Second, to aid your understanding of the relevancy of broader issues of methodology to your own research, particularly at the research design stage, Box 3.2 (page 62) sets out some questions to illustrate the distinctions and similarities between key research paradigms. These questions should cause you to reflect on some of the methodological issues associated with the design, conduct and knowledge generation implicit in your own research.
Families
Research is a systematic investigation to find answers to a problem.
Research in professional social science areas, like research in other sub-jects, has generally followed the traditional objective scientific method.
Since the 1960s, however, a strong move towards a more qualitative, nat-uralistic and subjective approach has left social scientists divided between two competing methods: the scientific empirical tradition, and the natur-alistic phenomenological mode. In the scientific method, quantitative
Box 3.2 Thinking methodologically about research design
• What are the main purposes of your research? For example, are you trying to change injustices in the world, or are you trying to understand how social reality is perceived through the perspectives of the researched?
• What is your role in the research? For example, are you an ‘expert’ or a change agent?
• What is the nature of knowledge? For example, do you believe that there are facts or laws that can be known, or is knowledge informed historically through insights that occur from time to time and replace ignorance and misapprehensions?
• What are the criteria that you are bringing to judge the quality of your research? For example, should the research be objective and generalizable, or should it contribute to a fundamental change in social life?
• Do you think your values should affect your research?
• What is the place of ethics in your research? For example, do you consider it sufficient to abide by a code of professional ethics, or should the way the research is conducted closely match your own ethical frameworks?
• What ‘voice’ do you adopt (or are you encouraged to adopt) when writing a research report? For example, do you write as a disinterested scientist, a transformative intellectual or a passionate participant?
• What do you (and your teachers, managers and/or colleagues) think are the essential issues that you need research training in? For example, should you be trained primarily in technical knowledge about measurement, design and quantitative methods, in this and qualitative approaches, or do you need to be resocialized away from your existing assumptions about the nature of research?
• Can you accommodate several methodologies in your research?
• Who are the audience for your research? For example, are you hoping to persuade government administrators, funders and policy committees, feminists and Marxists or your colleagues and fellow researchers?
(Adapted from Guba and Lincoln 2005)
research methods are employed in an attempt to establish general laws or principles. Such a scientific approach is often termed nomothetic and assumes social reality is objective and external to the individual. The nat-uralistic approach to research emphasizes the importance of the subjective experience of individuals, with a focus on qualitative analysis. Social real-ity is regarded as a creation of individual consciousness, with meaning and the evaluation of events seen as a personal and subjective construc-tion. Such a focus on the individual case rather than general law-making is termed an ideographic approach.
(Burns 2000: 3) As the above quotation indicates, researchers are adept at classifying them-selves and their peers into two groups: us and them. In this sub-section we will consider two alternative research dichotomies: qualitative/quantitative and deskwork/fieldwork. The first of these distinctions has been the subject of much debate. The second distinction is much more pragmatic, and hence less debated, and has to do with the individual researcher’s preferences and opportunities for going out to do their research (fieldwork) or staying in their office, library or laboratory (deskwork).
Box 3.3 Research families, approaches and techniques
Research families
• Quantitative or Qualitative
• Deskwork or Fieldwork Research approaches
• Action Research
• Case Studies
• Experiments
• Surveys
Research techniques
• Documents
• Interviews
• Observations
• Questionnaires
Qualitative or quantitative?
Quantitative research is empirical research where the data are in the form of numbers. Qualitative research is empirical research where the data are not in the form of numbers.
(Punch 2005: 3) Quantitative research tends to involve relatively large-scale and representa-tive sets of data, and is often, falsely in our view, presented or perceived as being about the gathering of ‘facts’. Qualitative research, on the other hand, is concerned with collecting and analysing information in as many forms, chiefly non-numeric, as possible. It tends to focus on exploring, in as much detail as possible, smaller numbers of instances or examples which are seen as being interesting or illuminating, and aims to achieve ‘depth’ rather than
‘breadth’.
There has been widespread debate in recent years within many of the social sciences regarding the relative merits of quantitative and qualitative strategies for research. The positions taken by individual researchers vary considerably, from those who see the two strategies as entirely separate and based on alter-native views of the world, to those who are happy to mix these strategies within their research projects. Because quantitative strategies have been seen as more scientific or ‘objective’, qualitative researchers have felt the need to argue their case strongly. Qualitative research has become increasingly popu-lar. The continuing debate over its relative merits can be seen more broadly as being about the status and politics of different kinds of research.
