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Nature OF Qualitative research
Course: Qualitative Psychology
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Students shared 16 documents in this course
University: University of Delhi
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Qualitative research is a form of social inquiry that focuses on the way people interpret and
make sense of their experiences and the world in which they live. In the words of Atkinson et
al. (2001), it is an “umbrella term”, and a number of different approaches exist within the
wider framework of this type of research. Most of these have the same aim: to understand the
social reality of individuals, groups and cultures. Researchers use qualitative approaches to
explore the behaviour, perspectives, feelings and experiences of people and what lies at the
core of their lives. Specifically, ethnographers focus on culture and customs grounded
theorists investigate social processes and interaction, while phenomenologists consider the
meanings of experience and describe the life world. All of these come under the umbrella of
the qualitative research paradigm. The basis of qualitative research lies in the interpretive
approach to social reality and in the description of the lived experience of human beings.
A great strength of qualitative research is that it cannot be neatly pigeon-holed and reduced to
a simple and prescriptive set of principles. Qualitative research is grounded in a philosophical
position which is broadly ‘interpretivist’ in the sense that it is concerned with how the social
world is interpreted, understood, experienced, produced or constituted. While different
versions of qualitative research might understand or approach these elements in different
ways (for example, focusing on social meanings, or interpretations, or practices, or
discourses, or processes, or constructions), all will see at least some of these as meaningful
elements in a complex – possibly multi-layered and textured – social world. It is based on
methods of data generation which are both flexible and sensitive to the social context in
which data are produced (rather than rigidly standardized or structured, or entirely abstracted
from ‘real-life’ contexts). It is based on methods of analysis, explanation and argument
building which involve understandings of complexity, detail and context. Qualitative research
aims to produce rounded and contextual understandings on the basis of rich, nuanced and
detailed data. There is more emphasis on ‘holistic’ forms of analysis and explanation in this
sense, than on charting surface patterns, trends and correlations. Qualitative research often
does use some form of quantification, but statistical forms of analysis are not seen as central.
For Denzin and Lincoln, the current state of qualitative research can be read as follows: ‘The
field of qualitative research is defined by a series of tensions, contradictions, and hesitations.
This tension works back and forth between the broad, doubting postmodern sensibility and
the more certain, more traditional positivist, postpositivist, and naturalistic conceptions’
(1998: 31). Others are more critical of the idea that postmodernism is ‘broad and doubting’
(or indeed that postpositivism is always so certain). They suggest instead that some