Manderson et al
At the beginning of the article,
Manderson and his co-authors made the distinction between qualitative research
instruments and quantitative research instruments. They mentioned that for
well-designed quantitative research, as long as instruments are reliable and
interpretations are valid, there are limited opportunities for various
interpretations. For qualitative studies, This may not be true, as the
advantage of qualitative study is its richness; therefore, interpretations are
situational and hard to “transfer” between researchers and situations. However,
this would raise issues of validity, reliability and interpretability of
qualitative data. Different methods of interpreting and using raw data would
produce different qualitative results. Therefore, in this article, Manderson
and his co-authors proposed a method called “structured method of analysis”,
which is featured with using highly structured methods of analysis, with
“explicit codes and categories”. In this way, qualitative data which involves interpretation was partially transformed to
quantitative studies. The pitfall of this method would be to raise an issue of
de-contextualizing qualitative data. Ross described one alternative way to
solve this problem: sorting the files into categories for further analysis.
Another issued caused by multiple
researchers in a team is the difficulties of assuring confidentiality of data.
This might require the principle investigator to assure that every researcher have
IRB certificate cleared.
Sin:
As a continuum of Manderson’s
notion of “structured method analysis”, Sin described an evaluation study using
mixed method, trying to quantifying qualitative data. However, improving the
validity of interpretations, quantifying qualitative data is not enough. In the article, Sin reflected that it is necessary
to have clear codes if the project involves collaborations in a team. However,
this doesn’t mean that codes will not be changed after team members dig into
the data. Therefore, researchers would adopt the way of pilot coding to test if
one coding tree is reliable enough. The coding process described in Sin’s work
shared many similarities with my research experiences. Given the collaborative
feature in my group, it is quite likely that preliminary and ambiguous coding
schemes, especially, at the beginning would cause lots of confusions and
varying understandings between collaborators. Therefore, we tend to have very
clear coding books developed together with the coding scheme. This appears to
be an effective way to reduce ambiguity among researchers. After we had clear
descriptions on the code book, we would move to pilot coding. What we usually
do in our group is to have 10% of data and code based on the preliminary coding
scheme. This process would involve with adding more “grounded based” codes
emerged from the data.
The way of software use is
determined by conditions rather than by the function of the software. This
relates to the issue that software doesn’t analyze the data, but people do.
Another expectation that is behind software use is that computer tools will not
analyze the data quickly as people expect.
N6 enables researchers to combine
quantitative methods and qualitative method together. However, researchers
don’t have settled answers concerning what is being quantified and what types
of quantitative analysis is more appropriate.
Barry:
Being different than other two
studies which tried to quantify qualitative data, aiming for improving
reliability among researchers in a group, Barry approached this problem from
the perspective of reflexivity practices. Reflexivity is defined as the
awareness of the researcher’s own presence in the research process. The major
part of this study described how Barry’s team constructed reflexive accounts.
Two tools were used in this study, one is an narration recording individual
researchers’ reflexivity and the other was about definitions of key theoretical
concepts. The first tool involved with sharing their positions and their
preferred theoretical framework. The second process involved with reflections
on theoretical stances and how would those guide study designs.