Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons^™

Reflection On The Methodological Aspects Of A Critical Ethnographic Approach Used To Inform Change For Adolescents With Disabilities, Sonia Gulati, Margo Paterson, Jennifer Medves, Rebecca Luce-Kapler

The Qualitative Report

Debate remains about how to effectively obtain information from adolescents with disabilities in marginalized areas and how to apply this knowledge to shape rehabilitation activities. This study explored how to empower adolescents in the urban slums of North India to assume greater control over their rehabilitation within the context of a local community-based rehabilitation program. Participants included 21 adolescents with and 11 adolescents without disability (aged 12 to 18 years), and 10 community-based rehabilitation workers. A critical ethnographic approach was adopted. Fieldwork was conducted from January to May 2005 and October 2006 to March 2007. This paper focuses on the …

How To Conduct Ethnographic Research, Nisaratana Sangasubana

The Qualitative Report

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of conducting ethnographic research. Methodology definition and key characteristics are given. The stages of the research process are described including preparation, data gathering and recording, and analysis. Important issues such as reliability and validity are also discussed.

Corporate Ethnographers: Master Puzzlers, What They Do, And Their Value To The Business Sector, Alice Obenchain-Leeson

The Qualitative Report

Melissa Cefkin's book Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter is the fifth volume in a six-volume series on studies in public and applied anthropology by Berghahn Publishing. Cefkin unearths the world of corporate ethnography by explaining how the field evolved from the larger field of anthropology. Through collecting a variety of corporate ethnography studies conducted at Intel, Microsoft, and others, Cefkin brings to life the work of corporate ethnographers as master puzzlers as she attempts to answer the questions: What are corporate ethnographers and under what conditions do they work? What value does ethnography bring to the understanding of complex business …

Clear And Engaging: A Review Of Sidnell's Conversation Analysis: An Introduction, Oksana Parylo

The Qualitative Report

Conversation Analysis: An Introduction by Jack Sidnell is a concise and clear primer to describing, analyzing, and understanding human talk. Combining theoretical descriptions and analysis of transcribed conversations, Sidnell (2010) explains the elements of conversational organization: turn-taking, action and understanding, preference, sequence, repair, turn construction, stories, and openings and closings. In addition, Sidnell opens the discussion about the role of topic and context in conversation analysis. Conversation Analysis: An Introduction is a good guide to conducting conversation analysis. This book is appropriate for those who are not familiar with conversation analysis and want to get a better understanding of this …

Reflexivity And The Sociology Of Science And Technology: The Invention Of "Eryc" The Antibiotic, Fran Collyer

The Qualitative Report

Until recently, the social-technical process of invention has fallen between sociological investigation of the genesis of a new idea (an ideational phenomenon) and the production of a new technology (a material phenomenon). The advent of post-modernism and post-structuralism offered new avenues for theorising invention, accounting for, on the one hand, its material nature, and, on the other, its ideational nature, through the notion of socio-technical ensembles: phenomena constructed through the co-producing, mutually constitutive action of actants (both human and otherwise). This paper argues that despite its potential, theorising within the sociology of science and technology is hampered by insufficient attention …

Validating The Mexican American Intergenerational Caregiving Model, Socorro Escandón

The Qualitative Report

The purpose of this study was to substantiate and further develop a previously formulated conceptual model of Role Acceptance in Mexican American family caregivers by exploring the theoretical strengths of the model. The sample consisted of women older than 21 years of age who self-identified as Hispanic, were related through consanguinal or acquired kinship ties to an elder, and had provided at least one intermittent service (without pay at least once a month). A comparative analysis method was used to test the existing theory, which consists of four phases: (a) Introduction/Early Caregiving Experiences, (b) Role Reconciliation, (c) Role Imprint, and …

The Experiment-Based Knew-It-All-Along Effect In The Qualitative Light Of Narrativity, Marek Palasinski

The Qualitative Report

In contrast to the extant quantitative studies on the hindsight effect, the present narrative analysis looks at it from a rare angle of talk-in-interaction. Fifty one-to-one interviews were done with five student groups, each of which was presented with a scenario ending with one factual outcome and three alternative outcomes that actually did not happen. Confirming the already proven role of the provided event outcome in overestimating the probability of its occurrence, this study expands the current understanding of the processes neglected by the research on the hindsight effect. It does so by highlighting the strategic use of vagueness, self-empowerment …

