This chapter focuses on “turning the story” from studies and using a different approach to conduct a qualitative study. The author describes Figure 11.1 (p. 270) as encompassing the three main factors of a qualitative study. The combination of the following are components of a qualitative study and can be changed to turn the story: Approach to Inquiry, Research Design, and Assumptions, Worldviews, & Theories .
The author uses the gunman case study in Appendix F as reviewed in Chapter 5 to show us how researchers can turn a study from one type to another type and perform completely different studies. Essentially, the main way for researches to approach telling different stories from one study is by reverting back to the general problem or issue that the study addresses. Refining and revision of the main issue or problem leads to a new study with a different approach.
A Case Study
The initial case study is about campus reaction to a gunman incident where a student tried to shoot a gun at his classmates. After discussing the initial problem of campus violence and explaining the events that happened during the attempted attack, the researchers gathered data with interviews, observations, documents, and audiovisual materials. The layering of themes that came up during the study (ex: denial, fear, safety, campus planning) boiled down to a psychological theme and organizational theme which were addressed in the study.
A Narrative Study
The narrative study that could emerge from the initial case study focuses on the teacher who was present at the time of the attempted attack. He and the student were both African American and the author proposes how the story could be turned into a narrative of the professor. If the researcher wanted to do this, the approach would have been to restory the stories into an account of the gunman that followed a chronology of events. The researcher would have examined life events, or epiphanies, picked out from storied told to him by the professor. The story would have different themes from the original study (ex: race, discrimination, marginality). The study could have taken a plethora of routes depending on which story the researcher wanted to get.
A Phenomenology Study
Narrative study involves studying a single individual as in a biography but on the other hand a phenomenology study involves studying several individual students and examines a psychological phenomenology. The phenomenon that you are study could involve studying human experiences and feelings such as fear. One can engage in extensive interviews and use the steps described in Moustakes (1994) to analyze them. While writing the results you can include a description of your own experiences and then proceed to describe the significant statements of the people that you interviewed. These statements can then be clustered into broader themes and finally ending with a long paragraph combining both textual (what they experienced) and structural descriptions (how they experienced).
A Grounded Theory Study
Grounded Theoretical study involves developing a theory around a process. The researcher’s intent would be to develop or generate a theory. The results section can be presented as a visual model which includes casual conditions that influenced the central category, intervening factors and strategies surrounding it. One can validate their hypothesis by judging the thoroughness of the research. For an example refer the gunman example listed in the chapter.
An Ethnography Study
Ethnography involves creating a description and understanding the workings of a ‘culture sharing group’. It involves looking at a particular incident and how it triggered responses from the members of the community. By doing this one can study micro cultures in the group and observe shared patterns of behavior. This data collection would depend heavily on interviews and observations.
The focus of the study helps shape its design. The differences between the five approaches to inquiry, in terms of foci, are clearly outlined in Table 4.1 of this book. For example, a single case study of an individual can be studied either as a biography or a case study. A small bounded system such as an event, a program, or an activity can be approached as a case study whereas a cultural system, including cultural behavior, language and artifacts, should be studied as ethnography.
Qualitative research has a predominant interpretative element because what we write or produce in the research comes from our personal experiences and our role in the research process. The findings of the research are as interpreted by us and the participants, readers and others reading our writing will have their own interpretations. The language used in the research design procedure of a study depends on the approach to inquiry. The appropriate terms to be used in various phases of qualitative research are discussed in chapters 6 and 9. Appendix A in this book also illustrates a list of words that researchers might use for their research design.
The participants who are studied reflect the approach to research. This is explained in Chapter 7 which also highlights the differences between various approaches depending on the extent of data collection. The approaches to inquiry vary greatly in the data analysis phase, ranging from unstructured (ethnography, narrative, interpretative) to structured approaches (grounded theory, phenomenology, case study). These procedures define the overall structure of data analysis and the extent to which the data would be described during analysis (Chapter 8). The final written research and the rhetorical structures used in the narrative also depend on the approach to inquiry (Chapter 9). The kind of approach adopted also defines the criteria to judge the quality of the study (Chapter 10).
Creswell recommends designing one’s study based on one of the approaches described in this book. He also suggests that even though one might choose to mix together different approaches, but it is important that those approaches be sorted out first before combining. According to Creswell, a study designed using one on the approaches enhances the sophistication of the project and conveys a standard of methodological expertise.
