Qualitative Research#
I have been waiting for this course since the beginning of my PhD journey. Stories are one of the oldest ways humans have used to educate each other, and I see qualitative research as a way of gathering stories to find underlying common themes. I appreciate the quantitative research’s ability to give trends across groups of people and show us that something is happening, but do not feel it tells enough of the story to get to the actual root of what is happening, or why it is happening. Think of it like soft systems analysis: You can use reasoning for part of your analysis, but you do not have all the information until you have talked to all the stakeholders in order to understand not just what their perspective is, but why they have it so you can best meet everybody’s needs in a proposed solution.
The Stories#
Returning to the idea of stories: Stories permeate human experience. They sell us products, they teach us lessons, they show us we are not alone in our experiences and allow us to gather in community. Examining the stories allows researchers to see the trends across time, across place, or both. Think of Google Trends. We can use that tool to see the change in use of search terms across time, but we can’t see why it’s happening unless we dig in and look at the context those searches have driving them. Google Trends. Use this example:
We can see this trend has a dip consistently over the past week. I am embedded in the community most likely to search this term. I instinctually understand why it owuld be likely that there are 0 searches at 2 am for “Science of reading.” People likely to search for this term are likely to be affiliated with k-12 education, and educators typically work during the daytime. They are likley asleep at 2 am.
The graph is fun, but just a bit of knowledge about the context where this graph comes from helps understand it so much better.