Qualitative Research Methods

The Qualitative Research Paradigm

The use of qualitative methods has a rich history in the social sciences, health sciences, and humanities. In the field of education, many research problems are best addressed by qualitative approaches, so the use of qualitative methods is very much the norm. In educational psychology, case studies, interviews, and other techniques have been used recently to explore a range of research topics. Although Gary Shank noted in 1994 that qualitative research had “made very little headway” (p. 340) in educational psychology at the time, the rise in the number of qualitative projects over the past decade points to a positive shift toward including more qualitative approaches. The rise of qualitative methods in the field of psychology itself, as noted in Sean Kidd's review of core journals, also points to the value of using qualitative approaches to investigate problems in disciplines that have been focused traditionally on quantitatively oriented research practices.

Research of high quality, regardless of paradigm, demands that appropriate methods are used to address the research problem at hand. To select appropriate methods, researchers must first understand the types of data they will obtain with each approach. To assess student satisfaction with in-school counseling, for example, a researcher should start by asking, “What do I want to know?” and “What method will allow me to [Page 828]address this question?” Unfortunately, new scholars (or those unfamiliar with the intent of qualitative methods) often make the mistake of starting a project by saying, “I want to use an online questionnaire” or “I want to design an experiment,” even when that method may not be the best one to provide data for a particular research problem. Understanding the intended goals of qualitative research is essential to selecting appropriate methods and to assessing the results.

Qualitative methods are best for addressing many of the “why” questions that education researchers have in mind when they develop their projects. Whereas quantitative approaches are appropriate for examining “who” has engaged in a behavior or “what” has happened (e.g., How many students approached school counselors for help last year? For what types of problems did they seek help?), and whereas experiments can test particular interventions, these techniques are not designed to explain why certain behaviors occur. Quantitative approaches are best used to document characteristics of the world around us, that is, what we see and what the implications are when we test hypotheses related to specific phenomena. As Ted Palys and Chris Atchison note in their text, Research Decisions, quantitative researchers prefer the deductive method, whereby a researcher deduces a hypothesis from a theory, gathers data to test the hypothesis, and then revises (or discards) the theory or looks for another situation in which to test the theory again; here, the “true experiment” is the method of choice, as this allows the effects of certain variables to be assessed while all other influences are held constant. Qualitative approaches, on the other hand, are typically used to explore new phenomena and to capture individuals' thoughts, feelings, or interpretations of meaning and process. Many qualitative texts (e.g., David Silverman's book, Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook), provide an overview of the preferences of qualitative researchers: to gather qualitative data that are naturally occurring, to explore meanings rather than behaviors, to reject the natural science model, and to craft studies that are inductive and hypothesis generating rather than ones that involve hypothesis testing.

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