Qualitative Research

Question 1

What is Absurdism?

Answer 1

A philosophy stating that the efforts of humanity to find meaning in the universe will ultimately fail because no such meaning exists.

Question 2

What is qualitative research?

Answer 2

Any research that isn’t quantitative

Question 3

What is a reductionist explanation in Psychology?

Answer 3

Reductionism is the belief that human behaviour can be explained by breaking it down into smaller component parts.

To explain a complex phenomenon you need to ‘reduce’ it to its constituent elements.

Question 4

Why is it important to consider the context in which human action and interaction occur?

Answer 4

People produce constructed versions of reality in talk and interaction.

‘Reality’ or ‘facts’ or ‘what happened’ is argued to be a social achievement - it is never independent of human action or agency

Therefore you must take into account the context of the conversation.

Question 5

What does it mean to say that reality is socially constructed or built by people in and through interaction?

Answer 5

As we do not have direct access to the truth and our perceptions bias our results, our reality is primarily constructed through the language we use to describe events.

Language also shapes how we see the world, by attributing meaning to events and objects.

Question 6

What is positivism?

Answer 6

An approach to knowledge that assumes a straightforward relationship between the world and our perception of it.

• To know something, it is assumed you need to demonstrate it through objective collection of data.*
• These data are then subject to some form of hypothesis testing.*

Question 7

What type of research is Content Analysis and what is involved in doing it?

Answer 7

Frequency counting (search for key terms and show you, most of the time not qualitative)

What is involved:

Examine texts in terms of predetermined categories for ‘scoring’ or ‘coding’ and count the number of instances

Analysing content of texts according to what you expect or hypothesize to be there

Question 8

What are the 4 major methods used by qualitative researchers?

Answer 8

Observation

Analysing texts and documents

Interviews

Recording (audio and video) and transcribing

Question 9

In textual analysis, what can examining accounts of the ‘same’ event in different news articles demonstrate?

Answer 9

There are different ways to frame situations which completely change how they are viewed.

Question 10

Why might qualitative researchers disagree with the following statement: Language can be unproblematically, and simply, descriptive of events, objects and people?

Answer 10

Because each person has a goal they are trying to achieve with their speech and language can be used in such a way that the same event can be phrased differently in order to achieve different outcomes.

Therefore language does not simply describe events, objects and people.

There are social and political consequences of language

Question 11

What are researchers looking for in texts / textual materials when they do qualitative analyses?

Answer 11

1) How different answers to particular issues are produced, framed, and sustained
2) What these framings tell us about the construction of important issues/concepts
3) What socio-political consequences these constructions carry with them

Question 12

What did Katie Simmons (Ekberg) argue about the descriptions in news reports of two community riots in Australia?

Answer 12

There was a recurring pattern of description, or a repeated form of accounting, for what happened in the ‘riots’
This pattern involved particular formulations or constructions of the concept of ‘change’.

In respect of the riot that involved Indigenous Australians, ‘change’ was repeatedly represented as an outcome that was not achievable.

By contrast, descriptions of problems within the non-Indigenous community of Macquarie Fields regularly represented ‘change’ as an achievable outcome.

Question 13

What is a 3-part list and how does it function?

Answer 13

Used to summarize general classes of things

They function rhetorically to strengthen an argument or position

When describing an event, using three parts making it more convincing

Question 14

What is an extreme-case formulation and how does it function?

Answer 14

They are semantically extreme formulations that invoke the maximal or minimal properties of events or objects such as “everyone” “nobody” “always” “never” “completely” “nothing” etc.

They are used to try and be convincing as there is no possible way it could be wrong.

Question 15

What pattern was identified in perpetrators’ accounts of domestic violence when they were interviewed following court-ordered counselling sessions?

Answer 15

That they would phrase their accounts in terms that made their actions morally justifiable.

Question 16

What is problematic about using interviews as a form of data collection in psychological research?

Answer 16

The subjects know they are being watched and will phrase their answers in such a way to achieve certain goals.

• They try to present a positive frame of themselves*
• Most interviews are artificial, they’re trying to frame in a certain way.*
• How do we know if they are telling the truth?*

Question 17

What is Ethnomethodology?

Answer 17

The study (ology) of the common-sense methods that people (ethno) use in everyday interactions.

• The practices and knowledge that people use in their everyday lives without thinking about them, the common-sense understanding or what everybody knows.*
• The ethno-methods that people use to account for or make sense of their own actions, and the actions of others.*
• The methods that they use to produce descriptions of the world that seem rational and justifiable.​*

Question 18

What are ‘breaching studies’ and why were they done?

Answer 18

By breaching social norms researchers can identify how people would react in situations that differ from social norms.

Question 19

What are some examples of ‘breaching studies’?

Answer 19

Facing the wrong way in a lift

Asking a customer (not an assistant) where something is and then after they tell you they don’t work there continuing it ask them.

Taking items out of other peoples shopping carts

Question 20

What was a problem with ‘breaching studies’?

Answer 20

A problem with the study was that people tried to normalise what was going on. They tried to find rational reasons why people were acting the way they were.

People tried to normalise.

Question 21

What was Dorothy Smith interested in studying?

Answer 21

How people knew if they thought someone was mentally ill.

