Foundations of Qualitative Research for Education

Foundations of Qualitative Research for Education, a man and woman sat in the upper level of a packed athletic stadium watching a big game of what was to be a winning season for an up-and-coming division I men’s collegiate bas- ketball team. Although it was difficult to distinguish…

Foundations of Qualitative Research for Education

Foundations of Qualitative Research for Education, a man and woman sat in the upper level of a packed athletic stadium watching a big game of what was to be a winning season for an up-and-coming division I men’s collegiate bas- ketball team. Although it was difficult to distinguish them from the other enthusiastic and boisterous spectators, they were researchers engaged in a study of the home team-the socialization and education of male college athletes. Attending games was a minor part of their research work. They also hung out with and interviewed players, athletic staff, boosters, athletes’ women friends, media personnel, and professors. In addition, they col- lected press reports and other written materials related to the team and players. They gained access to the locker room, the dormitories, and other places players spent their time. They followed several groups of players through their college years and beyond. The researchers maintained detailed written notes of what they observed and heard and conducted tape-recorded interviews, which they transcribed. The result was a book that explored topics such as the relationship between athletics and academics, social class, ethnicity, and players’ friendship and achievement, players’ views of their college experi- ence, and the social organization of collegiate athletics (Adler & Adler, 1991).

In another part of the United States, a researcher regularly visited a multicultural public elementary school where she spent long periods of time observing and carefully listening to boys and girls go about their day-to-day activities, in the classroom, on the playground, in the gym, and in the lunch room, as well as in less supervised places. She was studying how chil- dren experience gender in school. The book that resulted from her work is rich in detail about the “gender play” among groups of children. She discusses and describes gender-related ac- tivities such as “chase and kiss,” “cooties,” “goin’ with,” and teasing (Thorne, 1993).

A researcher was concerned about how African American boys came to be seen as “bad.” She spent three years doing fieldwork in “Rosa Parks” Elementary School, locat- ed in a West Coast city, observing the students’ and teachers’ relationships during the school day, and interviewing teachers, students, administrators, and parents. She became interested in how the punishment practices the school employed helped to shape the boys’ reputations as “bad boys.”

She concluded that the school’s labeling and punish- ment practices pushed the students toward the criminal justice system rather than toward Bonne with Purdue education of paying jobs Herod contrasts how schools regulate swing pople with the lows’ na pithanoring the sometimes troubles whether the others bows the foursome consequences of the school’s social construction of the boys as fuure criminals (Ferguson, 2001), cher regularly visited a city elementary school, inter In a medium size city, a researcher

Viewing and observing female teachers. She was studying her informants’ perspectives abun they work, what they valued and criticized about their occupation, and how these Views were manifested in their speech and After she completed her work in the whosh, she road harves and leners by female teachers archived in libraries. In addition, ane esamined published Wional accounts of teaching and other related material. In the hock she publislied, she explored how teachers think about their occupation and how their thinking is related briniages of teachers available in popular culture (Biklen, 1995),

There are examples of people conducting qualitative research for education. They ashaast nether the variety of strategies nor the range of topics. Other qualitative research- one look at what postcards tell about social history (Bogdan, 1988); explore zero-toler auce policies for controlling violence in schools (Casella, 2001); interview teenage girls about sexuality (Toliman, 2002); do heldwork to compare the experiences of white and Latina high school gris (Benie, 2003); interview students, do participant observation, and analyse weitten and popular cultural texts about the prom (Best, 2000). The educa tional experiences of people of all ages (as well as material that expands our knowledge of these experiences), in schools as well as out, can be the subject matter. Qualitative re search for education takes many forums and is conducted in many settings.

Although researchers in anthropology and sociology have used the approach de seribest in this book for a century, the term qualitative research was not used in the social sciences until the late 1960s. We use qualitative research as an umbrella term to refer to several research strategies that share certain characteristics. The data collected have been termed soll, that is, rich in description of people, places, and conversations, and not easily handled by statistical procedures, Research questions are not framed by operationalizing variables, rather, they are formulated to investigate topics in all their complexity, in context.

