Metode Penelitian Administrasi

DR. H. Rasyidin, S.Sos, M.A

What is Research?

• “A systematic process of critical enquiry leading to valid propositions and conclusions that are communicated to interested others” (McLeod, 1994).

• What are some of the key words in this definition and why are they important?

Taking A Closer Look at Methods

• METHODS

– What methods will you use to address the research questions?– How many and why this many? (sampling)– How will these methods be designed? i.e. How will the study be

conducted? Where? How will you gain access? – What is the justification for these methods?– What questions will be asked and why?– What are the limitations of these methods and how will you

address these limitations?– How will analysis be undertaken? – What are the ethical concerns related to these methods and

how will these be addressed?

All the methodological decisions you make – i.e. how you answer each of the above questions should be tied to the methodological literature and/or the literature in your subject area.

Deciding on a methodological approach

• Ontology: What is the nature of the phenomena, or social reality, that you want to investigate?

• Epistemology: What might represent knowledge or evidence of the social reality that you want to investigate?

• Research area: What topic is the research concerned with?

• Research Question: What do you wish to explain or explore?

Ontology• What is the nature of things in the social world?• For example, are you investigating:– Bodies, subjects, objects– Rationality, emotion, thought– Feeling, memory, senses– Motivations, ideas, perceptions– Attitudes, beliefs, views– Texts, discourses– Cultures, society, groups– Interactions, social relations

• Some ontologies are better matched to qualitative research methodology than others (e.g., social processes, interpretations, social relations, experiences etc.)

Epistemology• What is your theory of knowledge? What are your presuppositions

about the nature of knowledge? • Examples of epistemological perspectives

– Positivist Perspectives (also called empiricism)• Fundamental claim is that reality is a fixed, measurable entity

that is external to people.• There exist “social facts.”• Aims to find true, precise and wide-ranging laws of human

behaviour which we can generalise to the population as a whole• “If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.”

– Social Constructionism• Reality is constructed socially so rejection of “social facts”• Aim is to describe the subjective and consensual meanings that

constitute social reality.• Understanding of social world as “local truths” which cannot be

evaluated by external criteria

At the start of your research project….

• After you have decided upon your research question, you need to decide what approach you are going to take:– Quantitative?– Qualitative?

Ask yourself are you seeking to prove or disprove a theory? Or are you trying to generalise your findings to a population?If so this will be a deductive approach, a quantitative

approachOr are you hoping to elicit some understandings on what people

think or feel about an issue? Is the topic an area that there is little information and so you must undertake an initial, exploratory study?If so, this will be induction, a qualitative approach

Deductive TheoryTheory

Hypotheses

Data Collection

Findings

Hypotheses Confirmed or Rejected

Revision of Theory

Induction[General research question]

Observation

Theory Formulation

Quantitative and Qualitative Methods

Quantitative:• Deductive• Tests hypotheses• Positivism• Objectivism• Employs measurement• Macro• Detached researcher

Qualitative:• Inductive• Produces theories• Phenomenology• Constructionism• Does not employ measurement• Micro• Involved researcher

Quantitative and Qualitative Methods

• Quantitative:Measures objective factsFocuses on variablesValue freeReliability is keyIndependent of contextMany casesStatistical analysis

• Qualitative:Constructs social meaningFocus on interactive processesValues are presentAuthenticity is keyContext constrainedFew casesThematic analysis

Main Steps in Quantitative Research:

1. Theory2. Hypothesis3. Research design4. Devise measures of concepts5. Select research site(s)6. Select research subjects/respondents7. Administer research instruments/collect data8. Process data9. Analyse data10. Write up findings and conclusions

Main Steps in Qualitative Research:

1. General research question2. Select relevant site(s) and subjects3. Collection of relevant data4. Interpretation of data5. Conceptual and theoretical work6. Tighter specification of the research question7. Collection of further data8. Conceptual and theoretical work9. Write up findings

Examples of Quantitative Research Methods

• Experiments• Social surveys

– Cross-sectional– Comparative (cross-national)– Longitudinal

• Content Analysis• Secondary Statistical Analysis• Official Statistics

– Demography– Epidemiology

• Field stimulations– Structured Interviews and Observation.

