According to Easterbrook, (2008), “qualitative methods are used typically in research projects that take a human-focused perspective in the design and implementation of the investigation” (p. 828). This paper theme explains the reasoning for a topic’s approach as qualitative research. Additionally, the paper’s theme identifies the research design appropriateness while providing a rationale for not using other research designs. The qualitative research designs include phenomenological, ethnographic, grounded theory and case study. The approach to a research issue depends on the research question and the study’s goal. The phenomenological method provides for investigating the social science of consciousness as a legitimate subject matter for human psychology. Therefore, phenomenology provides a way of exploring lived experience, the actuality of the experience from the inside rather than from the natural science perspective of observation and measurement (Bevan, 2014). Ethnography is “to understand how behaviors reflect the culture of a group” (Leedy & Ormrod, 2010, p. 146). The ethnographer study provides for discovering another person's cultural knowledge. Three general categories of ethnographic design questions include descriptive, structural, and contrast. The goal of these questions typically involves the characteristic or interpretation of human behavior, practices, ideas, and values (Shalinsky, 2006). The grounded theory approach focuses on unscrambling the components of experience (Moustakas, 1994). The study of the components and their interrelationships provides for the development of a theory enabling the researcher to comprehend the character and significance of the experience for a particular subject group of people ... ... middle of paper ... ...an Journal of Medical Sciences, 67(3), 89-98. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.4103/0019-5359.121127 Leedy, P. D., & Ormrod, J. E. (2010). Practical research: Planning and design (9th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Mantzoukas, S., (2008). Facilitating research students in formulating qualitative research questions, Nurse Education Today, 28(3), 371-377, doi:10.1016/j.nedt.2007.06.012. Moustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. Shalinsky, A. (2006). Fieldwork, ethnographic. In H. Birx (Ed.), Encyclopedia of anthropology. 969-970. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.apollolibrary.com/10.4135/9781412952453.n343 University of Phoenix. (2013). Sample Qualitative and Quantitative Problem Statements. Retrieved from University of Phoenix, Res/722A - Research Design website.
Gender Importance of the Anthropologist of Ethnography What importance may the sex of the anthropologist have on the ethnographic process? There are many factors which can influence the ethnographic process for an anthropologist, and a very important one is his/her sex. This essay will examine the different attitudes towards sex, the problems that face all ethnographers when they embark on fieldwork in a different environment to their own, as well as the problems and benefits which can arise due to the sex of an anthropologist. In order to produce a written work about a certain culture or society (an ethnography, anthropologists must embark on what is known as the ethnographic process". This term refers to all of the various activities and research methods which the anthropologist must undertake if he/she wants to obtain a profound and objective understanding of the culture being studied.
The author could have employed other methods of qualitative research such as, narrative analysis, grounded theory, discourse analysis, data display and analysis, content analysis and quantifying qualitative data and computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAPDAS) (Saunders et al., 2016). Nevertheless, these approaches seem cumbersome sometimes and take a long time to complete (Willig, 1999; Braun and Clarke, 2006 and Smith and Bekker,
Qualitative research is an approach that attempts to situate an activity that locates the observer in the world by providing the study to occur in their natural setting and by attempting to make sense of, or interpret information (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). A characteristic of qualitative research is to use a variety of empirical materials such as personal experience, interviews, and questionnaires. It is imperative to understand the task at hand and how to fully carry out the study when using a qualitative research approach in order to find out the information needed. One view of qualitative research is it involves examining individual’s experiences and documenting those experiences in detail (Jones, 2011). By documenting these observations the researcher is ensuring validity in his or her data and giving the correct creditability to those who participated in the study.
Participant observation is a method of collecting information and data about a culture and is carried out by the researcher immersing themselves in the culture they observing. The researcher becomes known in the community, getting to know and understand the culture in a more intimate and detailed way than would be possible from any other approach. This is done by observing and participating in the community’s daily activities. The method is so effective because the researcher is able to directly approach the people in the community in a natural context as opposed to taking the participant out of their environment. The aim of participant observation is to gain an understanding the subject’s life from their perspective, with the purpose of collecting more detailed information about a community’s habits, opinions, relationships and issues.
