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Roundtable: Research Methods

Roundtable: Research Methods Program Transcript

GARY BURKHOLDER: Historically, introductory research design courses have focused on experimental methods, what we might call quantitative methods or approaches. As psychology and counseling has matured, we find that other approaches are also becoming more accepted. We're here today to discuss three specific approaches. Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Each of you represents a different approach to-- for research design. I'd like to ask each of you to introduce yourselves, tell us what your particular approach is, and also what your area of research interest is. George?

GEORGE SMEATON: My name is George Smeaton. I have a doctorate in social personality psychology. My area of interest has been things like interpersonal attraction, relationships, and sexual behavior. I've been interested in the correlations between certain personality variables and other kinds of behaviors that I'm interested in. All these types of research questions require quantitative methods in order to be able to determine how much a particular variable affects some other types of variables, how much variables are interrelated with each other.

GARY BURKHOLDER: Sreeroopa?

SREEROOPA SARKAR: My name is Sreeroopa Sarkar, and I have a PhD in educational psychology. My research area includes mental health promotion within the school and community setting, cross-cultural and multi-cultural psychology, and gender related issues in the field of psychology. My area of expertise in research method is in qualitative research. Qualitative research entails looking at a phenomenon or an event from the perspective of the people who we are studying. We try to understand, describe, and define the event from the personal experiences of the people. And we do that by observing them, by interviewing them, or by collecting documentation about the research problem from the particular setting.

Another important aspect of quality to do research is that it relies primarily on words, images, and some kind of descriptions, as opposed to numbers as we see in quantitative studies.

GARY BURKHOLDER: Debra?

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: I'm Debra Rose Wilson. And my background is in health care. I was a registered nurse and I have a PhD in health psychology. My interest is mixed methodology. From a health perspective, those numbers, the quantitative pieces, are important. We can't ignore those in health care. The biomarkers, the blood results, the lab results. Those numbers are important. But also important from a health perspective is the participant's experience. So that's

Roundtable: Research Methods

why qualitative is so important as well. And for mixed methodology, we get the best of both worlds.

GARY BURKHOLDER: Great, thanks. Let's begin by talking about the different research approaches in terms of their legitimacy, their prestige, or their acceptability. George, why don't you start and just talk to us about the preeminence of quantitative research methods in design.

GEORGE SMEATON: Well, quantitative methods are the methods that have been used since the beginning of the history of the field of psychology. It's been very important for the field of psychology to be able to quantify their variables and to be able to precisely measure the effects of certain types of manipulations on human behavior, because psychology, as a new science, needed to find a way of fitting into the scientific models that other sciences have used in the past.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: I think from a mixed methodology approach, and especially in health care, quantitative can't be ignored. Those hard numbers are so important when it comes to health care issues, patient and participant health. And in research particularly, looking at outcomes, measuring cleanly outcomes before and after interventions in health care.

SREEROOPA SARKAR: Qualitative research has been lately becoming popular among the psychologists. It has been accepted as a valid research method for about last 15 years. Previously there were some misunderstanding that qualitative research is not as scientific as quantitative research.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: That's true. Because there was a period of time when qualitative research wasn't even allowed to be considered in psychology papers as valid.

SREEROOPA SARKAR: You're right. And there is a belief that qualitative research is not as scientific as quantitative research. But I'd like to emphasize that in qualitative research, we scientifically observe, analyze, manage data just as quantitative research. So qualitative research is as empirical and as scientific as quantitative research studies.

GARY BURKHOLDER: I think it's interesting that qualitative research has really been around for a long time. And it really dominated the fields of anthropology and sociology. And it's taken a long time for it to get to the point where it is acceptable now. And one of the other things I noticed is applying for grants, for federal grants, that more and more, it's becoming acceptable to do mixed method research. I don't know if you, doing mix methods, you have any comments on why that might be.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Well I think mixed methods brings in the best of both worlds. We're still having that quantitative piece that's valid. But you're bringing in

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the lived experience of the phenomena. Consider pain, for example. While we can measure the parameters of pain with quantitative blood pressure, pulse rates, those sorts of things, measurable types of things, the qualitative piece is the lived experience. What is the pain like? How does it influence your life? How does this impair your mobility, for example? It's hard to describe that with just numbers when it's an experience that you have.

So mixed methodology really does the benefit of pull both of these very valuable research methods into one. Especially in the area of health care.

GARY BURKHOLDER: I think it's interesting you were talking-- starting to talk about misunderstandings about qualitative research. And maybe we can talk a little bit about misunderstandings and myths around different research designs. I don't know if anybody has anything they want to begin with on that.

SREEROOPA SARKAR: Sure Gary. One thing I hear a lot about qualitative research that's it's easier to carry out. I would I'd like to say that is a myth. Qualitative research is not as easy as is thought. And it requires a long term commitment on the part of the researcher. Sometimes it can get expensive.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: It's very labor intensive.

