Qualitative Methodology

Educational researchers study human experience and seek to understand the motivation, decision-making, quality, and value of what occurs throughout the learning process and in the school setting, making the context of the research social in nature. Social sciences utilize qualitative methodologies in order to understand how and why participants do what they do in certain situations. Qualitative methodologies examine a single circumstance in its entirety by analyzing all the specific parts together as a whole, while quantitative methodologies gather data on a specific part of the whole but in much larger quantities of that single instance. Key elements that are unique to qualitative research include context, meaning, researcher-as instrument,

No other methodology provides such rich and detailed analysis of a specific research subject, which means that the results explain how and why those particular results occurred. The details gathered provide researchers with the needed network of intricate webbing to build theories and laws with the optimal application being used to further explain previously studied work(Myers, 2000). The thoroughness of the research data is powerful because meaning is drawn from multiple variables within the study, each of which provides an array of perspectives that lend to the understanding of what is occurring (McMillan & Schumacher, 2010; Roller,

Several researchers (Donmoyer, 1990, Creswell, 2005; Falk & Guenther, 2007; Metcalfe, 2005; Patton, 2002) define generalization in new terms that better fit with qualitative research because data cannot be exactly duplicated but the theory behind the findings is information that can be transferred. Therefore a suggested term akin to the generalization of quantitative data is the transferability of qualitative data (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). The context of new research may be different, which prevents literal translation, but the theory behind the findings can be replicated across multiple studies, which allows compareable translation (Falk & Guenther, 2007). Each new study performed that seeks to replicate the findings of a previous study, provides further evidence that begins to show predictable patterns which ultimately builds on theory, which is a generalization of