Qualitative Research Assessment

Exam 1
1. Explain Cause and effect and Causation in relation to the various research methods (experiment, correlational, and qualitative) discussed in lectures and readings from the textbook and articles. That is, what is the best way to establish cause and effect?
Experimental research attempts to identify relationship by conducting controlled experiments psychological experiments; furthermore, the experimental is a quantitative approach designed to discover the effects of presumed causes (Christensen, Johnson, & Turner, 2014). The key feature of this approach is that one thing is deliberately varied to see what happens to something else to determine the effects of presumed cause. Some individuals use exercise to see if they can lose weight,

This definition has three primary components that are essential to understanding the nature of qualitative research. The first component is that qualitative is interpretive. Qualitative data consists of words, pictures, clothing, documents, or other non-numerical information. During and after the data is collected, the research continually attempts to understand the data from the participant’s subjective perspective. The most important task of the qualitative researcher is to understand the insiders view then the researcher takes of objective outsider and relates the interpretive subjective data to the research purpose and research questions. In qualitative research, the research questions are allowed to evolve, or possibly change during the study because qualitative research is usually focused on exploring phenomena; consequently, quantitative typically does not allow the change of that sort because the focus is on hypothesis testing. Qualitative is useful for understanding and describing local situations in theory and for theory generation; in contrast, quantitative research tends to be more useful for hypothesized testing. The second component of qualitative research is multimethod. This means that a variety of methods are used to collect data. Data collecting methods include the personal experience, introspective analysis, and individual’s life story, interview with individuals, written document, photographs and historical information. Qualitative research uses several of these data collecting methods to try and get the best description of an event for the meaning it has for the individuals being studied. The use of several methods is referred to as triangulation because it is believed that the use of several methods provides a better understanding of the phenomena being