor

of your research depends largely on how well you implement each of these components. If you don't

collect data in a rigorous, thorough way, your conclusions are not going to be as valid. If you don't

take the time to build rapport and really think about your interview questions and your field notes,

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: your data is not going to be as valid, and then your final

points won't be as valid. So you have to keep all of these in mind as you go through the qualitative

research process. Lots and lots of people have written about this. I just picked a few of my favorites

here for some further reading to give you a real general sense of the overall process. You can look at

Merriam and Associates, Qualitative research in practice;

DR. DENISE CLARK POPE [continued]: Miles and Huberman, classics in the field, Qualitative data

analysis; and Taylor and Bogden, Introduction to qualitative research methods, which is one of the

texts that I use in my own classroom for this is very, very step-by-step process. Thank you for being

a wonderful audience. I really appreciate it, and I hope you enjoy doing qualitative research.

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Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods