data analysis, modelling and research methods: qualitative methods ii university of dublin trinity...

Data Analysis, Modelling and Research Methods: Qualitative Methods II

UNIVERSITY OF DUBLINTRINITY COLLEGEDepartment of Sociology

MSc in Economic Policy StudiesDr. Daniel Faas13th March 2015

20.04.23 MSc in Economic Policy Studies: Qualitative Methods II Dr. Daniel Faas 2

Agenda

• Interviews, observations and focus groups

• Thematic and discourse analysis

• Ethical issues in social science research

• Introducing mixed method approaches


1. Interviewing (summary)

• One of the most powerful ways we use to try to understand our fellow human beings. Interviewing is a paramount part of sociology because interviewing is interaction and sociology is the study of interaction

• Location/setting is very important in interviews

• Different degrees as to the structure of an interview: unstructured, semi-structured, and structured (quantitative). But there are many more types of qualitative interviews as we shall learn today.

• Building rapport is important (just like with participant observation) and also the ways in which you present yourself (‘strategies’ you adopt)


D.F.: What role would you say does your Turkish Cypriot background play inyour life today?Safak: Well, it plays a big part cos that’s my origin, but I don’t think of it as a big part where everything I do is revolved around that. I think cos, you know, I don’t live there and I don’t know people – I do know some people but they’re not like the people I know here, that I like, all my friends are here, and my close family’s here, so obviously I care more about them than I do distant family who I only see once a year. But it plays a big part as to who I am, because of the way, cos that’s just who I am, cos I am Turkish-Cypriot, but I don’t make my whole life go around that. I kind of just, I just try to stay in between and care about both things just as much, like, just as equally, but obviously that’s harder cos I do a lot of things here, like watch British TV, that makes me learn more about England and London, than I do about Turkish, because, well, I watch Turkish TV less.

Semi-structured interview: an example


2. (Participant) Observations

Advantages:

- directness should greatly enhance validity- not dependent on actors’ consciousness, memory, understandings of research or their motivation to reveal the truth- observation means directly gathering evidence about what people do and say in their normal activities.

Limitations:

- observations are slow and do not give access to minds,- validity depends on observer’s understanding of what is observed- validity depends on what the observer is in a position to observe.


Choosing the type of observation

• Are you seeking a reliable description of what happens?- need for decisions in advance about what it is to be observed; how to categorise - probably need to be a detached (non-participant) observer- probably need to understand in advance what is happening- likely to give a quantitative account generalising about the extent to which different things happen and relate to one another.

• Are you seeking to understand what is happening?- need to learn from participants what it is all about- possibly need to share in their lives (participant observation)- probably need to ask questions as well as observe- need to decide gradually what to observe and in what terms- likely to give a qualitative account about what seem to be especially significant kinds of things that happen.


Interviews versus participant observations


3. Documentary sources

• personal documents (e.g. letters, diaries, photographs) vs. official documents (e.g. company, government reports)

• primary sources form the basic and original material for providing the researcher’s raw evidence whereas secondary sources copy, interpret or judge material to be found in primary sources

• mass media outputs (e.g. newspapers, magazines, radio, TV)

• virtual documents (e.g. private emails, personal webpage, official online documents, forums and mailing lists)


4. Focus groups

• Form of group interview involving several participants and a moderator, main role of the researcher is organising the event and interpreting issues

• Study interaction between group members (group dynamics)

• Enables researchers to discuss issues with participants at a fairly high level of generality and allows insights into collective perspectives

• researcher defines the discussion topics; more controlled than participant observation but less controlled than individual interviews because of the participant-defined nature of group interaction


Focus groups

• can be used to explore new research areas or to examine well-known research questions from the research participants’ own perspective

• can be used either in the opening stages of the research to guide the later construction of interview questions or a questionnaire, or as follow-up research to clarify findings in the other data.

• Running more groups increases data volume and complexity of analysis

• Average 5-10 members per group; over-recruit in anticipation of ‘no-shows’; use smaller sizes when the topic is more controversial or sensitive and larger group sizes when you want to hear brief suggestions.


Advantages and limitations of focus groups


Focus group: an example

D.F.: What sorts of things do you know about Europe and the European Union?Anne: Not much!Victoria: It’s really difficult,-Anne: I don’t know anything.Victoria: -totally out of my depth.Elizabeth: It’s quite confusing cos it changes so much, that people-Anne: The Euro.Sophie: There’s places part of it [indistinct]Elizabeth: Oh, isn’t there a referendum or coming up for something or other?Victoria: A what? What’s that?Elizabeth: I dunno. I just heard it, walking through my house and the news was on somewhere, this whole thing about-Victoria: What’s a referendum?Elizabeth: I don’t know.Anne: I know about the euro because I was in Ireland when it was going through.Victoria: They don’t have it in Ireland.


Focus group: some suggested readings

Barber, R. (2007) Doing Focus Groups. London: Sage.

Morgan, D.L. (1988) Focus Groups as Qualitative Research. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Peek, L. & Fothergill, A. (2009) Using focus groups: lessons from studying daycare centers, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. Qualitative Research 9(1): 31-59.

Wilson, V. (1997) Focus groups: A useful qualitative method for educational research? British Educational Research Journal, 23(2): 209-24.


Basic steps in qualitative data analysis

• ‘Coding is analysis (…) and this part of analysis involves how you differentiate and combine the data you have retrieved and the reflections you make about this information’ (Miles and Huberman, 1994).

• Other researchers say that coding is simply a stage to getting to analysis (e.g. Lonkila, 1995)

• Steps and considerations in coding- code as you go along, and start early- read through transcripts/field notes/documents more than once (make notes the second time)- review the index of codes you have generated- multiple coding of data items- do not worry about producing too many codes


Basic steps in qualitative data analysis

• Turning data into fragments- cut and paste / code and retrieve- 3 levels of coding (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996)

• basic coding• content and language• broad analytic themes

- coding helps to generate ideas and build theory problems with coding

• Problems with coding- losing the context of what was said (extracting sections of data)- fragmentation of data - loss of narrative flow - narrative analysis as solution? life history interviews - risk of only providing descriptive account of data rather than theorizing

Source: Silverman, D. (2005) Doing Qualitative Research, London: Sage.


Data analysis I: Thematic analysis

• One of the most common approaches to qualitative data analysis

• Not an approach to analysis that has an identifiable heritage or that has been outlined in terms of a distinctive cluster of techniques

• For many, a theme is more or less the same as a code. But it can also be built up out of a group of codes.

• After transcribing, start coding (i.e. look for themes emerging from your data/transcript) and finally interpret the data.

• Other types of analysis: discourse analysis, conversation analysis


Data analysis II: Discourse analysis

• Discourse is never neutral, includes all forms of linguistic communication (e.g. written, spoken) and is constitutive of the social world

• locates contextual understanding in the situational specifics of talk- avoid making reference to ‘ethnographic particulars’ (Potter, 1997)

• skills of critical analysis rather than codification

• ‘sceptical reading’ of intended meanings behind speech acts

• four themes in discourse analysis (Gill 2000):- discourse is a topic, not just a resource- language is constructive- discourse is a form of action- rhetorically organized


Discourse analysis: linguistic approach

• Linguists look for grammatical cohesion and discourse coherence as in the following example:

A: Can you go to Cork tomorrow?B: Yes, I can. Coherent and cohesive

A: Can you go to Cork tomorrow?B: Aer Lingus flies to Cork Coherent but not linguistically cohesive.


Foucauldian power/knowledge

• Understanding the relationship between power/knowledge is a key goal of Foucault’s work

• Knowledges created in and creating discourses

• In discourse, power and knowledge are joined together.

• complex interplay of knowledges and productive power, the nuances of these become the object of enquiry.

• Critical discourse analysis, which draws heavily on Foucault, emphasizes the role of language as a power resource that is related to socio-cultural change


Foucauldian subjectivation

• The subject, or self (or I), is not the rational, abiding actor of the Enlightenment project or thought

• Instead, the subject is formed and constrained, but not determined, through the productive power of discourse. This is subjectivation.

• This is not a once and for all production. It is ongoing and liable to change and contestation. For example, people negotiate and renegotiate their identities and are positioned and repositioned discursively.

• The opposite is if people are a priori assigned to ‘ingroups’ and ‘outgroups’ of society (e.g. In relation to migrants, ‘othering’/‘newcomers’)


Foucauldian discourse

• Discourses are systems of knowledge

• Discourse does not report external facts

• Discourse produces the ‘facts’ it appears to report

• Across and within time and contexts, discourses compete, contradict and/or complement each other

• Discourses are made and remade through discursive practices. These practices include written and spoken language, non-linguistic representations and non-verbal utterances and bodily gestures (what we say, write, think, do)


Foucauldian discourse

• The meanings of discourses are not fixed

• Foucauldian discourse analysis analyses language, representations, and practices to identify the discursive frames that underpin these.

