Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 82

There are two major types of measurement in social work research—quantitative and qualitative. With quantitative measurement, you measure each variable either as a category (e.g., male or female) or as a number (e.g., age measured in years, score on the anxiety scale, etc.). When you measure your variables in a qualitative manner, on the other hand, you will normally have words to examine. This would be the case if you have responses to an open-ended question on a survey. For example, you may confront the following question on a questionnaire: “In your own words, how would you describe your feelings about being a parent?” In this case, you put down words on the page. These words will be examined in a qualitative study. Sometimes you make notes from your observations of an environment you are studying. In this case, you are also analyzing words, the words you wrote down.

For quantitative measurement, the researcher decides how to categorize things and wishes for the study subject to respond according to these categories. As a study subject, you may be asked to select one of the following categories that best reflect your opinion about a theme: strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, or strongly disagree. With qualitative measurement, the study subject has the flexibility to determine the words that will characterize his or her thoughts on the theme of the question being posed. Because of this flexibility, the qualitative method of measurement is more often found in exploratory studies.

While you can measure your phenomenon of interest either qualitatively or quantitatively with regard to any of the four types of research, we will use examples in this book of qualitative measurement (i.e., words) for the exploratory research study, and we will examine the other three types with examples of quantitative research (i.e., categories or numbers). The rationale for this decision is that you are more likely to find quantitative measurement in descriptive, explanatory, and evaluative studies and qualitative measurement is more likely to be found in exploratory studies.

Among the various definitions of qualitative research is the one below from the University of Southern California Libraries Research Guides (n.d.):

The word qualitative implies an emphasis on the qualities of entities and on processes and meanings that are not experimentally examined or measured [if measured at all] in terms of quantity, amount, intensity, or frequency. Qualitative researchers stress the socially constructed nature of reality, the intimate relationship between the researcher and what is studied, and the situational constraints that shape inquiry. Such researchers emphasize the value-laden nature of inquiry. They seek answers to questions that stress how social experience is created and given meaning. In contrast, quantitative studies emphasize the measurement and analysis of causal relationships between variables, not processes. Qualitative forms of inquiry are considered by many social and behavioral scientists to be as much a perspective on how to approach investigating a research problem as it is a method.

The qualitative study is more suitable for situations where little is known, so you are not in a good position to develop a study hypothesis and measure variables in a quantitative manner. If there are few theories that guide your understanding of the phenomenon of interest, you will likely choose a qualitative method of measurement. If you are seeking to understand social processes rather than describe or explain reality, you are more likely to select the qualitative method.

The quantitative method of measurement, on the other hand, is more suitable for the testing of a theory or hypothesis, or the careful description of a phenomenon in concrete terms. It is more likely to be used in an evaluative study, which has the purpose of determining if a social work intervention has had the intended effect on the client’s target behavior. In such situations, you will normally have an idea about how to measure variables in a quantitative manner.