This page isn’t adding another
introductory site, because there are already many
splendid meta-sites that contain all the links to sites
I’d send you to. Those listed below are just a
beginning – I’ve chosen them because they in turn lead
to other excellent sites or references. A morning’s browsing will
set you up with places to go, whether your need is
figuring whether you should be working qualitatively,
getting a basic road map of methods and modes of
qualitative research, or starting out with
bibliographies and definitions of terms.
Meta-sites for
introductions, readings, more links
QDA Online is
a UK research project, ongoing, to bring together
starter materials including short articles on most
qualitative methods and topics. It defines
everything, explains lots and gives a fairly update
reading guide.
A search for “qualitative” at the
splendid university-based site of
Intute in the UK
will take you to a very helpful description and link for
pretty much every basic introduction available online
and a lot of other more specific and sophisticated
resources.
And in the US, the University of
Colorado offers a
qualitative research page
with links and
bibliographies at . So too does the online journal
The Qualitative
Report .
At a more personal level, there are
very strong and helpful sites maintained with links to
current discussions and bibliographies. Bobbie Kerlins developed a
qualitative page over many years and also hosts the
Qualitative Research Web Ring.
And Judy Norris's
Qual Page
is now maintained at UGA by Jude Preissle.
Online Journals
Many journals specialise
in qualitative research – see listing at
http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/calls.html.
Some are available online,
either free or by subscription (check if your
institution has the subscription). The following give
you great material to start browsing:
The Qualitative
Report
Qualitative Research Journal (Alternate
Site)Published by the
Association for Qualitative Research
Locate your version
of “qualitative”!
Be aware that qualitative research
differs across disciplines as well as across methods.
Try reading for different focus - e.g.:
And some links to online
resources on video data...
Unclear how
people are using such data?
Here’s an account of
a study using
video in Education (hotbed of video research at the
moment!)
Want a few
ideas of the issues such research raises?
Susanne
Friese gave a
presentation at the CAQDAS conference last year
raising important issues.
Worried
about the ethics of it all?
Kristi Jackson and Sandra Prettyman on ethics and
software use. See also recent
FQS articles and
SocResearch online.
On
reporting with digital data, strengths and
problems.
Here’s
one very enthusiastic account
from an education
study.
Online
resources on Participant Observation –
You may
be using the method for something quite that sounds
literally a world away, but it’s useful to start where
it seriously started: with attempts to understand local
communities. This method properly belongs in
Anthropology, and there they simply call it Fieldwork
and the literature is mainly under Ethnography. If
you’re new to this area, a brisk and sensible
introduction is nearer home than you might expect – the
Victorian Government
Department of Sustainability and environment.
Not
very far away motivationally, I found a fuller account
that very efficiently offers a summary of tasks and
challenges, in my own previous world of family research:
Family Health International
offers a Qualitative
Research Methods: A Data Collector’s Field Guide with
pragmatic advice for
Participant Observation. If you don’t know
anything about the area and don’t have time for any
other reading start here! And from a school of Public
Administration comes a neat
summary of current issues
in the method.
So where is this as a method in academic
research? Jan Morse and I systematically compared
Ethnography with three other methods (Phenomenology and
Grounded Theory) and provided core readings in in
Readme First for a User’s
Guide to Qualitative Methods.
A websearch will
find a lot of course notes from round the world, such as
these notes, to introduce you to the more
significant issues that an academic study will raise.
And for
the even curlier issues of participant Action Research,
there’s a start at
this link.
And
academic issues? For a start, consider all qualitative
research as participant observation! If you are
interviewing, read about the differences and overlap
with ethnographic methods. Then, consider that there is
no one method of participant observation – there are
many techniques and a range of degrees of intervention
and participation, and very many methodological
approaches, and many new texts developing the simpler
themes of early ones.