They ordered or structured their account in a certain way to explain why someone was mentally ill by phrasing what is ‘normal’ and then explaining how the persons account was ‘abnormal’

Question 22

What is a contrast structure and how does it work?

Answer 22

Contrast structures are oppositions or distinctions that cast some circumstances, some behaviours or some persons as normal or natural, and others as abnormal or unnatural

A ‘packaging’ of a statement

e. g. a contrast stucture might be: “it was obvious x, and yet they did y”
* Involves a description of a pattern of behaviour that was explained previously in a statement that supplies the instructions for how to see that behaviour as odd or anomalous.*

Question 23

What is Conversation Analysis?

Answer 23

Conversation analysis is an approach to the study of social interaction that focuses on practices of speaking that recur across a range of contexts and settings.

• A micro-analytical approach to the study of naturally occurring interaction*
• A focus on natural conversation*

Question 24

What is the ‘dead social-scientist test’?

Answer 24

To determine whether the data being analysed was naturally produced or artificial.

‘if the scientist died on the way to work today would the interaction that is the object of study still have taken place?’

If yes, natural. If not, unnatural

Question 25

Why are conversation analysts so interested in ‘talk-in-interaction’?

Answer 25

Talk-in-interaction is the commonplace mundane site at which human interaction can be studied for what it reveals about the production of social order.

Question 26

What are some of the micro-level analysis that is done in conversation analysis?

Answer 26

Intonation

Pauses or timing

Interruption

Laughter

False starts, etc.

Breathing

Question 27

Why do conversation analysts focus on the tiny details of talk?

Answer 27

The goal of conversation analysis (CA) research is to reveal the orderliness that characterizes ordinary conversation and to account for this orderliness

Talk is the central activity in social life. But how is ordinary talk organised, how do people coordinate their talk in interaction, and what is the role of talk in wider social processes?

Question 28

Why has there been a big focus, in conversation analysis, on turn taking?

Answer 28

It is a fundamental building block of interaction, most people are fluent in knowing when it is their turn to talk and when someone else’s turn is.

Sequences in talking, one of the best places to find interesting information in conversation

Question 29

What is an ‘adjacency pair’?

Answer 29

Conversation is done in pairs.

A first part (turn at talk) sets up expectations that a particular type of second part (turn at talk) will follow.

Question 30

Adjacency pairs are said to be ______ in character

Answer 30

normative

• There is a norm that is supposed to be follwed in conversation*
• If someone says ‘hello’ to you and you ignore them it becomes very awkward*

Question 31

An accusation followed by a denial is an example of?

Answer 31

An adjacency pair

Question 32

Describe an example that provides evidence that kids understand that they have restricted rights in interaction with adults.

Answer 32

son: You know what Daddy? then father: “What?”

• A person asks this to move the adjacency pair into making the parent ask the question so they now have the right to tell a story.*
• Kids have to put the first question out there in order to get authorisation to continue*

Question 33

What sort of responses refusals typically involve?

Answer 33

Refusals involve:

Delays in response time

Prefaces or Hedges (umm, ahh, well etc)

Palliatives (appreciations, apologies, I would love to but…)

Qualifiers (I don’t “think” I can make it, do it in a specific way)

Accounts (Provide explanations for why it invitation can’t be accepted)

Question 34

Acceptances usually come out immediately because they are…

Answer 34

the preferred ‘second part’ to the adjacency pair

Question 35

Refusals are the ______ of the second adjacency pair

Answer 35

Dispreferred part

Question 36

What is the difference between preferred and dispreferred second parts in adjacency pairs? Give some examples.

Answer 36

Question 37

What did Wooffitt say about descriptions that involved the construction: ‘I was just doing X . . . when Y’.

Answer 37

Typically used when a speaker is describing what he was doing just before the paranormal experience

The form of a story when talking about unbelievable stories are “I was just doing something normal when something abnormal happened”

X = normal activity, Y = paranormal event

Tries to show that they are still a normal individual who just experienced something weird.

The level of detail is there because it helps bolster that this was a true event.

Question 38

How does the construction ‘A friend of a friend’ function in urban myths?

Answer 38

It is a standardised opening. Can’t be checked or too hard to check.

Friends, we can make judgements about, a friend of a friend is a step back so we can’t judge its reality or can be questioned.

Speaker doesn’t have to answer follow up questions. Less chance of a challenge

Question 39

What are 3 fundamental assumptions of CA?

Answer 39

1) Talk is structurally organised
2) Talk - and the actions it accomplishes is organised in sequences
3) The analysis is empirically grounded (don’t speculate motivations behind the pattern)

Question 40

What is the ‘factors and variables’ approach in Psychology?

Answer 40

Shields (2008) claimed that psychology researchers’ tradition of factorial thinking “methodifies” their ways of theorizing.

What researchers end up doing is pretty much just studying how one variable influences one or more other variables.

“Outside the lab, meaningful human actions are not simply organized on a factor-and-variable causal basis. It could be that experiments do not reveal, but rather make it so, that human actions can be fitted to predictable causal formats”

Question 41

What are the features of qualitative research?

Answer 41

1) Preference for data that is rich in description
2) Belief that reality is constructed socially
3) Belief that reality is about interpretation and not about hypothesis testing