Research Supplement: Qualitative Research
Rose M. Spielman; Kathryn Dumper; William Jenkins; Arlene Lacombe; Marilyn Lovett; Marion Perlmutter; and Alison Heinhold Melley
Qualitative Research
There are pros and cons to all of the various types of research design in Psychology. We have already seen that experiments allow us to study cause and effect. However, correlational and quasi-experimental research also have value, because they allow us to study topics we cannot experimentally manipulate (these might include whether people have a large or small income; whether they identify as male, female, non-binary, trans, etc.). However, quantitative methods often reduce complex psychological phenomena to simple processes studied in artificial settings and so it is sometimes difficult to reconcile this with how people behave, think, and feel in real world settings. Qualitative research offers the potential for researchers to contextualize their findings within a broader social, cultural, and historical context, and is gaining more popularity as an alternative methodology in the field of psychology. While quantitative research focuses on generating specific answers to research questions using numbers and statistics, qualitative research aims to provide detailed descriptions of human behavior that help to understand the personal experiences of the research participants.
Qualitative research is not hypothesis driven, and questions tend to be more general, with the goal of understanding what people feel or understand about certain situations in their lives. For example, counseling psychologist, Dr. Aisha Holder and colleagues wanted to understand how successful Black women in senior management positions in corporate America experienced and coped with racism in the work place. They wanted to provide rich, detailed, and contextualized descriptions and so they conducted a qualitative research study where they asked ten participants about their lived experiences (Holder et al. 2015).
Methods of Data Collection
The ways that psychological data is collected varies a lot across studies, and methods used in qualitative studies sometimes overlap with those used in quantitative studies (interviews, archival data, and surveys). However, the data generated in qualitative studies are more complex, because they do not need to be represented by numerical values. Thus, questions are typically more open-ended. For example, in her qualitative research study, psychologist, Luo Lu from Taiwan asked Chinese students to write an essay in response to the prompt: What is happiness? (Lu, 2008). As you can imagine, this generates a lot more data than simply asking people to rate how happy they feel on a numerical scale (Dunn et al., 2008). Qualitative studies are also inherently flexible in their design, researchers frequently adapt their methods and questions in response to new findings as they emerge in the study.
Interviews
One of the most common ways to gather data in qualitative