1 / 13

INTRODUCTION TO QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN EDUCATION

INTRODUCTION TO QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN EDUCATION. What counts as Research? - “systematic inquiry that is characterised by a certain amount of rigour and governed by sets of principles and guidelines for procedures”.

hiero
Download Presentation

INTRODUCTION TO QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN EDUCATION

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. INTRODUCTION TO QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN EDUCATION • What counts as Research? • - “systematic inquiry that is characterised by a certain amount of rigour and governed by sets of principles and guidelines for procedures”. • a collection and analysis of information on the world of education in order to understand and explain it better. • A systematic approach to the collection of information – develop a respect for evidence • Lead to more critically informed opinions • Improve the ability of teachers to contribute to discussions on school policy in a more critical and effective manner.

  2. Research – classified as ‘pure’, ‘basic’, ‘applied’ or ‘action’. • ‘Pure’ to advance knowledge within a particular academic discipline. • ‘Applied’ focuses attention on some issues; seeks generalisations from a large number of cases • ‘Action’ looks into a particular issue of current concern , undertaken by those directly involved - seeking to implement change in a specific situation. • ‘Evaluation’ on the other hand is a systematic study of a particular programme or set of events over a period of time to assess effectiveness. • Our purpose: to look at qualitative techniques/methodology

  3. For any research process we would have to look at 4 questions: • What methods do we propose to use? • What methodology governs our choice and use of methods? • What theoretical perspective lies behind the methodology in question? • What epistemology informs this theoretical perspective? • Methods: procedures and techniques to gather and analyse data • Methodology: strategy, plan of action, process or design behind the choice of methods for particular outcomes • Theoretical perspective: philosophical stance informing the methodology, providing the context & grounding its logic and criteria • Epistemology: theory of knowledge embedded in the theoretical perspective and methodology.

  4. Traditional school of educational research – based on scientific positivism postulates that: • * there is truth to find; • * facts should be collected by methods which are theory neutral • * efforts should be made to eliminate the effect of the observer • * there are universal laws and observable phenomena • * generalisable causal relationships can be found • * hypotheses should be tested by repeatable experimentation. • Determinism: causes, circumstances • Empiricism: by means of a theory, hypothesis • Parsimony • Generalisability

  5. Five steps in the process of empirical science • 1. experience: the starting point of scientific endeavour. • 2. classification: the formal systematisation of data • 3. quantification: precision of measurement by mathematical means • 4. discovery of relationships: identification and classification of • relationships among phenomena. • 5. approximation of the truth

  6. CRITICISMS OF POSTIVISM AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD: • Science’s mechanistic and reductionist view of nature excludes choice, freedom, individuality and moral responsibility. People interpret their experiences, use them to construct their theories and act upon them. • The findings of positivistic science are trivial and of little consequence – the more tightly restricted, simplified and controlled the variables, the more likely the result is to be pruned, synthetic version of the whole, a constructed play of puppets in a restricted environment. (Cohen & Manion, 1989)

  7. Bassey (1984) identifies two competing aims of educational research: • 1. Educational research should result in generalisations that will coalesce into educational theory. • 2. Educational research should contribute in some way to the improvement of educational practice. • Any research based on large samples (in order to give confidence to its conclusions) is not going to provide useful predictive information to the individual teacher. • (Should we be exploring other methodologies????)

  8. THE ANTI-POSITIVIST SCHOOL AIMS: • * to understand classroom reality as seen by participants • * to demonstrate how such views shape the action • * not to find the ultimate truth, but to make sense of the classroom world. • Qualitative methodology refers to those research strategies such as participant observation, in-depth interviewing , total participation in the activity being investigated, fieldwork etc., which allow the researcher to obtain first hand knowledge about empirical social world in question.

  9. WHAT IS A SOCIAL FACT? • Acc. to Durkheim (1938) it consists of a way of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him. • In the 1930’s and 1940’s the ‘Chicago style’ of participant observation developed where researchers “got their hands dirty in the field” which combined with the work of George Mead to offer the alternative view of symbolic interactionism (See Hitchcock &Hughes pp 28 – 35) • Human beings have a self; they can see themselves reflected in other people’s responses and reactions to them (ibid, p.31) • Each individual aligns their action to that of others. The individual constructs, modifies, weighs up pros and cons in the process of negotiation. This process takes place in a social context.

  10. Individuals negotiate the world by attributing meaning and acting on this basis. • The social action of the individual is constructed by him, it is not a mere release of activity brought about by the play of initiating factors. • We should recognise the reflexive quality of social research: that is we a part of the social world we study. • Read pp 36 -38 of Hitchcock & Hughes. • Chapter 1 of Cohen, Manion & Morrison

  11. Some Research Journals in Education

  12. Assignments Outline • Select a research article in your area of study/area of research. • Identify the problem area • What are the research questions/hypotheses • How complete is the Literature Review? Do you think it is current or dated? Why? • Discuss the methodologies used, are they adequate in answering the research questions? • How are the results analysed? Do you feel that the researcher has answered the questions well? What has been left out? • Conclusions: are they relevant, accurate? Can the conclusions be applied to other similar situations? • What are the general strengths and weaknesses of the article? • How would you have tackled the problems in this study? • Does the study make a significant contribution to the corpus of knowledge in the area of specialisation?

More Related