What does qualitative research make use of?

Concept

Research designs differ in the form of evidence they gather and in how they justify a conclusion. A design that works with non-numerical material — interview talk, field notes, open-ended responses, documents — builds its claims by interpreting language, and it warrants those claims by showing the reader the participants’ own words on which the interpretation rests.

A design that works with measurement does the opposite: it reduces observations to numbers and warrants its claims through statistical summary and inference.

Application

The stem asks what qualitative research makes use of. Qualitative reporting is built on verbatim material. After transcripts are coded into themes, the analyst selects short extracts that typify each theme — representative quotations — and prints them beside the interpretation. This is what produces the “thick description” a qualitative account is judged on, and it lets a reader check whether a stated theme is genuinely grounded in the data. So the element qualitative research makes use of here is representative quotations.

Contrast

• Scaling builds a measuring instrument: Likert, Thurstone or Guttman procedures place responses on a numerical continuum so that an attitude can be scored.

• Factoring, that is factor analysis, works on a correlation matrix of many measured variables and extracts a smaller set of latent factors that account for their shared variance.

• SPSS is a statistics package used to hold numerical data sets and run procedures such as t-tests, ANOVA, chi-square and regression.

Cross-check

Apply one test to each element: is it a way of producing or processing numbers, or a way of presenting language? Constructing scales, extracting factors and running a statistics package all belong to numerical measurement and analysis, which is the quantitative mode of proof. Verbatim participant extracts are language offered as evidence, which is the mode of proof qualitative research depends on.