SREEROOPA SARKAR: Very labor intensive process. And it requires hard work on the part of the researchers.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And you have to really embed yourself in the data. And also, in qualitative research, what's very difficult is recognizing and putting forward your own biases. You have to recognize your bias in that research. And that's a difficult thing to do, standing back and objectively looking at where your biases might be coming from that may be influencing how you're perceiving what these participants are telling you.

GEORGE SMEATON: I think in the area of quantitative research, there's been some misconceptions. For one thing, I think that many people might assume that you need very sophisticated laboratory equipment or that you need to have large quantities of participants. And neither of these types of things are true. Survey research, where you're collecting objective survey data, can be done in almost any setting, with-- and that would be a quantitative approach. So that's an important thing I think people need to understand with that method.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And I don't know if it's a myth or not. But mixed methodology really does require expertise in both areas, in quantitative, understanding the statistical analysis, as well as qualitative, understanding the qualitative analysis. Two different approaches. So I think from a mixed methodology approach, it is a great deal more work than either.

Roundtable: Research Methods

GARY BURKHOLDER: And also, I think just the idea that there's something more scientific about numbers and statistics that makes people for some reason want to do that. And also, I was interested about the qualitative and talking about that myth. Because I get students who will tell me that, I don't like statistics. So I want to do a qualitative approach. And I think it's really important for students to understand that it is very difficult. But that both of them are equally accepted.

GEORGE SMEATON: Well one thing I want to add to that is that, you can use quantitative methods with open ended responses. So for example, you can find a way of coding a statement, for, for example, optimistic attitudes or achievement motivation. And then you can assign numbers to blocks of text and use that to correlate with other kinds of behaviors. So you don't have to have multiple choice tests, fill in the blank kinds of tests in a survey to use quantitative methods.

- Next, the roundtable participants consider how particular topics might be addressed by each of the three methodologies.

SREEROOPA SARKAR: One of the research areas where I see a lot of researchers using qualitative studies is in the area of HIV/AIDS or STD prevention. And they use these qualitative research method in their formative research study, particularly when they want to learn about various constructs related to the research question. They want to learn about sexual knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and risky sexual practices from people. And they wanted to capture the personal experiences of the people. And the data they collect, they use towards building quantitative research instruments.

GEORGE SMEATON: Right, and that's the kind of research that I have encountered in that area. For example, there might be tests of sexual knowledge. And you would administer that test of sexual knowledge, along with a measure of risky sexual behavior to see if knowledge about this correlates with action. And that's the type of thing that you'd be examining using quantitative methods in that area. The key thing there would be if we want to assess the level of some type of behavior or the interrelationship of some type of variables, and we want to test hypotheses related to that, that's when we'd need the quantitative approach for that area.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And I think too that mixed methodology would fit really well into, depending on how they set up their research question. For example, if they were doing an intervention on education. They had a brochure and they wanted to see if that changed sexual practices. They may gather quantitative data, which will really tell them did their sexual practices change? But what if it wasn't the brochure? What if there was something about the brochure that didn't work? You're going to get that from the qualitative interview. So a mixed methodology would provide an understanding of what it was like to be educated, and how they applied it, or how it didn't work or what did work. But the

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quantitative data will give us the results, give us some numbers of how-- what actually effect that it had.

GARY BURKHOLDER: Now Debra, you've done some work with different therapeutic interventions. Can you talk a little bit about your work and how you see this applying?

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Well, I have a lot of students that are interested in doing intervention of some sort, perhaps something in complementary alternative therapies or psychological intervention. And they want to examine what happens before and after. So I think that we can each of us examine from a mixed, qualitative, or a quantitative perspective, how they might be able to look at an intervention before and after the efficacy.

SREEROOPA SARKAR: I think you're very right Debra. We can use qualitative research method by doing a pre and a post interview, and try to gather their personal experiences before they went to the intervention and after the went to the intervention. And that will, in fact, add to the richness of your study when you combine qualitative data with the quantitative data.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And actually measure the outcomes. And then compare it and triangulate the data and compare it mixing the quality of a quantitative to see if we're going in the same direction. Is the answer the same from both the lived experience of the phenomena as well as the numbers that show outcomes?

GARY BURKHOLDER: What about some examples in organizations?

GEORGE SMEATON: Well, in organizations, there's often a lot of training programs in other types of interventions that are implemented by well-meaning managers without any real quantitative evidence on how they've actually affected the workers. And the reason why quantitative evidence is important is because in many cases, workers may feel like this particular intervention, maybe a safety program, maybe some type of motivational speaker, something of that nature, really made them feel good. It really made them feel like they were motivated to change their behavior. But, in the long run, they may not have changed their behavior at all. And so that's the kind of thing that is really important in the organization when resources are being allocated towards interventions of that nature.