Revitalization Of Indigenous Culture In Child Care Centre, Jana Kulhánková

The Qualitative Report

In this study, I address contemporary ways of looking after children and care giving roles women play in today's Aboriginal community in Brisbane, Australia. Data were collected through participant observation and interviews during field work in a family care centre managed by Indigenous women with the staff and their clients. My main contribution is in describing how various activities of the centre, such as parental programmes, women's gatherings, and rites of passage reflect the traditional models of child care and women's position in the family environment and how these models are perpetuated again in the modern urban environment. Furthermore, I …

How People Think About A Tv Program: A Q-Methodology Approach, Alireza Khoshgooyanfard

The Qualitative Report

This paper identifies four viewpoints about a TV program by making use of Q-method. Based on a factor analysis, 35 participants of this study are classified into four groups that each one creates a viewpoint towards the TV program. Each viewpoint is interpreted carefully by using 48 statements representing possible opinions about the TV program. The paper emphasizes that usual research methods like surveys are not as effective as the Q-method for this purpose. This method can help researchers to understand those angles of people's opinions that remain hidden by using a questionnaire or scale.

Descriptions Of Difficult Conversations Between Native And Non-Native English Speakers: In-Group Membership And Helping Behaviors, Ray Young, William V. Faux Ii

The Qualitative Report

This study illustrated the perceptions of native English speakers about difficult conversations with non-native English speakers. A total of 114 native English speakers enrolled in undergraduate communication courses at a regional state university answered a questionnaire about a recent difficult conversation the respondent had with a non-native English speaker. A thematic analysis of their responses revealed that helping occurred when the non-native speaker was considered to be a customer, in-group member, or "fellow human being." Helping behavior was characterized by actions that fostered understanding between the interactants and aided the non-native speaker in completion of a task or goal. Non-helping …

How I Learned To Design And Conduct Semi-Structured Interviews: An Ongoing And Continuous Journey, Silvia E. Rabionet

The Qualitative Report

Qualitative interviewing is a flexible and powerful tool to capture the voices and the ways people make meaning of their experience Learning to conduct semi-structure interviews requires the following six stages: (a) selecting the type of interview; (b) establishing ethical guidelines, (c) crafting the interview protocol; (d) conducting and recording the interview; (e) crafting the interview protocol; and (f) reporting the findings. A researcher's personal journey in crafting an interview protocol to interview HIV researchers is summarized. She highlights that training and experience are crucial and identifies some readings that can help in the process.

Mixed Methods Design: A Beginner's Guide, Karen M. Keptner

The Qualitative Report

Mixed Method Design: Principles and Procedures by Janice M. Morse and Linda Niehaus (2009) is a "how-to" book for conducting mixed method research. Morse and Niehaus go step-by-step through mixed method research and provide clear explanation for combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. They also provide examples of what is not mixed method design. The book is easy to read. It could be an invaluable reference for anyone who conducts research in health and social sciences, seasoned researchers and students alike.

Growing…But Constrained: An Exploration Of Teachers' And Researchers' Interactions With Culture And Diversity Through Personal Narratives, Kimetta R. Hairston, Martha J. Strickland

The Qualitative Report

Educators from all realms of education who engage in in-depth conversations and reflections about personal experiences and perspectives related to diversity are significantly important to the cultural understandings in Education. This paper is a narrative analysis of how teachers who were enrolled in a Master's Program from two university campuses of the same predominantly White university participated in an in-depth look at their diverse cultural experiences through reflection and dialogue. Two researchers, one African American female utilizing the Critical Race Theory perspective the other Caucasian female using Socio-constructivism, interacted with one another and the teachers' narratives through several personal experiences …

Sometimes I Am Afraid: An Autoethnography Of Resistance And Compliance, Paige Averett, Danielle Soper

The Qualitative Report

Utilizing a feminist autoethnographic stance and method, this article is based upon the dialogues produced by a student completing an assignment for a social work instructor. Various tensions are explored, including the role of autoethnography in both qualitative and feminist research and the role of fear in a woman's life. A critique of the role of culture in the experience of fear as well as the student's use of autoethnography to resist and accept fear is explored. The uses of autoethnography for social workers are also discussed.

Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words? Using Mind Maps To Facilitate Participant Recall In Qualitative Research, Johannes Wheeldon

The Qualitative Report

Mind maps may provide a new means to gather unsolicited data through qualitative research designs. In this paper, I explore the utility of mind maps through a project designed to uncover the experiences of Latvians involved in a legal technical assistance project. Based on a sample of 19 respondents, the depth and detail of the responses between the groups were compared. Those who first completed mind maps identified a greater number of unique concepts and provided more in depth responses about their experience in later interviews. Participants suggested that by first completing a mind map, they were better able to …

Denzin's The Qualitative Manifesto Book Summary And Critique, Lise M. Allen

The Qualitative Report

Ethnography, Corporate Ethnography, and Corporate Research

A Reflexive Pragmatist Reading Of Alvesson's Interpreting Interviews, Brian T. Gearity

The Qualitative Report

Remember those interviews you collected for that qualitative research study? How did you address issues of interviewee power, impression management and rationality? Was it "trustworthy"? Really? In Interpreting Interviews, Mats Alvesson summarizes the current state of thought on interviews as a tool for qualitative data collection and challenges this framework as simplistic and failing to account for its complexities as a social act. Alvesson argues for a critical consciousness and pragmatic approach to interviews. This review blurs genres from autoethnography and more traditional approaches while taking Alvesson's approach, reflexive pragmatism, to its logical consequences. As a whole, Interpreting Interviews is …

Welcome (Back) To The Old World: A Review Of Peter Swanborn's Case Study Research: What, Why And How?, Maja Miskovic

The Qualitative Report

Case Study Research, a book by Peter Swanborn, a former chair of methodology at the Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam, joins the collection of scholarly sources available to students, researchers and practitioners interested in doing case studies. The author situates the book within a general methodological framework, useful for graduate courses with a strong emphasis on quantitative research, mainly organizational science, information management, marketing, health sciences, and psychology. The book offers precise advice regarding the case study design, steps to be followed in conducting it, and a secure epistemological-methodological space in which appropriate strategies lead to solutions/answers.

Successfully Writing And Defending The Dissertation Proposal: A Review Of Designing Qualitative Research, Diana Riviera

The Qualitative Report

Designing Qualitative Research (5th ed.) by Catherine Marshall and Gretchen B. Rossman (2011) is, in my opinion, a book of compiled elements central to the design and defense of the qualitative research proposal. The authors provide invaluable examples through the use of vignettes. Overall, the book is an easy read that is essentially divided into two parts: research design and proposal defense. As a whole, this book is a useful tool for anyone taking on a qualitative research study for the first time.

Announcements And Plenary Address – A Dance Of Transparencies: Researching Identity And Identifying Researchers, Ronald J. Chenail

The Qualitative Report Conference

Taking its place alongside such core metaphors as culture, phenomenon, discourse, and narrative, identity has emerged as an important trope in qualitative research. Be it people's sense of themselves as members of a family, culture, corporation, or the world society, qualitative researchers are interested in learning how people come to define themselves within their varied contexts. This area of research is also fraught with controversy as researchers and their research participants struggle with gender, sexual, cultural, brand, product, customer, and corporate identities and the methodological and ethical decisions entailed in studying such phenomena. An associated concern is how do we …

Modeling Social Participation As Predictive Of Life Satisfaction And Social Support: Scale Or Index?, Anne T. Zelenka

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social participation in late adulthood through activities such as volunteering with charities, playing sports, and joining clubs can increase life satisfaction, directly by providing enjoyable engagement and indirectly by increasing a person's sense of social connectedness. When reported levels of different types of activities are used to measure social participation, conventional measure development procedures based on classical test theory lead to a proliferation of small participation subscales that don't show good reliability, don't have theoretical power, and don't match researchers' conceptions of the dimensions of participation. Based on the poor performance of conventional approaches, some researchers have suggested that social …

2011 Life In Hampton Roads Survey, Social Science Research Center, Old Dominion University

Life in Hampton Roads Survey Report

[Introductory paragraph]

The Social Science Research Center (SSRC) at Old Dominion University recently completed data collection for the second annual Life in Hampton Roads telephone survey. The purpose of the survey was to gain insight into residents’ perceptions of the quality of life in Hampton Roads. The survey also attempted to determine the attitudes and perceptions of citizens regarding topics of local interest such as transportation and traffic, local and state government, crime, and other issues. Funding for the 2011 survey was provided by the ODU Office of Research and the Office of University Advancement. Questions were generated through email …

2011 Life In Hampton Roads Survey Results*, Social Science Research Center, Old Dominion University

Life in Hampton Roads Survey Report

No abstract provided.