While people conducting qualitative research develop a focus as they collect data, they do not approach the research with specific questions to answer or hypotheses to test. They also are concerned with understanding behavior from the informant’s own frame of reference, External causes are of secondary importance. They tend to collect their data through sustained contact with people in settings where subjects normally spend their time classrooms, cafeterias, teachers’ lounges, dormitories, street corners.

The best-known representatives of qualitative research studies and those that most embody the characteristics we just touched on are those that employ the techniques of participant observation and in-depth interviewing. The man and woman watching the basketball team and the researcher at “Rosa Parks” Elementary School were engaged in participant observation. The researcher enters the world of the people he or she plans to study, gets to know them and earns their trust, and systematically keeps a detailed written record of what is heard and observed. This material is supplemented by other data such as school memos and records, newspaper articles, and photographs.

In addition to participant observation and archival research, the study of female teachers used in-depth interviewing. Sometimes termed “unstructured” (Maccoby & Maccoby, 1954), or “open-ended” (Jahoda, Deutsch, & Cook, 1951), “nondirective  Meltzer & Petras, 1970), or “flexibly structured” (Whyte, 1979), the researcher is bent on understanding, in considerable detail, how people such as teachers, principals, and students think and how they came to develop the perspectives they hold. This goal often leads the researcher to spend considerable time with informants in their own environs, asking open- ended questions such as “What is a typical day like for you?” or “What do you like best about your work?” and recording their responses. The open-ended nature of the approach allows the informants to answer from their own frame of reference rather than from one structured by prearranged questions. In this type of interviewing, questionnaires are not used; while loosely structured interview guides may sometimes be employed, most often the researcher works at getting the informants to freely express their thoughts around particular topics.

Because of the detail sought, most studies have small samples. In some studies, the researcher draws an in-depth portrait of only one subject. When the intent is to capture one person’s interpretation of his or her life, the study is called a life history. We use the phrase qualitative research, but others use different terms and conceptual-ize the brand of research we present in this book slightly differently. Anthropologists have often used the term fieldwork to refer to the kind of research we are describing (see Junker, 1960). Its use derives from the fact that data tend to be collected in the field as opposed to laboratories or other researcher-controlled situations. In education, qualitative research is frequently called naturalistie because the researcher frequents places where the events he or she is interested in naturally occur. And the data are gathered by people engaging in natural behavior: talking, visiting, looking, eating, and so on (Guba, 1978). The term ethnographic is applied to the approach as well. While some use it in a formal sense to refer to a particular type of qualitative research, one in which most anthropologists engage and which is directed at describing culture, it is also used more generally sometimes synonymously with qualitative research as we are defining it (Goetz & LeCompte, 1984).

Other phrases are associated with qualitative research. They include symbolic interactionist, inner perspective, the Chicago School, phenomenological, case study,  interpretive, ethnomethodological, ecological, and descriptive. The exact use and defi-nition of these terms, as well as words like fieldwork and qualitative research, vary from user to user and from time to time. We do not mean to suggest that they all mean the same thing, nor to imply that some do not have very exact meanings when used by particular people who belong to particular research traditions (Jacob, 1987; Tesch, 1990; Lancy, 1993; Smith, 1992; Wolcott, 1992).

We prefer to use the term qualitative research to in- clude the range of strategies that we call “qualitative,” We will clarify some of the phras-es we have just mentioned as we proceed with our discussion. At this point we have merely introduced our subject matter. Next we discuss in more detail the characteristics of qualitative research. Then, before we explain its theo- retical underpinnings, we place our subject in historical context. Reference : ( (QUALITATIVE RESEARCH for EDUCATION: An Introduction to Theories and Methods

Robert C. Bogdan | Sari Knopp Biklen, 5th edition Pearson, 2018).