SREEROOPA SARKAR: George, I think we can use qualitative research method in the studies that you just gave an example of. We can actually try to understand the perspectives of the employees. For example, if we are looking into why employees don't use the safety equipment that they're supposed to use, we can try to understand the personal experiences. We can try to look into their personal experiences and try to see what it is is preventing them from using the

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equipment. Is it a discipline issue? Or is it the attitude about not caring for their safety? Or--

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Is it just uncomfortable to wear, for example?

SREEROOPA SARKAR: That's correct.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Yeah.

SREEROOPA SARKAR: And I guess the qualitative data can help us in terms of understanding their personal experiences. And you can, again, combine qualitative and quantitative data to get a wider range of responses.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And I think if you're going to use a mixed methodology in that approach, you're going to understand why, what parts of the intervention worked. And maybe you find out that it wasn't the intervention that worked. Maybe they were answering the questions correctly because that was what they thought they were supposed to answer post intervention. So with a mixed methodology, we're going to get a feel for qualitatively, what was it like to go through that training? What isn't going to work? What worked in that training? What didn't? And then we're going to actually be able to measure did the training work with some numbers.

GEORGE SMEATON: Yeah and I think you just mentioned something that is important with a quantitative approach that you have to be careful with. And that is, sometimes people think that they know what you're looking for, and they may respond in that way. And so you may think that you've got a quantitative effect. But really, it's just the workers anticipating what you're looking for and giving you what you want to hear. So that could be a really advantage-- real advantage of using a qualitative method in that situation.

GARY BURKHOLDER: I think an important point that we're talking about here is that students really need to develop the research question first. And then let the research question drive the particular approach or methodology that's going to be used. I think going back to something we talked about earlier, students will come to us and say, I want to do a quantitative study. And then try to back into the research question from that angle.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Got a perfect example. I had a student who came to me that wanted to do a quantitative study. He had an experience. He was an Ethiopian refugee who had come to the United States. And when he first entered the United States, he had a really negative experience in health care. His companion got quite ill, and he was afraid to enter the health care system. There were myths that were associated with it. Don't go in there. They'll take your kidneys and sell them. There was a lot of myths that he had. He wasn't educated in our system. And then after he went to school and became a nurse and then

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later worked on his master's degree, he didn't want that to happen to other refugees. But had the understanding that it continued to happen. And he wanted to somehow measure whether it happened.

But for him, what we wanted to know was, is it happening? Is it a similar experience? What is the experience like for other refugees? So, when we worked on his study, we looked at it from a qualitative perspective, asking other refugees from Ethiopia what was their experience in entering the health care system in the United States? How frightening was it? What kind of barriers were in their way? What myths blocked their ability to do some-- you know, to get some help when they needed it?

SREEROOPA SARKAR: I had a student who came to me who wanted to do a research with women with sickle cell disease, particularly the women who came from Caribbean island. And she wanted to start with a qualitative research method because she wanted to understand their lived experiences of the women who were suffering from sickle cell. And also, they are not too many research available with that particular population. So she wanted to start out with the qualitative research study. And the qualitative data that she collected from the study.

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: That's not uncommon that a qualitative study first kind of seeks theory, seeks ideas. And then leads into a quantitative study later.

GEORGE SMEATON: Well, and that could also help with the wording of the survey, so that you would be using words and concepts that are familiar with the people that you're working with.

GARY BURKHOLDER: Let's talk about a slightly different situation, where the student comes to you. The student has a very specific topic of interest, and doesn't exactly know what the methodology or approach should be. Do you have some examples of some very specific kinds of questions that really clearly lend themselves to one approach or another?

GEORGE SMEATON: Yeah, I had a student who was interested in the effects of early childhood reading experiences on the likelihood of becoming arrested and incarcerated in prison. And so she had a group of convicted prisoners that she was going to be using for this study. And her-- she wanted to use a qualitative method. She wanted to interview these individuals in an in-depth manner to understand their experience that they had in first grade reading classes. The problem I had with that was that she may well have understood that group very well, and maybe that group would have told her that they had some very difficult time learning to read in first grade. But that may have been well true for anyone of that group or that socioeconomic group, lived in those areas. Might all of those kinds of people might have had that same kind of difficulty, even those who weren't in prison. So that particular question really called for a quantitative

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comparison between a control group that wasn't incarcerated and the experimental group that was in the prison system.

GARY BURKHOLDER: You've each provided some really good examples for students about different approaches for their research. Do you have any final comments that you'd like to make to students or suggestions about what they can do to be good research designers?