• Links to notions of deconstruction

e.g. ‘foreigner’: (1) different citizenship status between majority and minority ethnic communities; (2) oppressive term implying minority communities not part of society; (3) linguistically, the word ‘foreigner’ can mean someone who comes from a foreign country or someone who is not a member of a group.


Deconstruction of ‘turkey’

D.F.: Have you experienced any form of prejudice or discrimination?Yildiran: Well yeah, they did actually. They said I’m a ‘F … ing Turk’, which hurts me, it’s in a way, like, ‘you’re a Turk, you’re not with us, you’re just odd’, you know?Muhammad: Some people sometimes take the piss by like saying, you know the Turkey, they say like ‘I’m going to go and buy a turkey and cook it’.Yildiran: Oh yeah –Muhammad: – and they’re taking the piss like that.Yildiran: Yeah, at Christmas. They –Muhammad: they go, they go, we’re going to buy a Turkey –Yildiran: They pee you off! They go ‘I wanna go and get a turkey and eat it’.Muhammad: And I then I get really pissed.Yildiran: And this in Turkey, it’s actually what you eat at Christmas.Muhammad: Like, when it is Christmas, they go we’re going to get a turkey and eat it tonight, and that really pisses me off sometimes but I have to take it.


On the importance of deconstruction

• e.g. ‘turkey’: (1) refers to an ugly, large, hybrid bird grown for its white and brown meat; (2) refers to notions of festivity and Christianity as a turkey is usually eaten at Thanksgiving in the United States and during Christmas in England. The size of the bird has a symbolic or even hierarchical meaning as Yildiran said that ‘they [e.g. Christian, white, African Caribbean] wanna go and get a turkey [e.g. non-white, Muslim]’. (3) Thirdly, a turkey can also be a stupid or silly person which further puts the students in an inferior position.

• Questions you need to ask yourself:

1. What discourses are being produced/deployed?2. What contradictions or incoherencies might be inherent in or between these discourses?3. What sorts of subjects do these discourses constitute?4. What spaces for resistance or alternative meanings might be identified?


Secondary analysis of qualitative data

• Compare different researchers’ interpretations of the same data

• Problem of second researcher’s lack of ‘insider’ understanding of social setting

• Ethical issues- difficult to maintain anonymity/confidentiality-participants may not have given informed consent to secondary analysis

• Not just the analysis but also the collection of qualitative data by more than one researcher can pose difficulties.


Irish qualitative data archive (www.iqda.ie)


• Most professional codes of ethics stress the importance of five ethical responsibilities towards research participants:

(1) voluntary participation(2) no harm (experimental studies)(3) informed consent (4) anonymity and confidentiality(5) privacy

You also have an ethical responsibility toward your colleagues, the wider public as well as research sponsors and funders (e.g. acknowledgements)

Ethical principles in social research


Political issues in social research

1. Taking sides can be problematicHammersley (2000) critiques critical social approaches as politically framed and distorted: ‘partisan researchers’ who adopt the side of the less powerful; the label ‘critical’ is an empty rhetorical shell and its use amounts to an attempt to disguise a particular set of substantive political commitments as a universal position.

2. Attracting research funding Vested interests of government, organizations and funding bodies; decisions about which research projects to fund; calls for tender: encourages proposals for research in particular areas; preference for quantitative, policy-oriented research (Morgan, 2000)

Source: Hammersley, M. (2000) Taking Sides in Social Research: essays on partisanship and bias. London: Routledge.


• Qualitative methods tend to provide an understanding of a focused phenomenon within a specific context

• Quantitative methods tend to identify broad relationships between or among phenomena without digging beneath surface

• Mixed methods designs can provide a more nuanced understanding by illustrating broad relationships and focusing on particular aspects

• concurrent vs. sequential data collection strategies: many mixed studies begin with an exploratory qualitative component followed by confirmatory survey research (opposite also possible)

Introducing mixed-method approaches


Reflecting on mixed-method approaches

• Increasingly common in social science research

• Not inherently superior to single-method research

• Success depends mainly on four factors:

(a) well designed and conducted(b) methods appropriate to research questions(c) effects of spreading limited resources(d) skills and training of researchers

Source: Hantrais, L. (2005) ‘Combining methods: a key to understanding complexity in European societies?’, European Societies 7(3): 399-421.

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