Researching Society and Culture

1. Researching Society and Culture Week 10: Mixing methods: Sociological imagination or epistemological heresy?

2. Lecture outline • Differences between qualitative and quantitative methods: a review • Breaking down the quantitative/qualitative divide • Mixed methods: rationales and practices • Mixed methods: research examples (William Julius Wilson) • Conclusions

3. Differences between qualitative and quantitative research strategies Bryman, 2008, Social Research Methods, p. 22

4. Differences between qualitative and quantitative research methods Quantitative methods are generally seen as ideally suited to: • Questions to which the answers are measurable/ quantifiable e.g. ‘How often do you make use of service x: every day, once a month, once a year, never’ ? • Questions where only absolute guarantees of anonymity would persuade respondents to answer honestly e.g. questions about income, illegal/’deviant’ activities, voting etc. • When you want to be able to say something about ‘the whole population’. Qualitative methods are seen as preferable when: • You are interpreting views, opinions, ideas • Context is important • Research is with vulnerable or ‘hard to reach’ groups • Research is into complex or dynamic social processes

5. Breaking down the quantitative/qualitative divide • Don’t exaggerate differences: • Qualitative research sometimes exhibits features that are normally associated with positivism: • e.g. Adler and Adler 1987: qualitative study exploring whether participation in athletics in higher education in the USA is associated with higher or lower levels of academic achievement (i.e. tested hypothesis; ‘objectivist’ overtones) http://www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/Volume21/QSR_8_1_Adler_Adler.pdf • Quantitative research sometimes incorporates interpretivist stance: • e.g. Westergaard et al (1989) After Redundancy: quantitative study that explored how people who were made redundant responded to their experience in terms of their job-search methods, their inclination to find jobs, and their political attitudes (i.e. interpretivist overtones)

6. Mixing our methods: An epistemological faux pas? • ‘Mixed methods’ (or ‘multi-method’): generally refers to research strategies that mix qualitative and quantitative methods (although some may use the term more loosely to refer to other ‘mixtures’ of methods). • Epistemological and methodological debates are routinely set up around the discussion of supposedly mutually exclusive (quantitative and qualitative) approaches. • The argument against mixed methods tends to be based on one or both of two kinds of argument: • the idea that research methods carry epistemological commitments, and • the idea that quantitative and qualitative research are separate paradigms (i.e. incommensurable, or incompatible, in epistemological terms).

7. Arguments for mixed methods • The connections between epistemology and ontologyand research methods are not deterministic. • Research methods as techniques of data collection or analysis can be viewed from a pragmatic epistemological point of view, concerned with what is useful for research purposes rather than the nature of reality. • Strong objections to quantitative research amongst feminist researchers (e.g. the silencing of women’s voices, controlling variables as a ‘masculine’ approach) have softened in recent years (e.g. recognizing that quantitative methods can be useful for highlighting statistics of gender discrimination ). • BUT: mixed-method research is not intrinsically superior to mono-method research: like any other method it must be appropriate to the research questions, contextand design.

8. Mixed methods: approaches Different methods can be used either in parallel or sequentially and either discretely or in an integrated fashion to important effect. • Triangulation (also known as convergent findings) • use quantitative and qualitative methods to address the same research question, to ensure greater certainty of results • Additional coverage • Assigns different strengths of different methods to different goals within the overall project • Example: parallel use of methods for discrete purposes • Complementary assistance • Link methods together so that one methods helps the other • Example: sequential use of methods for pilot studies

9. Triangulation of data • Triangulation is a process of checking the inferences drawn from one set of data sources by collecting data from others. • Within an ethnographic approach you might want to check your own observations of a situation/event against how it is described to you in interview. • Alternatively you might use a diary entry or a set of family photos to confirm or contest something said in conversation. • This process of triangulation in ethnographic work is a way of improving validity [countering the view that the researcher gets a very ‘partial’ understanding of the social world]. But this comes about because it allows you to first capture differences and contradictions and work through them to try and understand the whole.

10. Additional coverage with parallel use of methods • Triangulation is an example of the parallel use of methods as a check on inference from that data. • However, methods can be used discretely in parallel in order to provide a different kind of data, answering a different question, but helpful to the overall research • It is common for qualitative researchers to employ an element of small-scale survey for the purposes of generating descriptive [but not inferential] statistics, for example. • The dangers in this kind of parallel work is that the data from different sources may simply present different types of information that cannot be easily integrated and thus produce no valuable analytic yield.

11. Complementary assistance with sequential mixed methods • An alternative approach is to use different methods sequentially. • The most common example of this is the recognition by survey researchers that the formulation of questions for questionnaires is benefited by using qualitative research methods – either interview or focus groups – to understand how respondents are likely to interpret questions. The aim of such mixing of methods is to reduce misreporting and cross-cultural confusion and thus the qualitative element is designed to improve the main technique which is quantitative. • Although less common, qualitative specialists may also use quantitative work to identify interesting cases for study, or else to statistically test hypotheses thrown up by ethnographic work.

12. Mixed Methods: Research Examples William Julius Wilson: • When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996) • More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (2009) • Venkatesh criticizes Wilson, his PhD supervisor, in Gang Leader for a Day as a quantitative researcher stuck in his ways. • However, in both books, Wilson attempts to overcome limitations of statistics by including qualitative research methods and analysis.

13. When Work Disappears:The World of the New Urban Poor • Critically examines effects of joblessness on US urban ghettos • Mixed methods: ethnographic observations; open-ended life history interviews; employers’ survey of the Urban Poverty and Family Life Study UPFLS (1987-1988, random survey of 2500 poor and non-poor African-American, Latino and white residents in Chicago’s poor inner-city neighbourhoods, with three sub-samples) • Liberal ideology emphasizes the importance ofstructural social factors(e.g. race, class) to account for the disappearance of work, whereas conservative ideology emphasizes the importance of cultural factors (values, attitudes, habits and styles). • Wilson aims to reconcile structural social factors (race and class; ‘objectivist’) with cultural and social psychological factors (using ‘interpretivism’).

14. More than Just Race:Being Black and Poor in the Inner City • Like Gang Leader for the Day, this book was written with a general readership in mind. • Wilson examines debates on urban poverty (including Venkatesh’s work) and further develops the idea that social structural and cultural factors are linked. • Combines statistical data with policy analysis and cultural discourse analysis, using qualitative techniques of identifying interpretive ‘cultural repertoires’ and collective ‘meaning-making’ (thus engaging fully with both ‘objectivist’/critical realist and ‘interpretivist’ research strategies).

15. Conclusions • Epistemological divides in the social sciences are weakening, but there remains some scepticism about mixing methods. • We have suggested that there are no absolute divisions between deductive and inductive approaches or between statistical/survey [quantitative] and interview/observation based [qualitative] methodological techniques. • These approaches and methods should be viewed as complementary rather than mutually exclusive and we should focus on selecting the most appropriate methods for a particular question and considering how different methods might be integrated (or ‘triangulated’) in the course of investigation. • We should also pay attention to the different ways in which methods can be use discretely or in an integrated fashion in order to maximise the benefits of a mixed method approach.

16. RSC Next term • Focus on real sociological research examples to examine different research methods in relation to substantive issues : • Hannah Jones and Alice Mah will giving the lectures • Topics include: riots, migration, community, disability, class, urban poverty, working lives and globalization, and slums and the informal economy. • Will also be emphasis on developing professional skills • Handout for Term 2 can be downloaded here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/undergrad/current/progsandmods/modules/researchingsocietyandculture/moduleoverview/moduleoutline/