Let me talk a little bit about qualitative data collection. We have a research question and we collect some data in order to address that question. The real beauty of qualitative research is that the possibilities for data collection are very extensive. I tend to group them into four categories. We've got open-ended interviews, Open-ended observations.
Documents. Now documents could be like private diaries, could be newspaper articles, could be minutes from a meeting, public and private documents. And then the fourth category that's really emerging these days would be audio-visual material.
So for example, I could collect pictures and interpret the pictures. Ask people to draw pictures of how they are learning qualitative research. It would be interesting to see what the pictures are that they draw. Or videotaping. Let's videotape people in the classroom participating in qualitative research and organize that source of information into some themes.
Or let's put a camera in someone's hands and have them take pictures of what it means to learn qualitative research in this classroom. So we have all these various ways, using websites, using email messages, using text messages. There's a lot of digital means that are developing now that become part of our qualitative research.
And I think that's really the beauty of it, is coming up with creative ways. There's a technique called photo voice, and that's where you ask people to take pictures of something that they've never seen before. the phenomenon, the topic you're looking at, and then you interview them about that picture that they take.
It's a very popular approach in some of the countries around the world right now called photo voice. So we have this large, large collection of different methods. Now once we collect that data, we want to put it into some categories. I talked about coding and themes.
And we can report a qualitative study. That's just reporting the themes. But to move it one step further, to make it a little bit more sophisticated project, we need to think about one of the designs that are available in qualitative research. And I'm going to use this example of we're in a classroom learning qualitative research. I could just summarize the themes that I hear from the interviews of people that are reflecting on what it means to do qualitative research or I could put it into one of the traditional designs that have been used for years in qualitative research.
research. Now, I'm going beyond just a theme approach, which is a very basic approach, to a little bit more of an advanced approach using one of these designs. There's a lot of designs out there in qualitative research.
One would be narrative design. In a narrative, what I do is I look for people's stories. So what I would take from these interviews is I'd be looking for stories about how people talk about learning quality research in this classroom. Rather than getting everybody's stories, I'd focus maybe on two or three people, a small number of people that are telling very different stories. One person is telling a story about learning qualitative research.
in the classroom through conversations with their colleagues seated right next to them. Another person is telling a story about learning qualitative research through the PowerPoint slides that the instructor is using. So that's narrative research, and there's a whole body of literature on how to do a good narrative qualitative study. We could also turn this into what's called phenomenology. This is another qualitative design.
Phenomenology takes a little different tact. Rather than look at individual stories, it looks at all of the people in the classroom, a fair number of people that I interviewed, and asks, what do they have in common? What did they learn in common? In other words, I'm trying to take all the different perspectives and bring it down to some common ideas. So maybe the common thing would be that they all learned From reading the Sage textbook, reading the book, and that was their primary.
And, you know, maybe as I talked to a lot of people, that is the best way that they learn. What do they all have in common, and is there some agreement on what they have in common? I could also turn this into a grounded theory qualitative study. And grounded theory is building a theory. From the views of participants, from the bottom up.
So I would interview the people and I would think about what process was going on in the classroom. Maybe it's a process of first becoming used to the class, then getting over their fears of qualitative research, and then moving on to learning some of the basics. And I would actually develop an explanation of how this process unfolds.
in learning qualitative research. So building an explanation or a theory based upon the individual views of participants. Or I might do an ethnography. Ethnography comes, all these different approaches come out of different fields. Ethnography is something that's been used by anthropologists for years.
Basically what they say is, let's take this class and let's call them a culture sharing group. a group that has developed ways of talking, behaving, acting. You know, as this class moves on, everyone sits in the same seat, time after time after time.
In other words, where you sit becomes a way of participating in this culture. So in ethnography, it simply looks at what are the patterns of behavior, ways people talk, ways people communicate, that develop over time in a group that comes closer and closer. Now, if it's the first time in the semester or second class, there won't be time to really build these ways of acting. But by the time I get to the fifth, the sixth, the seventh class meeting of this qualitative class, people will start to develop ways of acting.
We all know that we'll take a break halfway through. We all know we're going to sit in certain seats. We all know that we're going to have a PowerPoint presentation, and we expect these things. And so this culture begins to develop over time. That's ethnography.
Now, case study is somewhat similar. Case study, I'm going to develop an understanding of this class as a case. It's bounded.
The case is bounded by this room, by the people that are in it. And what I'll try to do here is to describe how this class works, a description of the case, and then I might point out some themes that emerged from talking to the students during the semester. So I'm building an in-depth portrait of this class so that if I present my case study to you, you will be able to see how this class works. I may describe the number of males and females in the class, and the age in the class, and the content in the class. And I may look across that description to come up with certain themes.
You know, everyone responds by bringing their laptop, computer, and this is how they're beginning to learn qualitative research. So what we have here are some very different ways. of moving past just coming up with themes and using, employing what we call qualitative research designs.
And we can choose the design that best fits the problem. If I want to study the process, I might look at a grounded theory design. If I want to get to these stories of individuals, where I can get that really great detail of people talking about what it's like to be in this class, I might use narrative. If I want to talk about how this class kind of comes together and becomes a cohesive sharing group, cultural group, I might use ethnography.
There's different ways of approaching it. Now this doesn't exhaust the possibilities. I could use other approaches. There's an approach where you... look at the language of how people talk about things like discourse analysis.
I can look at how people are participating in the learning process like responding to questions by having small group activities, by having small discussions, a participatory approach. There are others that are out there. But these are some of the ways in which I've now taken my data, moved beyond themes and really built the study into a distinct qualitative design.