8: Qualitative Methods

Question 1

What 3 things can data potential tell us about?

Answer 1

Reality, subjectivity or language use.

Question 2

Simplified, what are our key assumptions?

Answer 2

Real things have a correct representations, science should be objective and without bias, and results should be exactly the same between researchers if correct.

Question 3

What does selecting variables and operationalising them do meaning interpretation?

Answer 3

Meaning of situation/behaviour has been decided a priori by the researcher.

Question 4

Simply, what is IPA?

Answer 4

Understanding participants’ subjective experience.

Question 5

Simply, what is DA?

Answer 5

Social construction of meanings through language and interaction.

Question 6

How is IPA influenced by phenomenology?

Answer 6

Study of experience, what it’s like to be conscious, etc.

Question 7

How is IPA influenced by hermeneutics?

Answer 7

Study of interpretation, meaning-giving, etc.

Question 8

In what way is IPA double hermeneutic?

Answer 8

Research interprets the participant interpreting their experience.

Question 9

How is IPA ideographic?

Answer 9

It looks at individual cases.

Question 10

Why does IPA use small, homogeneous samples?

Answer 10

To get rich accounts of particular people in particular settings.

Question 11

What data collection method is usually used in IPA?

Answer 11

Semi-structured interviews.

Question 12

How does social constructionism view knowledge?

Answer 12

Inseparable from social relationships, power, etc. and mediated by the concepts and categories available to us in a given time and place.

Question 13

What does micro SC emphasise?

Answer 13

How meanings are generated, negotiated and contested by people through their immediate interactions.

Question 14

What does macro SC emphasise?

Answer 14

Constructions that dominate within a given historical and cultural context.

Question 15

How does discursive psychology view language?

Answer 15

As a tool used to achieve interactional ends.

Question 16

Why does discursive psychology reject psychology?

Answer 16

DP boreal language as an action, not just a route to understanding internal structures.

Question 17

What research method is preferred now in discursive psychology?

Answer 17

Naturalistic conversations.

Question 18

What is script in discursive psychology?

Answer 18

The appropriate or normal course of action in a certain situation.

Question 19

What is disposition in discursive psychology?

Answer 19

The implication that a person’s actions say something about them.

Question 20

Give 3 ways of constructing facts in discursive psychology.

Answer 20

Category entitlement stake inoculation, and using rich detail.

Question 21

How do people construct facts?

Answer 21

By establishing entitlement to speak with authority or objectivity.

Question 22

Give 3 ways of formulating extreme cases in discursive psychology.

Answer 22

Using strong terms, extreme examples, and extreme language.

Question 23

What 2 key things do people manage in their language use?

Answer 23

Subjectivity/objectivity and intention.

Question 24

In IPA, what are descriptive comments?

Answer 24

Comments close to the participant’s explicit meaning, key points that matter to them, taken at face value.

Question 25

In IPA, what are linguistic comments?

Answer 25

Ideas about why things are put a certain way.

Question 26

In IPA, what are conceptual comments?

Answer 26

Comments often in the form of questions, more abstract, opening up provisional interpretations.