Online
resources on Qualitative Coding –
Before
you start, and whilst you are doing it, keep asking the
big question, “Why am I coding?”. Coding can become a
substitute for thinking about the data; it’s busy-work,
something you can get on with when it seems that the
project will never come together. So especially if you
get bored, ask, “What will this coding –
or this particular code - allow me to
discover or ask?” I've worked through my ideas and
warnings on all these topics in Chapter 5 of
Handling
Qualitative Data.
Once you’ve thought through the answers
for your project, a brisk introduction to “how and what
to code”, is on
OnlineQDA.
The
literature on qualitative coding is largely in articles
and unpublished papers. The book literature still tends
to ignore the complexity or dangers of the task, even to
elide the massive differences between qualitative and
quantitative coding, and to assume that we are all still
doing it with colored highlighters and Xerox machines
rather than with software. This is one reason why I
wrote Handling Qualitative Data.
Uwe
Flick has done a very pragmatic job of summarizing a
grounded theory approach to coding in his
recent book: You may find that a better launching
place than the classics of GT.
And on
coding with software
Helen
Marshall tackles a tangle of issues in “What
do we do when we code data?”Qualitative Research
Journal 2:1 pp56-70.
One of
the earliest papers, by Udo Kelle, is reprinted in a
book
accessible Google-wise.
There
are few actual accounts of doing it with software and
most of these are not very reflective. Here's a
thoughtful one. Or for a complex project and
new ways of doing and using coding,
For
those using focus groups, check out a way-back paper by
Catterall and Maclaran on the risk of coding
reducing focus group analysis to snapshots.
If
you’re starting coding with software, it’s worth
visiting some of the thinking about what I’ve called
“coding fetishism”, and others have termed the “coding
trap”. Way back when listservs had vibrant discussions
of methods, there was a thread on Qualsoftware list about
this: check it out
at the list's site and click your way through to
follow “next in topic”.
Validity and
Reliability in Qualitative Research
A huge issue with a major literature.
Following are accessible online references simply
introducing the debate or offering practical suggestions
and literature reviews of the many and varied proposals
for terminological and pragmatic uses of ‘reliability’
and ‘validity’.
First, for those new to this whole
debate,
a simple American introduction
and some straightforward course
notes from the UK. Note
the different literatures and emphases across the
Atlantic. The UK notes point to Jennifer Mason’s highly
pragmatic text, Qualitative Researching,
published by Sage.
For many, the need is for practical
research design advice. In an accessible paper (2002),
Jan Morse and colleagues
identify the varieties and risks of this debate: ‘The
purpose of this article is to re-establish reliability
and validity as appropriate to qualitative inquiry; to
identify the problems created by post hoc assessments of
qualitative research; to review general verification
strategies in relation to qualitative research, and to
discuss the implications of returning the responsibility
for the attainment of reliability and validity to the
investigator.’ And there’s an interesting argument
against the lumping of all qualitative research
methodologies under a single ‘interpretivist’ or
‘constructivist’ paradigm in
a paper by Gary Rolfe
from nursing in Wales. On
the more
complex and largely US-based redefinings of the concepts
and the debate about whether they belong in a
quantitative mode,The
Qualitative Report carries two articles going into
some detail here:
one by
Glyn Winter and the other by
Nahid Golafshani.
And from Canada, the Center for Health Evidence at U
Alberta offers ‘A
User's Guide to Qualitative Research in Health Care’.
In medical or health
research, there are some valiant efforts to address
these questions for those seeking to publish qualitative
work. The Australian NH&MRC offers
guidelines for interpreting
qualitative research and . and establishing
the
ethical standards of
projects. And there's website advice for evaluating
papers submitted to the
British Medical Journal.
That paper refers to the classic
Qualitative Research in
Health Care, edited by
Catherine Pope and Nicholas Mays, published by BMJ Books
– and you can read the
editors’ contributions
online (BMJ 2000;320;50-52 ).
And for those in education
research, a now old but still useful
review of issues.
Does it have anything to do
with software? Of course! Click here for some of
my
thinking on
these issues and their relation to technology.
