WHAT IS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH?

Martyn Hammersley

The Open University

University of Southampton, January 2012

A Definition of ‘Qualitative Research’

A form of social inquiry that tends:

• To adopt a data-driven and flexible research design;

• To use relatively unstructured data;

• To emphasise the essential role of subjectivity in the research process;

• To study a small number of naturally occurring cases in detail; and/or

• To use verbal rather than statistical forms of analysis.

The Role of Framing Assumptions: A Joke

When Willie Sutton was in prison, a priest who was trying to reform him asked him why he robbed banks.

‘Well’, Sutton replies, ‘that’s where the money is’. (Garfinkel 1981:21)

Methods or Paradigms?Qualitative and Quantitative as:

• Methods appropriate for addressing quite different general types of question. Or as methods that need to be combined in order to answer particular research questions.

• Paradigms based on fundamentally discrepant sets of philosophical assumptions, with one being treated as legitimate while the other is dismissed as ‘unscientific’, ‘positivist’, etc. Or, each approach is viewed as legitimate in its own terms.

Problems with Quantitative Research

• Measurement: Do the assumptions built into the scale match the structure of the feature being measured? Does the data collected actually indicate variation on the scale reliably? (See Michell 2007; Hammersley 2009 and 2012)

• Does the analytic procedure employed, for example regression analysis, allow the accurate detection of the causal process concerned? (See Abell 1971; Abbott 2001; Ragin 2008)

Diverse Forms of Qualitative Inquiry• Anthropological ethnography• Virtual ethnography• Visual ethnography• Ethnomethodological conversation analysis• Foucault-inspired discourse analysis• Narrative analysis• Participatory action research• Biographical and autobiographical work• Qualitative interview studies and surveys• Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Sources of Diversity• A concern with different types of phenomena:

e.g. micro vs macro, perspectives vs practices.

• Studies aimed at diverse products: descriptions, explanations, theories, evaluations, photographic or video presentations, poetic, dramatic, or dance performances.

• Constraints and affordances of the data that can be collected about a topic.

• Conflicting methodological philosophies about what is possible and desirable: positivism, interpretivism, ‘critical’ inquiry, constructionism.

Fundamental DivergenciesThe key point is that some of the divisions among

qualitative researchers today are deeper, in philosophical terms, than that between qualitative and quantitative research:

• Ontology: causality versus construction.

• Epistemology: the very possibility of expert social knowledge.

• Politics: should research aim to generate knowledge, critique society, serve political action, capture lived experience, produce

art works, or exemplify ethical ideals?

The Predominant Attitude?

• Most researchers, understandably, are preoccupied with getting on with their own substantive inquiries, operating within whatever approach (pure or eclectic) they have inherited or adopted.

• In some respects this is commendable, but often it amounts to unreflective practice: reliance upon a range of questionable methodological ideas that are insufficiently understood and largely taken for granted.

Pluralism versus Policing?

• Should diversity be celebrated, tolerated, or controlled? Paradigm war, détente, or mixed methods integration?

• Even ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ involves some policing, so the key questions are: Where should the boundaries be drawn, on what basis, and how? How can or should different approaches be combined?

The Tolerable and the Intolerable

Tolerable: Variation in aim between description, explanation, and theory; variation in views about adequate strategies to achieve these goals across different types of phenomena.

Intolerable: Versions of the four methodological philosophies that either deny the possibility of social scientific knowledge (whether from a positivist or a ‘postmodernist’ direction) or seek to redefine the operational goal of research away from an exclusive concern with the production of value-relevant knowledge.

Qualitative versus Quantitative Revisited

• Even the mixed methods movement tends to accept the quantitative and qualitative distinction, and thereby to reify the approaches on each side.

• What is required, in my view, is to look in a more detailed way at the various decisions that researchers make in relation to different aspects of the research process.

Aspects of the Research Process

• Question formulation and mode of research design: ‘deductive’ vs ‘inductive’.

• Constitution/selection of cases: experimental, survey, detailed case study.

• Data collection strategies (see handout).

• Data analysis strategies: process-tracing, comparative analysis (correlational or configurational).

• Writing formats: standard, flexible, audience-relative.

ReferencesAbbott, A. (2001) Time Matters, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Abell, P. (1971) Model Building in Sociology, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Bryman, A. (1988) Quantity and Quality in Social Research, London, Unwin Hyman.

Garfinkel, A. (1981) Forms of Explanation, New Haven CT, Yale University Press

Gomm, R. et al (eds.) (2000) Case Study Method, London, Sage.

Hammersley, M. (1992) ‘Deconstructing the qualitative-quantitative divide’, in Brannen, J. (ed.) Mixing Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Research, Aldershot, Avebury.

Hammersley, M. (2008) Questioning Qualitative Inquiry, London, Sage.

Hammersley, M. (2009) ‘Is social measurement possible, or desirable?’, in Tucker, E., and Walford, G. (eds.) The Handbook of Measurement, London, Sage.

Hammersley, M. (2012) ‘What’s wrong with quantitative research?’, in Cooper, B. et al (eds.) Challenging the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide: Explorations in Case-Focused Causal Analysis, London, Continuum.

Jansen, Harrie (2010). ‘The Logic of Qualitative Survey Research and its Position in the Field of Social Research Methods’ [63 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11(2), Art. 11, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1002110.

Michell, J. (2007) ‘Measurement’, in Turner, S. P. and Risjord, M. W. (eds.) Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, Amsterdam, Elsevier.

Ragin, C. (2008) Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy sets and beyond, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

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Martyn Hammersley

What is Qualitative Research?

London, Bloomsbury, 2012