How distinctive are qualitative and quantitative forms of research? On first consideration, the use of questionnaires as a research technique might be seen as a quantitative strategy, whereas interviews and observations might be thought of as qualitative techniques. In practice, however, it is often more complicated than that. Thus, interviews may be structured and analysed in a quantitative manner, as when numeric data is collected or when non-numeric answers are categorized and coded in numeric form. Similarly, surveys may allow for open-ended responses and lead to the in-depth study of individual cases.
Box 3.4 sets out the perceived differences between the qualitative and quan-titative research families, while Box 3.5 sets out their similarities.
Fieldwork or deskwork?
The distinction between deskwork and fieldwork offers an alternative way of thinking about basic research strategies.
Fieldwork refers to the process of going out to collect research data. Such data may be described as original or empirical, and cannot be accessed without the researcher engaging in some kind of expedition. It might, for example, involve visiting an institution to interview members of staff, or standing on a
street corner administering questionnaires to passers-by, or sitting in on a meeting to observe what takes place. In some disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, fieldwork assumes particular importance.
Deskwork, on the other hand, consists of those research processes which do not necessitate going into the field. It consists, literally, of those things which can be done while sitting at a desk. These may include, for example, the administration, collection and analysis of postal surveys, the analysis of data collected by others, certain kinds of experimental or laboratory work, litera-ture searches in the library, research using the Internet, and, of course, writing.
Box 3.4 The differences between qualitative and quantitative research
Qualitative paradigms Quantitative paradigms
• Concerned with understanding behaviour from actors’ own frames of reference
• Seeks the facts/causes of social phenomena
• Naturalistic and uncontrolled observation
• Obtrusive and controlled measurement
• Subjective • Objective
• Close to the data: the ‘insider’
perspective
• Removed from the data: the ‘outsider’
perspective
• Grounded, discovery oriented, explora-tory, expansionist, descriptive, inductive
• Ungrounded, verification oriented, reductionist, hypothetico-deductive
• Process-oriented • Outcome-oriented
• Valid: real, rich, deep data • Reliable: hard and replicable data
• Ungeneralizable: single case studies • Generalizable: multiple case studies
• Holistic • Particularistic
• Assumes a dynamic reality • Assumes a stable reality
(Adapted from Oakley 1999: 156)
Box 3.5 The similarities between qualitative and quantitative research
• While quantitative research may be mostly used for testing theory, it can also be used for exploring an area and generating hypotheses and theory.
• Similarly, qualitative research can be used for testing hypotheses and theories, even though it is mostly used for theory generation.
• Qualitative data often includes quantification (e.g. statements such as more than, less than, most, as well as specific numbers).
• Quantitative approaches (e.g. large-scale surveys) can collect qualitative (non-numeric) data through open-ended questions.
• The underlying philosophical positions are not necessarily as distinct as the stereotypes suggest.
As in the case of the qualitative–quantitative divide, the fieldwork–deskwork distinction is also something of a false dichotomy, since most, though not all, research projects will make use of both sets of approaches. No matter how much time a researcher spends in the field, it is difficult to avoid some deskwork, even if this only consists of writing up results. Similarly, though it is possible to carry out useful research without ever leaving an office environment, information is usually still being accessed somehow.
The distinction between fieldwork and deskwork is, obviously, also not clear cut. It is debatable, for example, into which category one would place tele-phone or email interviews, which can be conducted at the desk but effectively take the researcher, at least electronically, into the field. And how would you categorize using your laptop while out in the field collecting data? The devel-opment of information and communication technologies, in particular the growth of the Internet, is undoubtedly blurring the fieldwork/deskwork distinction.
From the perspective of practice, however, this distinction may be more significant to researchers than that between qualitative and quantitative methods. An appreciation of it may help you in planning and implementing your research project. Your opportunities and preference for either fieldwork or deskwork – and you will most likely prefer one or the other – may help you in choosing, where this is possible, not just the topic of your research but the kinds of methods you use.
Approaches
Box 3.3 identified four basic approaches to, or designs for, research in the social sciences: action research, case studies, experiments and surveys. These are dis-cussed individually in more detail in the following four sections of this chapter.
It should be said at once that this classification is not meant to be either definitive or exclusive. It simply recognizes the most common approaches used by those carrying out small-scale research projects. Individual projects may, of course – as the examples given later in this chapter illustrate – involve more than one of these approaches: thus, a case study may be carried out through action research, while particular projects may involve both experiments and surveys.
Techniques
Box 3.3 also identified four basic social science research techniques: the study of documents, interviews, observations or questionnaires. These techniques are considered in more detail in Chapter 6, where the focus is on Collecting data.
Linking families, approaches and techniques
It should be stressed that the various families, approaches and techniques identified here do not map simply on to each other. Thus, it is possible to use