Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

STRATEGIES OF RESEARCH DESIGN

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1.What are the implications of saying that qualitative research uses more logic in

practice than a reconstructed logic?

2.What does it mean to say that qualitative research follows a nonlinear path? In

what ways is a nonlinear path valuable?

3.Describe the differences between independent, dependent, and intervening variables.

4.Why don’t we proveresults in social research?

5.Take a topic of interest and develop two research questions for it. For each research

question, specify the units of analysis and universe.

6.What two hypotheses are used if a researcher uses the logic of disconfirming

hypotheses? Why is negative evidence stronger?

7.Restate the following in terms of a hypothesis with independent and dependent

variables: The number of miles a person drives in a year affects the number of

visits a person makes to filling stations, and there is a positive unidirectional

relationship between the variables.

8.Compare the ways in which quantitative and qualitative researchers deal with

personal bias and the issue of trusting the researcher.

9.How do qualitative and quantitative researchers use theory?

10.Explain how qualitative researchers approach the issue of interpreting data. Refer
to first-, second-, and third-order interpretations.

NOTES

1. See Tashakkori and Teddlie (1998).


2. Ward and Grant (1985) and Grant and colleagues
   (1987) analyzed research in sociology journals and sug-
   gested that journals with a higher proportion of qualita-
   tive research articles address gender topics but that
   studies of gender are not themselves more likely to be
   qualitative.


3. See Kaplan (1964:3–11) for a discussion.


4. On the issue of using quantitative, statistical tech-
   niques as a substitute for trust, see Collins (1984), Porter
   (1995), and Smith and Heshusius (2004).


5. For discussion, see Schwandt (1997), Swanborn
   (1996), and Tashakkori and Teddlie (1998:90–93).


6. For examples of checking, see Agar (1980) and
   Becker (1970c).
   7. Problem choice and topic selection are discussed in
   Campbell and associates (1982) and Zuckerman (1978).
   8. See Flick (1998:51).
   9.Exceptionsare secondary data analysis and existing
   statistics research. In working with them, a quantitative
   researcher often focuses the research question and devel-
   ops a specific hypothesis to test after she or he examines
   the available data
   10. See Ball and Smith (1992) and Harper (1994).
   11. For place of theory in qualitative research, see
   Hammersley (1995).
   12. See Harper (1987:9, 74–75) and Schwandt (1997:
   10–11).
   13. See Gerring (2007:20) and George and Bennett
   (2005).

nonlinear research path

null hypothesis

reconstructed logic

reductionism

second-order interpretation

spuriousness

tautology

teleology

third-order interpretation

triangulation

universe

variable