Читать книгу Qualitative Dissertation Methodology - Nathan Durdella - Страница 71

In the next chapter, I will discuss with you dissertation methodology as a discrete lens with methodological assumptions, principles, and guidelines. Here, the focus is on how to successfully negotiate a methodological framework that works for your chair and for you. Given that your chair approves dissertation work, the need to present and support your ideas, argue and defend your interests, and ensure an outcome with which you can live is important. While you may not necessarily need to engage in intense debates about what you want or need to do to structure your research design, data sources, data collection and analysis procedures, and discuss your researcher roles, the use of qualitative methodology in dissertations requires a sense of the objections that faculty advisors or instructors may raise and strategies to overcome these objections. These strategies include pragmatic approaches to connect dissertation research to substantive activities of doctoral student work and a general understanding of social science research applied within dissertation contexts. Here are some common areas where dissertation advisors and student advisees may disagree:

 The need to use mixed methods or to include a survey in your qualitative dissertation. I sometimes hear an argument from students in my qualitative methods and action research classes that goes like this: “I need (or have) to do a survey because my chair (or instructor or fill in the blank) said that my study needs one.” Sometimes students seem intent on “doing a survey” themselves; other times, the claim emerges from a discussion with students’ dissertation chairs or previous course instructors. Whatever the source, the rationale for this approach tends to run along similar lines: What counts as empirical research is an experimental or observational survey research design. While such a design may be appealing and an argument about what constitutes empirical research may be attractive, there is little need to adopt an explicitly quantitative research design when a study’s research problem, purpose, and questions all relate to a qualitative research design that meets the standards for a rigorous, systematic empirical investigation in the disciplinary and larger social science research frameworks. In fact, unless your study’s background justifies the use of a survey in a mixed methods design, including one in the study would run counter to conventional approaches in social science research—especially if you use a survey with a small sample size or a sampling technique that is purposeful or to recruit participants for later interviews. What is more, using a survey without justification potentially could confound the study’s results and findings and unnecessarily extend time to complete the dissertation study and degree program.

 The claim that you must use multiple qualitative data collection methods for a “valid” study. Like the need to use survey research methods in a clearly qualitative research design, when students (or faculty advisors) argue that multiple methods must be used in a dissertation study, they generally cite the need to triangulate data. In these instances, I generally ask, Why do you need to triangulate data through methods alone? As we will see in later chapters, we have several strategies to ensure credible, dependable, transferable, and confirmable studies in naturalistic inquiry with a single qualitative data collection procedure. These strategies include adoption of practices to mitigate researcher bias and participant reactivity and the use of multiple approaches to triangulate data by data source (e.g., persons, processes, events, documents), data type (e.g., textual, numeric, audio, video), and data collection procedure (e.g., personal interviews, group interviews, observations, critical incident reports, etc.). Here, avoid the use of extra steps in data collection, steps that can have a ripple effect on data analysis and interpretation and can add time on events in the context of the study.

 The insistence that more than one research case and/or data collection site be included in your study. Along similar lines as the previous argument (which all seem to be logically connected), student advisees or faculty colleagues sometimes share that students need to work with multiple sites in a dissertation study—irrespective of the research problem, purpose, or questions. Generally speaking, if a study’s research problem identifies a need for a comparative approach to explore or understand a phenomenon or a group across institutional or organizational contexts, then a multisite design would be appropriate. By contrast, to include more than one site in a study without justification makes little sense in qualitative research methodology and may delay research progress if issues with access and permissions arise. What is more, the selection of sites without the use of a standard purposeful sampling strategy or strategies adds to the mess of a multisite study that appears to require a single site only. Why messy? When students include more than one site in a study without tying the decision directly to the background, they risk running into problems with data access and permissions and not maintaining a comparative lens throughout the data analytical and interpretive phases of the study.

 The notion that case studies are the best approach to conducting qualitative studies in applied or professional fields. While generally uncommon, I have heard this argument from some colleagues. In fact, these colleagues contend that students in applied fields—like education, social work, urban planning, or public health—may not have the requisite skills to design and conduct a full ethnographic study, for example. In addition, they argue that students in these programs tend to have time, resource, and career restraints that prevent them from traveling and/or entering the field for a year or more to conduct an ethnography. Indeed, doctoral students who work full time or have career and/or family obligations may be limited in what they can do in the field. However, the fact that they cannot complete all of the activities within the standard length of time does not mean that these students cannot adopt or borrow principles of qualitative research traditions such as ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory, or narrative inquiry. In later chapters, we will discuss strategies to scale methods and procedural steps in the context of data collection and analysis in these traditions. If a dissertation study’s research problem, purpose, and questions support the use of a research tradition and a student’s interest in using such a tradition is strong then this is an appropriate approach. Doing so generally enhances a study’s results and findings, usually brings more meaning to research activities, and connects students to a broader community of researchers connected to the tradition.