7.1 The Nature of Qualitative Research: Qualitative Research – Introduction and Secondary Data

in the past sessions we have talked about quantitative research and if you remember correctly from the earlier sessions quantitative research tries to use the methods and approaches we know from the

hard sciences think physics chemistry or biology and apply them to the social sciences however it is not the only perspective that you can take

and in the next sessions i want to talk about qualitative research there are several differences between qualitative and quantitative research and we discussed all of them already in an earlier

session but i want to repeat them here to bring them back to your mind one key difference is that qualitative research has an inductive view of the relationship between theory and research in

quantitative research you usually start with a theory based on the theory you derive hypothesis and these hypotheses are then tested based on the data you collect

in qualitative research you usually start with the data based on the data you derive certain types of relationships that you observe in the data and at the end you try to aggregate

those relationships up into a theory from an epistemological perspective qualitative research is interpretivist it assumes that people and their interactions can only be

understood by interpreting and understanding the motives of people involved you cannot study people like you can study atoms or molecules or any type of physical

process because people are not independent from the observation which means to understand you need to interpret actions trying to take the viewpoint of the

other side this is a very fundamental difference and it is really shaped on how you see the world and how you think business processes can even be studies

from an ontological perspective qualitative research is constructionist assuming that social properties are the outcomes and the of the interactions between individuals and they are not phenomena

that they are out there anyway that can be studied it assumes that any process or finding we have in business is not like a rule out of physics like gravity

that is out there anyway and that we just need to look for it is something that we can only understand when we try to put ourselves into the other people's shoes and what this also then implies is that

the focus of qualitative research is usually words or text and less numbers there are multiple approaches to qualitative research in this section and the next one we mainly cover three of

them one is documentary analysis we already talked about quantitative content analysis before this is the qualitative point on to it qualitative interviewing

you might remember in an earlier section we talked about structured interviews again this is the qualitative equivalent and ethnography or participant observation we already talked about quantitative observation

again this is the qualitative analogous however there are many others there's for example discourse and conversation analysis there may be focus groups many more and as for any quantitative method

you need to decide upfront which method fits best your research question and then familiarize yourself with that specific method i want to come back again to this inductive idea the nature of qualitative

research is that you start with a research question and then you select subjects sites any type of data you want to collect that seem most sensible to study those research questions

assume for example you want to understand how young people use social media sites like tiktok in a quantitative study you would try to get a representative sample of tick-tock user

or possibly a representative sample of young tick-tock users that is as large as it needs to be for your method in qualitative research the idea of representativity

is not relevant instead you try to select subjects that are particularly knowledgeable particularly insightful or particularly likely to talk to you then you collect data you interpret the data

and based on the interpretation you develop a conceptual framework this may lead you to changing your research questions collecting further data and in a constant interplay at the end

you may come up with some summary so very different to quantitative research the research question can be adapted on the way and additional data can be collected on the way for quantitative research this is not

the case you need to identify your research question theory hypothesis then collect data and if in the process you realize that the date of collective was wrong you have to start again and collect new data

the main idea of qualitative researches is that you need to try to understand the words through the eyes of the people you want to study you need to try to take the role of the other person understand the meaning that people

attribute to their world and you need to expect unexpected findings things that seem very obvious to you like the meaning of christmas like what is love may be very different

for different type of people there is a huge emphasis on understanding and describing the context details accounts of social settings very thick descriptions of what's going on

very detailed data collection about the environment there's usually an emphasis on the social processes how pattern and events effort over time and also

that social worlds are characterized by a lot of change flexibility and limited structure there is not that tight rigid schedule that we have emphasized so much in quantitative research

you would not have a very detailed observation schedule and coding schedule when you do a qualitative ethnography for example and the concepts and theory are grounded in the data

so they come from the data that do not come from the outside and are then validated with the data now with this come a lot of criticism as well many people argue that qualitative

research is too subjective because you as a researcher decide what to focus on who to talk to which elements seem particularly important to you and what they mean and this can lead to the fact that it

may be difficult to replicate two people studying the same phenomenon may talk to different people pay attention to different things and come up with different findings it leads to a problem of generalization

because if the sample is not representative if you talk to the people who are most insightful and most likely to talk back to you then it is very hard to generalize from qualitative

research and people often criticize that qualitative research has a lack of transparency in qualitative research you should describe what you did in a detailed manner similar to quantitative research

but the problem is that many things involve judgment calls and a lot of thinking and going back and forth and it can be hard if not impossible to formalize such a process afterwards

this table is supposed to compare quantitative and qualitative research summarizing a little bit what we have discussed until now quantitative research deals with numbers it has the point of view of the

researcher and assumes the researcher is distant from the phenomenon and testing some form of theory now qualitative research instead of focusing on numbers focuses on words

instead of taking the point of view of the researcher it tries to put yourself into the shoes of the participant the researcher is not distant the researcher is close to the subject and theory is not tested theory comes

out of the data so while in quantitative research the process is static and structured and focused on generalization with hard and reliable data

in qualitative research it is a process that is unstructured that requires context and that has very rich and deep very often textual or visual data the perspective of quantitative is very

often the macro the generalization over a group of people focusing on behavior in very often artificial settings a key technique used in quantitative research

are experiments that may be conducted in a lab similar to a lab that you use for hard sciences while for qualitative research the perspective is the micro the individual the meaning that this individual

attributes to things and most of the time in a natural setting