International Journal of Qualitative Methods: ARCHIVE
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Processes of Metastudy: A Study of Psychosocial Adaptation to Childhood Chronic Health Conditions
No full textMetastudy introduces a systematically aggregated interpretive portrayal of a body of literature, based on saturation and the synthesis of findings. In this metastudy, the authors examined qualitative studies addressing psychosocial adaptation to childhood chronic health conditions, published over a 30-year period (1970-2000). They describe metastudy processes, including study identification, strategies for study search and retrieval, adjudication of difference in study design and rigor, and analysis of findings. They also illustrate metastudy components through examples drawn from this project and discuss implications for practice and recommendations
Multiple Voices and Methods: Listening to Women Who Are in Workplace Transition
No full textIn this article, the author illustrates, through one participant’s transcripts, the two-part method used in research that sought a deeper understanding of the perceived learning of female professionals during workplace transition. Five women participated in a 1-hour interview and a focus group. To give voice to each participant while also identifying common themes and learning experiences, the author used a two-step research method. The first step entailed individual interviews, which the author analyzed using a voice-centered relational method. The author chose the second step, the focus group, to facilitate women’s learning from each other’s experience
Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives on Designing Video Studies of Interaction
No full textIn this article the authors discuss the theoretical basis for the methodological decisions made during the course of a Swedish research project on interaction and learning. The purpose is to discuss how different theories are applied at separate levels of the study. The study is structured on three levels, with separate sets of research questions and theoretical concepts. The levels reflect a close-up description, a systematic analysis, and an interpretation of how teachers and students act and interact. The data consist of 12 hours of video-recorded and transcribed music lessons from high school and college. Through a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, the general understanding of teaching and learning in terms of interaction can be widened. The authors also present a software tool developed to facilitate the processes of transcription and analysis of the video data
Racism and Ethnocentrism: Social Representations of Preservice Teachers in the Context of Multi- and Intercultural Education
No full textUsing a constructivist inquiry paradigm, the authors attempted in their content analysis to understand the social representations on race and ethnocentrism of preservice secondary teachers studying in an urban university in a Midwest city in the United States. Although social representations can be understood as something in which our participants deeply believe, this study suggests that racial and ethnocentric biases should be examined in the context of multi- and intercultural education. The authors favor a way of revisiting taken-for-granted ideas toward traditional, liberal, and critical or radical multiculturalism. They argue for the recognition not only of the differences and diversity of students (multicultural perspective) but also of the way in which teachers understand, communicate, and interact with them (intercultural perspective)
Symposium Introduction - Issues of Validity: Behavioral Concepts, Their Derivation and Interpretation
No full textQualitative inquiry that commences with the concept, rather than the phenomenon itself, is subject to violating the tenet of induction, thus is exposed to particular threats of invalidity. In this symposium, using the examples of the concepts of uncertainty, trust, vulnerability and suffering, and interview and videotaped data, we discuss strategies to maintain the inductive thrust, and hence validity, during data analysis. The authors present the use of a skeletal framework and scaffold as techniques to “frame” the concept, while, at the same time, continuing to further develop the concept
Advancing Uncertainty: Untangling and Discerning Related Concepts
No full textMethods of advancing concepts within the qualitative paradigm have been developed and articulated. In this section, I describe methodological perspectives of a project designed to advance the concept of uncertainty using multiple qualitative methods. Through a series of earlier studies, the concept of uncertainty arose repeatedly in varied contexts, working its way into prominence, and warranting further investigation. Processes of advanced concept analysis were used to initiate the formal investigation into the meaning of the concept. Through concept analysis, the concept was deconstructed to identify conceptual components and gaps in understanding.
Using this skeletal framework of the concept identified through concept analysis, subsequent studies were carried out to add ‘flesh’ to the concept. First, a concept refinement using the literature as data was completed. Findings revealed that the current state of the concept of uncertainty failed to incorporate what was known of the lived experience. Therefore, using interview techniques as the primary data source, a phenomenological study of uncertainty among caregivers was conducted. Incorporating the findings of the phenomenology, the skeletal framework of the concept was further fleshed out using techniques of concept correction to produce a more mature conceptualization of uncertainty.
In this section, I describe the flow of this qualitative project investigating the concept of uncertainty, with special emphasis on a particular threat to validity (called conceptual tunnel vision) that was identified and addressed during the phases of concept correction. Though in this article I employ a study of uncertainty for illustration, limited substantive findings regarding uncertainty are presented to retain a clear focus on the methodological issues
Verification Strategies for Establishing Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research
No full textThe rejection of reliability and validity in qualitative inquiry in the 1980s has resulted in an interesting shift for "ensuring rigor" from the investigator’s actions during the course of the research, to the reader or consumer of qualitative inquiry. The emphasis on strategies that are implemented during the research process has been replaced by strategies for evaluating trustworthiness and utility that are implemented once a study is completed. In this article, we argue that reliability and validity remain appropriate concepts for attaining rigor in qualitative research. We argue that qualitative researchers should reclaim responsibility for reliability and validity by implementing verification strategies integral and self-correcting during the conduct of inquiry itself. This ensures the attainment of rigor using strategies inherent within each qualitative design, and moves the responsibility for incorporating and maintaining reliability and validity from external reviewers’ judgements to the investigators themselves. Finally, we make a plea for a return to terminology for ensuring rigor that is used by mainstream science
Concept Analysis as Empirical Method
No full textAlthough there is not much support anymore for a clear cut distinction between object-language and meta-language, the view is generally accepted that the outcomes of concept analysis concern knowledge of the structures of language and not knowledge of reality. So it is rather risky to present concept analysis as an empirical method. Rules about language use, however, play an important part in what people do and how they behave and thus inform about specific parts of social reality. The so-called ‘thick concepts’ provide a special access to the way people interact. In this article, several examples of the analysis of ‘thick concepts’ are presented. In some cases, outcomes of concept analysis turn out to be strictly language and cultural bound; in other cases, conceptual knowledge appears to transcend those boundaries. The fact that empirical research is often nothing else than a form of language analysis calls for a tuning of conceptual-analytic and empirical research
Reconciling voices in writing an autoethnographic thesis
No full textThe authors consider writing and supervising an autoethnographic thesis as a process of reconciling voices while finding one’s own academic and personal voice. They draw from notions of polyphony to speak about how we negotiated with different voices (the voices of experts, research participants, personal affiliations, those used in our supervisory discussions) our way forward in the supervisory relationship, as well as in the thesis itself. They invite readers to draw their own meanings from these negotiations as they can relate to supervisory relationships and the writing of academic theses
Interviewing the Interpretive Researcher: A Method for Addressing the Crises of Representation, Legitimation, and Praxis
No full textIn this article the authors outline five types of debriefing and introduce a new type of debriefing, namely, that of debriefing the interpretive researcher. Next they present eight main areas accompanied by example questions to guide the interviewer when debriefing the researcher. They also present five authenticity criteria developed by Guba and Lincoln (1989) and include possible interview questions to document the degree to which the researcher has met these criteria. Finally, using Miles and Huberman’s (1994) framework, they illustrate how displays such as matrices can be used to collect, analyze, and interpret debriefing interview data as well as leave an audit trail