What is Qualitative Research ? What is Qualitative Research
Software?
What is Qualitative Research?
According to several prominent qualitative scholars (Creswell 2002; Pope & Mays 1995; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) Qualitative Research is intended to deeply explore, understand and interpret social phenomena within its natural setting. By using a qualitative researcher methodology, researchers want to collect richer information and get more detailed picture of issues, cases or events (Arora and Stoner 2009). They want to explore the why and how of a situation, not only what, where, when.
Just like all scientific research, Qualitative Research is a method that seeks answers to questions and involves the collection of evidence. In order to collect data, qualitative researchers use a wide range of techniques such as in-depth qualitative interviews; participant and non-participant observation; field notes; focus groups; document analysis and a number of other methods of data collection . There are also a variety of methodological approaches available to collect and analyze qualitative data such as phenomenology; ethnography; grounded theory; ethical inquiry; case studies; discourse analysis and more.
Qualitative research is used in many academic fields such as marketing research, education, health care, political science, communication, journalism, anthropology, sociology, psychology or management.
What is Qualitative Research Software?
Qualitative Research Software provides computer assistance for managing, coding and analysing large collections of documents. It helps researchers to perform rigorous qualitative analysis tasks in less time. With such qualitative research software, the amount of time spent in manual and clerical tasks is highly reduced allowing researchers to focus on the analysis of the qualitative data presented by the qualitative software and then to come up with useful conclusions and advices.
In order to achieve their qualitative research projects, many researchers rely on qualitative research software like QDA Miner, for analyzing interview and focus group transcripts (Besley & Roberts, 2010), news coverage (Entman, 2010), social media content (Cogburn & Espinoza-Vasquez, 2011), discourses (Pollach, 2012) and many others types of qualitative data.
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Sources:
Definition of Qualitative Research from MRC BioStatistics Unite
Arora R. & Stoner Ch. (2009). A mixed method approach to understanding brand personality. Journal of Product & Brand Management, 18(4), 272-283.
Creswell, J. (2002), Educational Research: Planning,Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research, Merrill Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
Behruzi, R., Hatem, M., Goulet, L., Fraser, W. (2011). The facilitating factors and barriers encountered in the adoption of a humanized birth care approach in a highly specialized university affiliated hospital. BMC Women’s Health, 11(1):53 (2011) PMID 22114870
Entman, R.M. (2010). Media framing biases and political power: Explaining slant in news of Campaign 2008. Journalism, 11(4), 389-408
Besley, J. C., & Roberts, M. C. (2010). Qualitative interviews with journalists about deliberative public engagement. Journalism Practice, 4(1), 66-81.
Cogburn D.L. & Espinoza-Vasquez F.K. (2011), From Networked Nominee to Networked Nation: Examining the Impact of Web 2.0 and Social Media on Political Participation and Civic Engagement in the 2008 Obama Campaign, Journal of Political Marketing, 10, 189-213.
Pollach, Irene (2012), Taming Textual Data: The Contribution of Corpus Linguistics to Computer Aided Text Analysis Organizational Research Methods 15(2) 263-287
Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (1984), Handbook of Qualitative Research, Newbury Park: Sage Publications
Mays N. & Pope C, (1996). Qualitative research in health care. London: British Medical Journal (BMJ) Publishing Group.