Qualitative research
1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation.
This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or field observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context.
Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic.
[6] Contemporary qualitative research has been influenced by a number of branches of philosophy, for example, positivism, postpositivism, critical theory, and constructivism.
[7] The historical transitions or 'moments' in qualitative research, together with the notion of 'paradigms' (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005), have received widespread popularity over the past decades.
[8] Several philosophical and psychological traditions have influenced investigators' approaches to qualitative research, including phenomenology, social constructionism, symbolic interactionism, and positivism.
The symbolic interactionist approach to qualitative research examines how individuals and groups develop an understanding of the world.
Qualitative researchers have also been influenced by the sociology of knowledge and the work of Alfred Schütz, Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and Harold Garfinkel.
These data sources include interview transcripts, videos of social interactions, notes, verbal reports[8] and artifacts such as books or works of art.
For example, content analysis has been applied to research on such diverse aspects of human life as changes in perceptions of race over time,[35] the lifestyles of contractors,[36] and even reviews of automobiles.
The programs are aimed at enhancing analysts' efficiency at applying, retrieving, and storing the codes generated from reading the data.
Many programs enhance efficiency in editing and revising codes, which allow for more effective work sharing, peer review, data examination, and analysis of large datasets.
[citation needed] To defend against the criticism that qualitative approaches to data are too subjective, qualitative researchers assert that by clearly articulating their definitions of the codes they use and linking those codes to the underlying data, they preserve some of the richness that might be lost if the results of their research boiled down to a list of predefined categories.
[citation needed] Sometimes researchers rely on computers and their software to scan and reduce large amounts of qualitative data.
[39] There are many ways of establishing trustworthiness, including member check, interviewer corroboration, peer debriefing, prolonged engagement, negative case analysis, auditability, confirmability, bracketing, and balance.
[39] Data triangulation and eliciting examples of interviewee accounts are two of the most commonly used methods of establishing the trustworthiness of qualitative studies.
"[43] Karl Popper carrying forward Katz's point wrote that "objects can be classified and can become similar or dissimilar, only in this way--by being related to needs and interests.
These advantages include help with (1) theory and hypothesis development, (2) item creation for surveys and interviews, (3) the discovery of stressors and coping strategies not previously identified, (4) interpreting difficult-to-interpret quantitative findings, (5) understanding why some stress-reduction interventions fail and others succeed, and (6) providing rich descriptions of the lived lives of people at work.
[42][55] Some OHP investigators have united qualitative and quantitative methods within a single study (e.g., Elfering et al., [2005][56]); these investigators have used qualitative methods to assess job stressors that are difficult to ascertain using standard measures and well validated standardized instruments to assess coping behaviors and dependent variables such as mood.
[42] Since the advent of social media in the early 2000s, formerly private accounts of personal experiences have become widely shared with the public by millions of people around the world.
