LESSON 3

QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
DEFINITION OF QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
• This is a research type that puts premium or high value on peoples thinking or point of view
conditioned by their personal traits.
• It usually take place in soft science like social sciences, politics, economics, humanities, education,
psychology, nursing, and all business-related subjects.
• Subjectivity in qualitative research is true, not for an individual or a group under study, but also for
you, the researcher, because of your personal involvement in every stage of your research. For
instance, during interviews, you tend to admire or appreciate people’s ideas bassed on their anwers
or your observations and analysis of a certain objects. (Coghan 2014)
• In qualitative research, the reality is conditioned by society and people’s intentions are involved in
explaining cause-effect relationships. Things are studied in their natural setting, enough for you to
conclude that qualitative research is an act inquiry or investigation of real-life events. (Silverman
2013; Litchman 2013 Walliman 2014; Suter 2012)
CHARACTERISTIC OF A QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
1. Human understanding and interpretation- data analysis results show an individual’s mental, social, and
spiritual understanding of the world. Hence, through their world views, you come to know what kind of
human being he or she is, including his or her values, beliefs, likes, and dislikes.
2. Active, Powerful, and Forceful- as you go through the research process, you find the need to amend or
rephrase interview questions and consider varied ways of getting answers, like shifting from mere speculating
to traveling to places or data gathering. Rather, you are inclined to discover your qualitative research design
as your study gradually unfolds or reveals itself in accordance with your research objectives.
3. Multiple reseach approaches and methods- you are free to combine this with quantitative research and
use all gathered data and analysis techniques. Being a multi- method research, a qulattitative study applies to
all research types: descriptive, exploratory, explanatory, case study, etc.
4. 4. Specifically to generalization- specific ideas in a qualitative research are directed to a general understanding
of something.
CHARACTERISTIC OF A QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
5. contextualization- a quantitative research involves all variables, factors, or conditions affecting the study.Your
goal here is to understand human behavior. Tuhs, it is crucial for you to examine the context or situation of an
individual’s life-the who, what, why, how, and other circumstances- affecting his or her way of life.
6. Diversafied data in real-life situations- a qualitative research prefers collecting data in a natural setting like
observing people as they live and work , analyzing photographs or videos as they genuinely appeat to people,
looking at classrooms unchanged or adjusted to people’s intentional observations.
7. Abounds with word and visual- words, words, and more words come in big quantity in this kind of research.
Data gathering through interviews of library reading, as well as the presentation of data analysis results, is done
verbally.
8. Internal analysis- here, you examine the data yielded by the internal traits of the subject individual (i.e.,
emotional, mental, spiritual characteristic). You study the peoples perception or views about your topic, not the
effects of their physical existence on your study.
TYPES OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

1. Case study- this type of qualitative research usually takes place in the field of social care, nursing, psychology,
rehabilitation centers, education, etc. this involves a long-time study of a person, group, organization, or
situation.
2. Ethnography- is the study of a particular cultural group to get a clear understanding of its organizational set-
up, internal operation, and lifestyle.
3. Phenomenology- coming from the word ‘ phenomenon,” which means something known through the
sensory experience, phenomenology refers to the study of how people find their experiences meaningful. Its
primary goal is to make people understand their experiences about death of loved ones, care for
handicapped persons, friendliness of people, etc.
4. Content and Discourse analysis- an analysis or examination of the substance or content of the mode od
communication( letters, books, journals, photos, video recordings, SMS, online messages, e-mails, audio-visual
materials, etc). Used by a person, group, organization, or any institution in communicating.
TYPS OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

5. Historical analysis- central to this qualitative research method is the examination of primary
documents to make understand the connection of past events to the present time.
6. Grounded theory- takes place when you discover a new theory to underlie your study at the
time of data collection and analysis.
ADVANTAGES OF QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
1. It adopts a naturalistic approach to its subject matter, which means that those involve in the
research understand things based on what they find meaningful.
2. It promotes a full understanding of human behavior or personality traits in their natural setting.
3. It is instrumental for positive societal changes.
4. It engenders respect for people’s individuality as its demands the researcher’s careful and
attentive stand toward people’s world views.
5. It is a way of understanding and interpreting social interactions.
6. It increases the researcher’s interest in the study as it includes the researcher’s experience of
background knowledge in interpreting verbal and visual data.
7. It offers multiple ways of acquiring and examining knowledge about something.
DISADVANTAGES OF QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
1. It involves a, lot of researcher’s subjectivity in data analysis.
2. It is hard to know the validity of reliability of the data.
3. Its open-ended questions yield “data overload” that requires the long time-analysis.
4. It is time-consuming.
5. It involves several processes, which results greatly depend on the researcher’s view or
interpretations.