Women In Transition: Experiences Of Asian Women International Students On U.S. College Campuses, Siva Jeyabalasingam

Department of Family Therapy Dissertations and Applied Clinical Projects

Often referred to as people in transition, international students usually arrive in the U.S. with a clear sense of their academic goals; however, they often have not considered what their lives will be like or how they may change in non-academic ways. In addition to the typical level of university-related stress, international students face additional problems and difficulties generated in part by the cultural differences between the U.S. and their own countries. This is particularly true for Asian students. Of several studies that have investigated the experiences of international students in the U.S., only a handful have examined Asian students' …

Information Withholding And The Management Of Productivity In Teams, Dolores Drumheller

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The importance of good communications between team members has been well documented. Yet previous studies on communications between team members have neglected to focus on reasons for information withholding between people working on teams. The purpose of this case study of 16 engineers and 6 educators was to understand why team members withhold information when working together. A convenience sample was selected from a software engineering organization. Collective intelligence theory in a modern communications environment was used as the theoretical foundation. This theory posits that the synergy of full group collaboration results in enhanced performance and the spread of new …

Nasis 2011: Nebraska Annual Social Indicators Survey Questionnaire, Bureau Of Sociological Research

Nebraska Annual Social Indicators Survey (NASIS)

[ About this Survey ] We need your help to learn about how Nebraskans' think, feel, and live. Your responses will help shape program and policy development in Nebraska now and into the future.

This survey includes questions on various topics, such as water issues, life processes, crime, and the media to name a few. Each section starts with a header to identify the topic related to the questions. We think you will find many, if not all, of the topics interesting and easy to answer.

68 questions; 12 pages

A Q Methodology Analysis Of Individual Perspectives Of Public Decision Making Influences Of Collaborative Processes, Perry D. Gross

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Suboptimal public policy formulation and implementation often result from traditional representative democratic practices. Increasing government fragmentation, eroding trust among policy actors, and an increasingly complex policy making environment contribute to this problem. Collaborative decision making is considered to be a pragmatic alternative by its advocates. The purpose of this research was to explore the claim that process dynamics lead participants to prefer collaborative approaches to decision making among local and regional transportation plans in a western state. The conceptual framework was the diversity, interdependence, and authentic dialogue (DIAD) theory-based model of collaboration in decision making. The research questions focused on …

Board Member Perceptions Of Nonprofit Organization Effectiveness, Laura Levy Maurer

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In contemporary American society, the nonprofit board is accountable for ensuring that an organization has sufficient resources to carry out its mission. Filling the gap between demands for services and the resources to meet them is often a struggle for small, local nonprofit organizations. This hermeneutic phenomenological study examined how board members of small, local nonprofits in the focal community perceive organizational effectiveness. Understanding the nature of nonprofit organization effectiveness according to board members contributes to understanding how those accountable meet their organizational objectives. A review of the literature revealed that nonprofit effectiveness involves the action of contributing and the …

Increasing Access To Family Planning (Fp) And Reproductive Health (Rh) Services Through Task-Sharing Between Community Health Workers (Chws) And Community Mid-Level Professionals In Large-Scale Public-Sector Programs: A Literature Review To Help Guide Case Studies, James R. Foreit, Sarah Raifman

Reproductive Health

This literature review covers case studies related to community-based distribution of family planning programs, and community health worker (CHW) programs that included family planning and other reproductive health services. It offers essential processes and implications for additional operations research which look at constraints and factors critical to introducing new program procedures or strengthening existing ones.

The Lived Experience Of Late-Stage Doctoral Student Attrition In Counselor Education, Brad Willis, Karla D. Carmichael

The Qualitative Report

Doctoral student attrition occurs across academic disciplines and presents problems for noncompleting students and the programs from which they withdraw. The following research question guided the present study, "What is the experience of doctoral attrition in counselor education?" Six late-stage doctoral noncompleters from counselor education programs participated in research interviews that were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Results showed two distinct types of attrition. Five participants reported a negative experience of encountering barriers that acted against the internal desire of the participants to obtain the doctorate. One participant reported a positive experience of an internal change that altered the …