Читать книгу Practitioner's Guide to Using Research for Evidence-Informed Practice - Allen Rubin - Страница 57

Qualitative studies tend to employ flexible designs and subjective methods – often with small samples of research participants – in seeking to generate tentative new insights, deep understandings, and theoretically rich observations. In contrast, quantitative studies put more emphasis on producing precise and objective statistical findings that can be generalized to populations or on designs with logical arrangements that are geared to testing hypotheses about whether predicted causes really produce predicted effects. Some studies combine qualitative and quantitative methods, and thus are called mixed-method studies.

Some scholars who favor qualitative inquiry misperceive EIP as devaluing qualitative research. Again, that misperception is understandable in light of the predominant attention given to causal questions about intervention effectiveness in the EIP literature, and the preeminence of experiments as the “gold standard” for sorting out whether an intervention or some other explanation is really the cause of a particular outcome. That misperception is also understandable because when the EIP literature does use the term evidentiary hierarchy or research hierarchy it is almost always in connection with EIP questions concerned with verifying whether it is really an intervention – and not something else – that is the most plausible cause of a particular outcome. Although the leading texts and articles on the EIP process clearly acknowledge the value of qualitative studies, when they use the term hierarchy it always seems to be in connection with causal questions for which experiments provide the best evidence.

A little later in this chapter, we examine why experiments reside so high on the evidentiary hierarchy for answering questions about intervention effectiveness. Right now, however, we reiterate the proposition that more than one research hierarchy is implicit in the EIP process. For some questions – like the earlier one about understanding homeless shelter experiences, for example – we'd put qualitative studies at the top of a research hierarchy and experiments at the bottom.

Countless specific kinds of EIP questions would be applicable to a hierarchy where qualitative studies might reside at the top. We'll just mention two more examples: Are patient-care staff members in nursing homes or state hospitals insensitive, neglectful, or abusive – and if so, in what ways? To answer this question, a qualitative inquiry might involve posing as a resident in such a facility.

A second example might be: How do parents of mentally ill children perceive the way they (the parents) are treated by mental health professionals involved with their child? For example, do they feel blamed for causing or exacerbating the illness (and thus feel more guilt)? Open-ended and in-depth qualitative interviews might be the best way to answer this question. (Administering a questionnaire in a quantitative survey with a large sample of such parents might also help.) We cannot imagine devising an experiment for such a question, and therefore again would envision experiments at the bottom of a hierarchy in which qualitative interviewing (or quantitative surveys) would be at or near the top.