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: I think that you need to choose something you're really interested in. You're going to be with this for a while. You're going to become expert in this area. So make sure it's something that you love, that draws you. Because you don't know what doors are going to open because this research that you've done.

SREEROOPA SARKAR: I would like to emphasize the same thing too. You should select a topic that you are interested in, because you have to work hard and for a long time with that particular research area. You may not want to pick qualitative research method because you think it's easier to carry out. So my suggestion would be to pick a research topic that you are interested in. And then formulate your research question, and select appropriate research method that's applicable to your study that's going to answer your research questions.

GEORGE SMEATON: The suggestion I have is that students should never feel that they need to invent a measure, invent methods out of the clear blue on their own. It's a lot of work to try to create something out of thin air. And in fact, it's not good science. The best science is when methods used in earlier studies are changed slightly to test new variables, or to test a measure in a new population that has been normed with another population.

So it's very important to try to use the measures and the methods as much as possible that you've read about in earlier studies of the topic that you're investigating.

GARY BURKHOLDER: I think these are all great suggestions for the students who are doing research. And also that there's a number of faculty members that they'll be working with on their research who provide the different expertises that they may need. And they don't have to go in and do this research design on their own. They're going to have support to help them to make sure that they pick the right research design for their particular research question. Thank you everybody for providing these suggestions for the student.s

DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Thank you for having us.

GARY BURKHOLDER: You're welcome.

Roundtable: Research Methods

TINA BLOOM: I have been a professional dog trainer for 20 years. And I've worked with a lot of police dogs and service dogs. And I've always been fascinated by the interaction between dogs and people. And recently, I've become interested in pet assisted therapy. And I've done some of that. And there is a lot of research in pet therapy showing that pets have an incredible impact on people. But there's really no research showing how or why or explaining this. So I found the body of information called mood contagion, where people catch the emotion from the people around them. So if I'm with someone who's nervous, I'll become nervous. If I'm with someone who's calm, I become calm. And it's a perceptual process. It's unconscious. And I'm wondering if, possibly, this is how dogs make people feel better, is they catch the emotion from their dog.

My hypothesis is that we actually catch, through a non-conscious process, the emotion that our pet is feeling, specifically how our dog is feeling. So we have a terrible day at work. We come home. We feel stressed out. We walk in, and we see that happy, dancing little body. And we just kind of absorb that emotion from them. And I'm looking at what mechanism might cause that.

The pet assisted therapy literature has basically no explanation of why dogs affect people. And what I'd like to do is take the methodology from mood contagion and use that, looking at the human canine interaction, and emotional process. And I can do quantitative and qualitative studies. As far as quantitative, I can look at physiological aspects of the relaxation response. I can look at heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure. And as far as qualitative, I can ask for ratings of mood. How did your mood change? From happy to angry? So I can do quantitative and qualitative, which would be a mixed design.

Having been a person from a rural area and coming into a more suburban lifestyle after college, I see that people are just not connected to nature and animals like they have been historically. And I'm thinking my study will help institutions and policymakers see how important the link is between animals and humans, and how emotionally connected they are.

AMY GEARHARD: My research has been drawn from a very strong professional and academic interest. I have worked in the field of autism spectrum disorders for about 12 years in private practice now. About three years ago, I went ahead and started a nonprofit organization. And trying to pull from different sources in the field, trying to pull from different treatment in the field, and realized there is nothing out there that really suits the needs of the children of every single family that comes to me.

And I have been doing a lot of interest, a lot of research on my own, looking for what's out there, what's good, what's not so good, and why isn't it so good? And so from there, pull together an integrated treatment approach. And Walden has provided that background through the courses to build that approach. And now I'm to the point in research design and in my dissertation that it's time to put

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some numbers to it in time to run the study and see where we're at and see what we've come with.

I am looking to find out whether or not, or to what degree, an integrated treatment approach works effectively for children on the autism spectrum. And I am starting now very narrow. I'm looking at individuals ages two to five years old with an autism diagnosis. The methodology that I will be using is quantitative. I will be doing a repeated measures INOVA approach. That will allow me to get in and get the type of detail that I need. The field of autism is very particular in the research that they're looking for and the research that is acceptable. It's a very competitive field. And I need those numbers.

The implications for social change from the study is what I am the most excited about. It's what I am the most passionate about. Field is waiting for a treatment approach to come out and say, hey, this is another way to do this. This is a new way to do this. And here's an approach that can help any child with autism, instead of my study works for five people with autism. So the possibilities with this are really endless. And I intend to set it up in such a way that as I get it done, it's opening a door to another study. It's opening a door to another study that somebody else can do that we can do at another site.

My hopes for this study is that it will lay the groundwork for the field for millions of children in years to come. I truly believe, through my experience in the field, and as I'm getting into the research aspect, that we can do this in such a way that every family will have the ability to access such a model of treatment.