Qualitative Analysis Week Two

Today I'll look at Creswell's chapter on five different approaches to qualitative research.

His description of the narrative approach starts off unsurprisingly: the researcher tells a story. No kidding. After skipping over a few paragraphs near “postmodern,” I have a few questions. Does it make sense to call biographies and autobiographies research? While I'm happy to question assumptions underpinning quantitative research in line with what Professor Reynolds mentioned last week, this seems extreme. Stories play a large roll in our lives, and have great value. But how can telling them be research?

I encourage anyone interested in Phenomenology to read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology . Can you even study the structure of consciousness as experienced from a first person point of view? It's a question for experts, philosophers, and while not an expert myself, I am knowledgeable enough to have strong opinions. I am also knowledgeable enough to know that Creswell is no expert, and will not address my concerns. I'm skipping this section as too dubious to bother with. I'm not on board with his premises, and he has no interest in arguing with me. Apparently, “Phenomenology can feature a streamlined form of data collection.” What exactly is the data? What is “epoche” or “bracketing”? ...Cui bono?

Next: Grounded Theory Research. I'm hopeful here. The title includes several words I like. However, I read that theory is “an abstract analytical schema of a process...”. Why does Creswell use “schema” and not “scheme” or "construct" or "system" ? If he's going to use technical terms, he needs, at some point, to tell me what he means by them. How can I understand the overview without them? Anyway, since I'm supposed to generate a theory of a process or action or interaction, I would like to have had some examples of each. Better still, to see some results. Kids in middle school biology offer results for different research methods. Graduate level educational theory? Sorry, no luck. Again, I skip any page with “constructivist.” “Positivist” is good, though. “Foucault” Next.

The methodology section for Grounded Theory Research is the highlight of Creswell's article. I typically think of knowledge as legitimized by the process which generates it, and I want to know more about what justifies a researcher's use of a particular method. Creswell lists a series of terms which if explained would likely go a long way to doing that: categories, theoretical sampling, constant comparative, causal conditions, strategies, intervening conditions, axial coding, and conditional matrix. These all sound good. Do these terms allow practitioners of Grounded Theory Research to falsify and eliminate competing hypotheses? Can you use Grounded Theory Research, and other qualitative good bits (questioning the clarity of data) to evaluate existing theories? Perhaps I should evaluate existing studies of writing.

How does Ethnography differ from narrative? I again wonder about the kind of value this research generates. Are these people really OK with simply telling stories which differ in no important way from a podcast? I would loathe to pay twenty thousand dollars to learn how to blog.

That's all I have for now. Creswell mentions in his conclusion that interviews take precedence in Grounded Theory Research, as opposed to other methods. I don't understand why that is so, and would like to learn more. Aside from such questions, I take very little away from Creswell's overview.