May 14, 2008
SITBB Vault: Questions for Dummies: Basics of GTM
A re-post--especially for The Lonely Dissertator. (And for all the quantitatively trained students who have confided to me in whispered tones that they long to learn more about qualitative research!)
Now, I'm not saying you're a dummy--and I am certainly not claiming to not be a dummy myself about qualitative research (that is, the hypothetical book to the right could just as well be by as for a "dummy"). But I think I may have some small nuggets of non-obvious knowledge to pass along as I continue to develop my expertise in one method of qualitative research, Grounded Theory Methods (GTM).
So, I present here one such nugget. Enjoy!
The Importance of Questions in Grounded Theory Methods (GTM)
Definitely NOT a book about GTM "by dummies" is Strauss & Corbin's Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. These authors--one (Strauss) was a co-founder of the Grounded Theory method--say that asking questions is one of the "two operations [that] are absolutely essential for the development of theory" using the method. There may be no dumb questions in the classroom, but there are questions in GTM that are, if not "dumb," better than others.
What are good questions in GTM? According to Strauss & Corbin,
A good question is one that leads the researcher to answers that serve the developing theoretical formulation. Many questions can be asked, and just as many can lead the researcher down a subsidiary path, one that might be interesting but not in service of the evolving theory (p. 76, emphasis added).
The authors go on to describe their suggestions for four different types of questions. The first two of these are "sensitizing questions" that "tune the researcher into what the data might be indicating," and "theoretical questions" that "help the researcher to see process, variation, and ... to make connections among concepts" (p. 77). (The other two types I'll not discuss: practical/structural and guiding questions.)
Did you get that? Unless you've had your nose in qualitative research books non-stop for almost a year like I have, probably not. I often feel like I did not start "getting" GTM until I drank the methodological kool-aid. A lot of this stuff does sound kind of cult-ish in nature, like if you do not understand you just haven't properly given over your mind and spirit to The Method. But actually, it is not so difficult.
For example, questions of the first kind, sensitizing, include:
- What is going on here (e.g., issues, problems, concerns)?
- Who are the actors involved?
- How do they define the situation?
- What is its meaning for them?
- Are their definitions and meanings the same or different?
And examples of the second kind of questions include:
- What is the relationship of one concept to another?
- What would happen if...?
- How do events and actions change over time?
- What are the larger structural issues here, and how do these events play into or affect what I am seeing or hearing?
Hypothesis vs. Question: Null
One of the first things learned by students of qualitative research is that while quantitative research speaks of research hypotheses, qualitative research speaks of research questions. (The extent to which that is true or not can be debated--for example, some quantitative research is more exploratory in nature and deals in research questions while some qualitative work is more confirmatory in nature and deals in explicit hypotheses or more hypothesis-like questions. But that's a digression for another time.)
A staple of much quantitative analysis (especially for those learning it) has been the idea of the "null hypothesis". Again, some disclaimers are in order: there is some fair amount of controversy in research about just what the null hypothesis does/can tell and does/can not tell researchers. Additionally, it is not uncommon for research to make unfounded conclusions about alternative hypotheses based on their statistical rejection or non-rejection of the null. But the idea of the null hypothesis, to me, is a useful metaphor--if nothing else--for the research process: We want with our research to clear away randomness and the meaninglessness in order to be able to see the patterns and the logic.
Thinking about the null hypothesis got me wondering: What would be the equivalent qualitative question to the null hypothesis? What is the question that you, as a researcher, are trying to reject?
One possibility of a "null question" is actually a two-parter, question plus answer: Is there anything of interest going on here? No, there is not. Just as you might try to find statistically significant differences in quantitative scores to disprove such a statement, in qualitative research we might think of analyzing data for qualitatively significant differences in participants' responses to disprove this null Q&A.
The null question may end up being true. It may be that there is nothing patterned or analytically meaningful or otherwise news- or PhD-worthy about anything that any of my participants say, or--if there is--my qualitative skills are too weak to detect them and my dissertation and entire PhD quest has been all for nothing--
OK, that isn't so much a null question as every dissertator's deepest fear. (And that is a topic for another day...)
Posted by perry032 at May 14, 2008 03:48 PM