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1,2,3 - Introduction To Qualitative Research

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1,2,3 - Introduction To Qualitative Research

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venkatesh sharma
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Introduction to Qualitative

Research
What’s in the Van? • The “skateboard
footwear” company
needed to become a
“lifestyle” company.
• Qualitative research
asked, “What other
segments share cultural
meanings and values
with skateboard culture?
• Used ethnographic
approach
What is qualitative research?
• Research that addresses business objectives through techniques
• that allow the researcher
• to provide elaborate interpretations of phenomena without depending on numerical
measurement

• Its focus is on discovering true inner meanings and new insights.


• Less structured than quantitative approaches.
• Researcher-dependent
• Researcher must extract meaning from unstructured responses such as text from a
recorded interview or a collage representing the meaning of some experience.
What is qualitative research?
• Research that produces descriptive data – people’s own written or spoken
words and observable behavior

• Is more than a set of data gathering techniques (Ray Rist, 1977)

• Is a way of approaching the empirical world

• Qualitative research is concerned with the meaning people attach to things


in their lives
• i.e. understanding people in their own frames of references and experiencing reality
as they experiences it (Corbin & Strauss, 2008).
• Qualitative research involves
• collecting and analyzing non-numerical data (e.g., text, video, or
audio)
• to understand
• concepts,
• opinions, or
• experiences.

• It can be used to gather in-depth insights into a problem or


generate new ideas for research
Discoveries at P&G!
• P&G often uses
qualitative research
techniques.
• Used to learn that
P&G was suffering
from a management
problem.
Qualitative research question examples

• How does social media shape body image in teenagers?

• How do children and adults interpret healthy eating in the India?

• What factors influence employee retention in a large organization?

• How is anxiety experienced around the world?

• How can teachers integrate social issues into management curriculums?


• Qualitative research is used to understand how people experience the
world

• They tend to be flexible and focus on retaining rich meaning when


interpreting data.
• This method is about “what” people think and “why” they
think so.

• For example, consider a convenience store looking to improve


its patronage.
• A systematic observation concludes that more men are visiting this
store.

• One good method to determine why women were not visiting the
store is conducting an in-depth interview with potential customers.
• For example, on successfully interviewing
• female customers, visiting the nearby stores and malls, and

• selecting them through random sampling,


• it was known that the store didn’t have enough items for women.

• So fewer women were visiting the store, which was understood


only by personally interacting with them and understanding why
they didn’t visit the store because there were more male products
than female ones.
Uses of Qualitative Research
• Qualitative research is useful when:
• It is difficult to develop specific and actionable decision statements or
research objectives.
• The research objective is to develop a detailed and in-depth understanding of
some phenomena.
• The research objective is to learn how a phenomenon occurs in its natural
setting or to learn how to express some concept in colloquial terms.
• The behavior the researcher is studying is particularly context-dependent.
• A fresh approach to studying the problem is needed.
Types of qualitative research methods

critical
in-depth
incident
interview,
techniques

case study
focus groups,
research

projective ethnographic
techniques research,

content
analysis,
Qualitative methods

Semi-structured
Focus Group Interviews Depth Interviews Conversations
Interviews

Word Thematic
Associations/Sentence Observation Collages Apperception/Cartoon
Completion Tests
Qualitative Research Orientations
• Major Orientations of Qualitative Research
1. Phenomenology—originating in philosophy and psychology
2. Ethnography—originating in anthropology
3. Grounded theory—originating in sociology
4. Case studies—originating in psychology and in business research
What Is a Phenomenological Approach to Research?
• Phenomenology
• A philosophical approach to studying human experiences based on the idea that
human experience itself is inherently subjective and determined by the context in
which people live.

• Seeks to describe, reflect upon, and interpret experiences.

• Relies on conversational interview tools and respondents are asked to tell a story
about some experience.
What Is Hermeneutics?

• Hermeneutics
• An approach to understanding phenomenology that relies on analysis of texts
through which a person tells a story about him- or herself.

• Hermeneutic Unit
• A text passage from a respondent’s story that is linked with a key theme from
within the respondent’s story or provided by the researcher.
What Is Ethnography?
• Ethnography
• Represents ways of studying cultures through methods that involve becoming
highly active within that culture.

• Participant-observation
• An ethnographic research approach where the researcher becomes immersed
within the culture that he or she is studying and draws data from his or her
observations.
What Is Grounded Theory?
• Represents an inductive investigation in which the researcher poses questions about information
provided by respondents or taken from historical records.

• The researcher asks the questions to him or herself and repeatedly questions the responses
to derive deeper explanations.

• Key questions:

• What is happening here?

• How is it different?

• It does not begin with a theory but instead extracts one from whatever emerges from an area of
inquiry.
What Are Case Studies?
• Case Studies
• The documented history of a particular person, group, organization, or event.
• Themes
• Are identified by the frequency with which the same term (or a synonym)
arises in the narrative description.

7–19
Qualitative “versus” Quantitative Research

Quantitative business research Qualitative business research

• Descriptive and conclusive • Exploratory


• Addresses research objectives • Uses small versus large
through empirical samples
assessments that involve • Asks a broad range of
numerical measurement and questions versus structured
statistical analysis. questions
• Subjective interpretation
versus statistical analysis
Contrasting Exploratory and Confirmatory Research

• Qualitative data
• Data that are not characterized by numbers but rather are textual, visual, or
oral.
• Focus is on stories, visual portrayals, meaningful characterizations, interpretations, and
other expressive descriptions.
• Quantitative data
• Represent phenomena by assigning numbers in an ordered and meaningful
way.
Qualitative Vs. Quantitative Research
Blank Qualitative Research Quantitative Research
Objective To gain a qualitative understanding of To quantify the data and generalize
the underlying reasons and the results from the sample to the
motivations population of interest

Sample Small number of non-representative Large number of representative


cases cases

Data collection Unstructured Structured


Data analysis Non-statistical Statistical
Outcome Develop an initial understanding Recommend a final course of action
Comparing Qualitative and Quantitative Research

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