Examples of Qualitative Research

• In-depth Interviews• Focus Groups• Ethnography/Field Research• Historical-Comparative Research• Discourse Analysis• Narrative Analysis• Media Analysis

Worth noting…

• Quantitative and qualitative research are often cast as opposing fields.

• But sometimes they blur - qualitative research may employ quantification in their work or may be positivist in their approach. Some quantitative may employ phenomenology.

• Both can be also be combined in a project– Qualitative can facilitate quantitative research (1) can provide

hypotheses (2) fill in the gaps, help interpret relationships – Quantitative can facilitate qualitative through locating interviewees

and help with generalising findings – Together they can give you a micro and macro level versions and so

you can examine the relationships between the two levels. They can complement each other.

Final words…

• To make it easier to understand the two different approaches, I sometimes tell students to think of TV detectives.

• Induction - this is the method that CSI use. They find the evidence and then produce the theory on what happened.

• Deductive logic - this is your more traditional detective. They have a hunch that someone murdered someone else and seek to prove it. Think Columbo, Murder She Wrote or even Inspector Morse.

Qualitative ResearchBy now, qualitative research has become an acceptable, if not mainstream, form of research in many different academic and professional fields. As a result, the large number of students and scholars who conduct qualitative studies may be part of different social science disciplines (e.g., public administration, sociology, anthropology, political science, or psychology) or different professions (e.g., education, management, nursing, urban planning, and program evaluation). In any of these fields, qualitative research represents an attractive and fruitful way of doing research.

Examples of qualitative research

There are many other examples of qualitative research. They touch on all walks of life. Close to all of our lives, the changing role of women in American society has been the subject of a good number of studies, such as:•Ruth Sidel’s (2006) inquiry into how single mothers confront their social and economic challenges•Pamela Stone’s (2007) examination of why successful career women drop out to stay at home•Kathryn Edin & Maria Kefalas’s (2005) study of why women with low incomes “put motherhood before marriage”

In the three examples above, the researchers conducted extended interviews with many women and their families, also visiting their homes and observing family behavior. These and other studies follow, in a way, Carol Gilligan’s (1982) landmark study of a woman’s place in a man’s world—which argued that much of the so-called universal theories of moral and emotional development had been based exclusively on male perceptions and male experiences.

Beyond these examples, the range of topics covered by other contemporary qualitative works stretches from the rare to the commonplace, such as:•Unearthing surprising but still existing forms of exploitation, such as human slavery in Thailand, Mauritania, Brazil, Pakistan, and India (e.g.,Bales, 2004)•Analyzing the challenges of immigration between other countries and the United States, whether in educational (e.g., Valenzuela, 1999) or community (e.g., Levitt, 2001) settings•Studying how older people might have been admitted into a hospital or into long-term care in circumstances that could have been avoided (e.g., Tetley, Grant, & Davies, 2009)

• Offering data and explanations on how a Fortune 500 firm in the computer business could go out of business in the 1990s (e.g., Schein, 2003)

• Contrasting the consumer differences between toy stores located in middle- as opposed to working-class neighborhoods, reflecting not just the stores’ practices but also the families’ shopping and purchasing habits (e.g., Williams, 2006)

• Examining residential life and the differences in racial, ethnic, and class tensions in four urban neighborhoods (e.g., Wilson & Taub, 2006); or

• Showing the different childhood experiences of working- and middle-class families by making extensive observations in the homes of 12 families (e.g., Lareau, 2003)

You even can study everyday life on the streets of your city or town, such as:•Duneier’s (1999) study of sidewalk vendors•Lee’s (2009) study of street interactions; or•Bourgois’s (2003) study of the addicts, thieves, and dealers who form part of the underground economy in some cities

The allure of qualitative research is that it enables you to conduct in-depth studies about a broad array of topics, including your favorites, in plain and everyday terms. Moreover, qualitative research offers greater latitude in selecting topics of interest because other research methods are likely to be constrained by:•the inability to establish the necessary research conditions (as in an experiment);•the unavailability of sufficient data series or lack of coverage of sufficient•variables (as in an economic study);•the difficulty in drawing an adequate sample of respondents and obtaining•a sufficiently high response rate (as in a survey)