The term methodology refers to the way in which we approach problems and try to find answers and in social science, it applies to how research is conducted, our assumptions, interest and purposes shape which methodology we choose (Steven, 2016:3).Qualitative research is understanding people from their own perspectives, their viewpoint and experiencing reality as they experience it. Qualitative research has many approaches or methods of collecting data and one of them is an interview which I have chosen to explain further based on it as a method of collecting data. The interview is the most common method of data gathering used in qualitative research and it is used in deferent ways by every main theoretical and methodological approach.
Culture is beautifully complex. Cultural practices naturally, therefore, are made up of intricate implicit and explicit thoughts and behaviours. Participant-observation is at the centre of anthropological research because it allows the anthropologist to experience rather than read. Bronislaw Malinowski, regarded as the father of participant-observation, created a scientific framework for how research could be conducted in the field. This framework has evolved as anthropology has changed over the ages. In this essay, I will compare and contrast the central premises of Malinowski’s 1922 book Argonauts of the Western Pacific and a contemporary anthropologist Nancy Kalow’s article Living Dolls which reflects on the participant-observation she carried
Spradley, J. P. & McCurdy, D. W. (1972). The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in a Complex Society. Chicago: Science Research Associates.
Creswell, J. W. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Marshall, C, Rossman, Gretchen B, (2006). Designing qualitative research, 4th edition, Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
... data (Myers, 2013). To illustrate the application of grounded theory to the tourism and hospitality industry in this article, the two dimensional framework proposed Urquhart, Lehman and Myers (2010) is depicted in Figure 4. Connell and Lowe (1997) demonstrate interpretation on the degree of conceptualization on the x-axis and substantive focus of the theory scope on the y-axis (Myers, 2013). The article notes that data collection interview and fieldwork produced 40,000 words of data and sufficient evidence (Connell and Lowe, 1997), but the article does not show any of the data (Pratt, 2009). As a result, it is not clear how the researcher connects the data to the practical application of the approach in international tourism and hospitality industry. The article does explain the motive and need (Pratt, 2009) for inductive qualitative research using grounded theory.
In this paper, I will define quantitative and qualitative research methods and provide examples in the context of social issues which will hopefully provide insight into how this methods are properly applied.
There are different types of qualitative research design; namely - a case study, action research, ethnography, phenomenology, narrative inquiry and grounded theory (Saunders et al., 2012). The philosophical position of this study of interpretivism supports the case study approach used to investigate the phenomenon under study. A case study design is particularly useful in empirical enquiry investigating in-depth contemporary phenomena, and drawing data from multiple sources for triangulation (Yin, 2014, p. 16 and 17). Yin (2014) emphasises the importance of context in a case study in research design, adding that the advantage of case study research is the fact that the boundary between the phenomenon and the context within which a case is being studied is not always discernible. Importantly, a case study is pertinent to answering the “who”, what”, where”, “how “and “why” research questions in both exploratory and explanatory studies (Saunders et al., 2012; Yin, 2014). The presented study has chosen a case study design to
Clifford Geertz once said: “Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.” I recently spent a short amount of time at a busy 5-way traffic circle near my residence. While sitting in one spot for about 25 minutes, I observed many people doing many different things (mainly driving). Observing the various people made me think of what their particular cultures may have been, and from there, I began thinking of culture in and of itself. What is culture? Culture is defined as: Ideas and behaviors that are learned and transmitted. Nongenetic means of adaptation (Park, 2008). Culture plays a vital role in anthropology. After all, anthropology is the holistic, scientific study of humankind (Park, 2008). One cannot study humans as a whole without studying and understanding their cultures as well.
Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, 3rd Edition. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
...chniques and procedures among those associated with quantitative or qualitative research. A literature review, which included document analysis, was used to answer sub-questions one, two and three. A model building approach was suggested to answer sub-question four. In addition, the study uses a case study as a proof-of-concept. The use of a case study is a qualitative empirical study to strengthen the research validity. Since the research methods directly responding to the research questions (Literature review and Model building) make use of textual data, we classified this study as a qualitative study. Table 3.1 below summarises the classification of this study in terms of the dimensions discussed above.