Qualitative research

Qualitative research
Qualitative research is a process of putting data together from many sources in an effort to arrive at a holistic understanding of a phenomenon.

A qualitative design;

• is flexible and elastic
• can combine various data collection strategies
• strives to understand the whole
• requires ongoing analysis of the data formulate strategies

Preparation for a qualitative research

A researcher has to prepare themselves for conducting qualitative research in advance;

• Selection of title of the study or problem to be studied
• Plan design and data collection methods
• Select the setting and decide the nature of the participants
• Identify the ‘gate keepers’ who can provide access to important sources of data
• Determine time, money and resources availability for data collection

Phases in a qualitative study
The researcher conducts a qualitative study in three phases: orientation phase, exploration phase and confirmation phase.

• Orientation phase

The qualitative researcher enters into a study ‘not knowing what is not known’ that will make the researcher to drive forward.

• Exploration phase

The researcher explores the different aspects of the phenomenon. The questions to be asked to participants are shaped by the researcher.

• Confirmation phase

To confirm their findings trustworthy, the researcher often goes back and discusses their understanding with the study participants. 

Types of data collection strategies
The data collection strategies can be cross sectional or longitudinal. In cross sectional research, the data collection will be conducted at one point of time. In longitudinal research, the researcher conducts multiple data collection points over an extended time period.

Setting for qualitative research study
The qualitative researchers prefer natural setting to collect data; however, they conduct study in a variety of natural contexts to study phenomena extensively. 

Major types of qualitative research studies
The qualitative research traditions derived mainly from anthropology (culture), philosophy (lived experience), psychology (behavior), sociology (socially related) and socio linguistics (human communication). The major traditions which the qualitative researchers followed are;

• Ethnography
• Phenomenology
• Grounded theory

Ethnography
This research tradition focuses on the culture of a group of people. The main objective is to learn about a specific culture. The ethnographic researchers should use either one of perspectives; emic perspective or etic perspective. An emic perspective is the view of the culture as an insider or member of the community. An etic perspective is the view of the culture by an outsider. However, the ethnographers focus to acquire from emic perspectives. Some cultural experience is deeply embedded and members may not consciously aware of it. In this scenario, the researcher use ‘tactic knowledge’ to acquire information about the culture. Ethnography is time consuming and may take several months to get overall understanding of a culture. The researchers have to actively participated in a cultural group to develop intimacy with them. The ethnographers strive to acquire three types of information:

• Cultural behavior (What members do?)
• Cultural artifacts (What members do make and use?)
• Cultural speech (What people say?)

These study results provide an insight on health belief and practices.
The ethnography can be divided into two:

• Macro ethnography; study on culture broadly, for example: culture of a village
• Micro ethnography; study on culture which is narrowly defined, for example: culture of a tribal women.

Phenomenology
This approach strives to explore about people’s life experiences. The researcher conducts an enquiry regarding the experiences by the people in a given phenomena. The phenomenologist investigates subjective phenomena in the belief that reality is grounded in people’ lived experiences. There are two aspects of phenomenology: descriptive and interpretive phenomenology. In descriptive phenomenology, the researcher explores what people experience in regards to a phenomenon. In interpretive phenomenology, the researcher investigates how they interpret those experiences. The investigators believed that lived experience gives an idea to each person’s perception of a particular phenomenon. The phenomenologists are interested in four aspects of lived experience: lived space/spatiality, lived body/ corpeality, lived time/temporality and lived human relation/relationality.
In a phenomenologic study, the main data source is in depth conversations with the researcher and informant as participants. The researcher facilitates the informants to describe lived experience in a series of interview sessions. The sample size can be limited from 10 to 20, based on attaining of data saturation. The other data collection methods in phenomenology are participation, observation and introspective reflection.
The data analysis involves the following steps; bracketing, intuiting, analyzing and describing. Bracketing refers to the process of identifying and holding in abeyance pre conceived beliefs and opinions about the phenomena under study. Intuiting occurs when the researcher remains open to the meaning attributed to the phenomenon by those who have experienced it. Then, the researcher can proceed to analysis phase includes extracting significant statements, categorizing and making sense of the essential meaning of the phenomenon. Finally, the researcher defines the phenomenon with quotes.

Grounded theory
The grounded theory roots on social interaction and the interpretation they attach to social symbols like language. It is the study of social process and social structures. It explains the social and psychological stages that characterize a particular event. It also generates comprehensive explanation of phenomena that are grounded in reality. During data collection, the research questions are emerged from the data. The data collection, data analysis and sampling of participants occur simultaneously. A procedure referred to as constant comparison is used to develop and refine theoretically relevant categories and to identify the basic problems. The categories are compared with data so that commonalities and variations can be determined. In depth interviews and observation methods can be used for data collection. Typically, a grounded theory study involves interviews with a sample of about 20-50 informants.

Techniques of research control

Techniques of research control
Research control eliminates the influences of extraneous variables in the study so that true relationship between the independent and dependent variables can be understood. It excludes the contaminating factors that might affect the relationship between the variables. For example, the researcher wants to study depression among post partum women; the dependent variable is level of depression and independent variable is past partum women. There are other possibilities which affect the level of depression among post partum women such as age, socio economic status and marital status. If a researcher wants to study true relationship between independent and dependent variable, the extraneous variable has to be controlled. The extraneous factors can be divided into two;

• External factors
• Internal factors

Control of external factors
The external factors to be controlled in research are environment, time, culture and so on. To control the environmental influence on data collection, the researcher has to select the environment in natural or artificial setting according to the problem to be studied. Depending on the research topic, the relationship between dependent and independent variable may be influenced by the time of day, month and year. In these cases, the researcher should ensure the constancy of time during data collection.
Control of internal factors
Controlling internal factors such as gender, hereditary is doubtful in research. There are a few methods formulated o control subject characteristics to protect the research topic from the contamination of extraneous variables.
Methods are;

• Randomization
• Homogeneity
• Matching

Randomization
It means the selection of participants randomly, without any conscious decisions by the researcher. Randomization of study participants controls all possible sources of extraneous variables. For example, random assignment of subjects to experimental and control group would equalize the distribution of variables such as age, gender and neutralizes the influences of extraneous variables.
Homogeneity
When randomization is not feasible, the researcher can select the subjects who are homogenous with respect to extraneous variables are included in the study. Homogeneity means the researcher selects the study participants based on important extraneous variables such as specific age group, gender, education and so on. The main limitation of the homogeneity is that results of the study can be generalized only to the type of subjects participated.
Matching
During case control study, the researcher selects the study participants based on relevant extraneous variables and randomly divided into case control groups. This technique used to form comparable groups in case control design.