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Interviews
One of the most flexible and widely used methods for gaining qualitative
information about peoples experiences, views and feelings is the interview.
An interview can be thought of as a guided conversation between a researcher (you) and somebody
from whom you wish to learn something (often referred to as the informant).
The level of structure in an interview can vary, but most commonly interviewers follow a semistructured format. This means that the interviewer will develop a guide to the topics that he or she
wishes to cover in the conversation, and may even write out a number of questions to ask.
However, the interviewer is free to follow different paths of conversation that emerge over the course
of the interview, or to prompt the informant to clarify and expand on certain points. Therefore,
interviews are particularly good tools for gaining detailed information where the research question is
open-ended in terms of the range of possible answers.
Interviews are not particularly well suited for gaining information from large numbers of people.
Interviews are time-consuming, and so careful attention needs to be given to selecting informants
who will have the knowledge or experiences necessary to answer the research question.
See our page: Interviews for Research for more information.
Observations
If a researcher wants to know what people do under certain circumstances, the
most straightforward way to get this information is sometimes simply to watch
them under those circumstances.
Observations can form a part of either quantitative or qualitative research. For instance, if a
researcher wants to determine whether the introduction of a traffic sign makes any difference to the
number of cars slowing down at a dangerous curve, she or he could sit near the curve and count the
number of cars that do and do not slow down. Because the data will be numbers of cars, this is an
example of quantitative observation.
A researcher wanting to know how people react to a billboard advertisement might spend time
watching and describing the reactions of the people. In this case, the data would be descriptive, and
would therefore be qualitative.
There are a number of potential ethical concerns that can arise with an observation study. Do the
people being studied know that they are under observation? Can they give their consent? If some
people are unhappy with being observed, is it possible to remove them from the study while still
carrying out observations of the others around them?
See our page: Observational Research and Secondary Data for more information.
Questionnaires
Documentary Analysis
Documentary analysis involves obtaining data from existing documents without
having to question people through interview, questionnaires or observe their
behaviour. Documentary analysis is the main way that historians obtain data
about their research subjects, but it can also be a valuable tool for contemporary
social scientists.
Documents are tangible materials in which facts or ideas have been recorded. Typically, we think of
items written or produced on paper, such as newspaper articles, Government policy records, leaflets
and minutes of meetings. Items in other media can also be the subject of documentary analysis,
including films, songs, websites and photographs.
Documents can reveal a great deal about the people or organisation that produced them and the
social context in which they emerged.
Some documents are part of the public domain and are freely accessible, whereas other documents
may be classified, confidential or otherwise unavailable to public access. If such documents are
used as data for research, the researcher must come to an agreement with the holder of the
documents about how the contents can and cannot be used and how confidentiality will be
preserved.
See our page: Observational Research and Secondary Data for more information.
For every philosophical underpinning, you will almost certainly be able to find
researchers who support it and those who dont.
Use the arguments for and against expressed in the literature to explain why
you have chosen to use this methodology or why the weaknesses dont matter
here.
This is the point at which to set out your chosen research methods, including their theoretical basis,
and the literature supporting them. You should make clear whether you think the method is tried and
tested or much more experimental, and what kind of reliance you could place on the results. You will
also need to discuss this again in the discussion section.
Your research may even aim to test the research methods, to see if they work in certain
circumstances.
You should conclude by summarising your research methods, the underpinning approach, and what
you see as the key challenges that you will face in your research. Again, these are the areas that
you will want to revisit in your discussion.
Conclusion
Your methodology, and the precise methods that you choose to
use in your research, are crucial to its success.
It is worth spending plenty of time on this section to ensure that you get it right.
As always, draw on the resources available to you, for example by discussing
your plans in detail with your supervisor who may be able to suggest whether
your approach has significant flaws which you could address in some way.