Reflection on theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

What I learned from this week's theme about qualitative methods is that, qualitative methods are very beneficial to use on researches. Some qualitative methods that I have studied both in my paper and in the seminar such as interviewing, focus groups provides in-depth understanding about the subject which greatly contributes to collect the expected, needed information about the area of research. However using these methods are often quite expensive and time consuming. For instance what we discussed during the seminar was that creating focus groups usually requires a strong research budget as often researchers have to pay the participants and interviewing is somehow dependent on the skills of the interviewer so to hire an experienced interviewer might cost quietly and may require a researcher budget too. What I see during the seminar is that sometimes qualitative approaches are used for defining the hypothesis rather than supporting, in one of the papers that we discussed the researchers first used qualitative methods to create their hypothesis and then by using quantitative methods they supported it. In my opinion this shows the one of the main difference between quantitative and qualitative approaches which is quantitative methods provides solid statistical data as a result that enables researchers to make generalizations and come out with strong conclusions whereas qualitative methods provide detailed information which is beneficial to use when researchers do not know what to expect as a result.

Unfortunately I could not attend the second seminar which was about case studies so I did not have a chance to hear other opinions on case studies. What I think and briefly learned by looking at other posts on blogs case studies provides and intensive definition and analysis of a “case”, individual or target group. Main advantages are case studies enable numerous of details to be collected that normally can not be collected by other methods. Moreover they can also be used to produce hypothesis. On the other hand data collected during case study researches can not be generalized to wider population. As a result data collected during the study may lose its relevance over time. It is also difficult to draw cause and effect conclusions. Furthermore there can be possible biases as single person or small group gather and analyze data.