Tutorial 5 Research Approaches

0:00 hello everyone in the previous tutorial video we started talking about research methodology and in this video we are continuing the conversation by focusing on Research approaches now as I said in the previous video what I call a research approach is not called that by everybody when I say research approach I mean the general orientation of a research project or the the overall strategy of a research project as in qualitative quantitative multi-method so on using research approaches is one of the ways in which we classify research projects for instance if we have qualitative um a qualitative approach it implies

0:46 that they will be certain processes and methods that that follow and if we say something is quantitative it's implied that there's some other um types of processes and and methods to to follow and so it's not the only way we we can classify research for instance sometimes it's better to classify your research mainly by research design and not by research approach necessarily because for instance for a case study design um it is it is assumed that it will be um multi-method or mixed method so it's almost unnecessary to specify your approach specifically it could be better to discuss the research design as a case study and then discuss the multi-method

1:34 um combination as part of the case study design discussion instead of like separating it out or something like that uh now right let's look at how we choose research approaches and what is implied by different research approaches the reasons the the ways to think about this is is for obvious reasons very very similar to the way we um thought about research topics and problems um that I talked about in tutorial three firstly your philosophical stance informs your general orientation to research certain paradigmatic positions are associated with specific approaches like quantitative approach with

2:20 positivism and post positivism and qualitative approaches with interpretivism and mixed method or multi-method research with pragmatism and critical realism for instance this is not always the case and and some philosophical positions are more prescriptive and specific than others but be sure to consider your philosophical stance before deciding on a research approach now next up is the nature of your problem uh or the purpose of your your work we can also say what you are busy with greatly determines the specific approach that you will take to methodology when you are concerned with the purpose of your work um you are thinking about what's happening in real life and what's happening in your field of study for instance research usually doesn't happen

3:07 separately from life and if you are doing research in organizational communication for um for example the reality is on the ground in those real organizations in real time will also have an impact on your choice of research approach similarly you should also think about the audience of your work if your work is meant to be read by other scholars in the field or whether your work is intended for managers working in corporates or small businesses you have to think about the audience and the outcomes of your research when you are thinking about the research approach intertwined with all of this is the happenings in your bigger field of study and things happening in the scholarly world for instance organizational communication is bound to Fields such as

3:52 management economics Behavioral Sciences psychology sociology political sciences and potentially many others as a researcher you have to be up to date with what's happening in the disciplinary field when you decide on your research approach when it comes to academic research Theory will always be involved whether you are mostly concerned with testing Theory or building new Theory you have to think about the theories and theoretical Traditions um that that is underlying to your work it can also be said that your design decisions come come first and that your approach depends on your design as I said in the intro sometimes your research design implies a certain

4:38 approach or goes hand in hand with one especially if you have a specific design in mind maybe an experimental design or so your approach is kind of decided by that design it is sometimes not not really sensible to separate the design and the approach when there are that intertwined so whatever the case is for you and just remember to think about your design when you think about your approach because these things could be one and the same thing just like when you decide on other aspects of your study your problem your design and so on you must also keep the practicalities and feasibility of method of your methodological orientation in mind for example mixing and combining multiple methods could increase your period of data collection and Analysis it could also increase your budget on

5:25 the flip side you might no don't you might not have budget problems but you have no experience in doing mixed methods research or you are not capable of running a large scale survey then you have to factor those issues in when you decide on your approach it is not worth basing your decision decision only on your likes and your dislikes or your fears you shouldn't for instance avoid quantitative work because you are fearful maybe a little bit lazy to learn something new or if you dislike a certain aspect of it but you should consider your skill set and your experience when you make these decisions um and also I've done for one minute think that qualitative work is easier than quantitative or the other way around they are different but both have their complexities and and forgiving

6:13 characteristics too in the end one approach is not outright better than the other one might be better for you and for your research project but there is no such thing as better here in a general sense But whichever approach you choose your choice will have further implications for your study let's look at the different approaches in a bit more detail in traditional Euro Western research tradition we generally have qualitative and quantitative research as the two biggest opposing branches of res how research can be approached there are also various multi-method options of combining and mixing the two and then as you will see towards the end of this

6:58 tutorial video there's a lot in in between and Beyond these options too but the easiest way to understand qualitative and quantitative is by comparing them so I will do so quantitative research is usually associated with positivism and post-positivism but also feature as part of the methodological considerations made within the bounds of critical realism and pragmatism basically qualitative and quantitative research generates different kinds of data that is suitable for answering different kinds of questions quantitative research is about testing Theory and measuring the relationship between variables while qualitative research is about exploring and understanding quantitative and qualitative research

7:45 also generally start at different points quantitative researchers begin with existing ideas of as from theory for instance that is already defined and specified so the concepts of variables within that phenomenon is known since these variables are already fixed in meaning because remember we started with Theory the focus is on measuring the variables and in determining relationships between them this is also why we would say that quantitative research on the whole use deductive reasoning reasoning that starts with generalized ideas from Theory and uses these to find out

8:32 something about a specific phenomenon qualitative research then starts with a specific phenomenon sometimes it's not clear it's because it's from the real world most often it's not clear or defined or specific or fully known and since there's no solidly defined Concepts or defined variables the researcher uses qualitative data to understand more about the specific phenomenon and then they can maybe use that data to interpret it and maybe contribute to a more General understanding of that phenomenon maybe even working towards creating Theory from their data quantitative research usually involves numerical data that is analyzed by doing

9:17 statistical calculations while qualitative research is in essence non-numerical so mostly written and spoken language in languages images phenomena interpretations and so on and on a bit deeper level these different types of data is is about different orientations quantitative research is more about the standard way of doing things about exactness about generalizability about proof and evidence qualitative methods are more about understanding depth detail openness connection and so on let's take a study that is situated in a social media context if you are interested in information about an insta influencers account the number of

10:04 followers number of likes shares comments they are they are getting those things are important now these are quantitative stuff companies that market their products through influencers are interested in these counts as they use it to calculate follower reach follower engagement growth and so on but you can also be interested in other equally important things about that insta influencer the quality of their content the image they project what they represent are how their followers react how people are influenced these things are all qualitative you cannot say any of these things through knowing the number of followers or likes the same with research on societal

10:50 issues like maybe poverty for government to respond to poverty in their country they need to know how many people how poor where they are so on these are all quantitative and they will be about numbers and stats such as studies but poverty is a social problem with many other dimensions apart from the mere numbers what about the historical roots of poverty the causes the psychological impacts these dimensions are qualitative can you see how both these approaches have a place depending on what it is you want to know and what you value and other contextual factors of your study you will decide on an overarching approach to your work also can you see the link with the deeper philosophical questions in

11:37 research terms we can say that quantitative and qualitative research have different ontological and epistemological assumptions that are foundational to them quantitative research has an objectivist ontology and an empiricist epistemology where qualitative research has a constructionist ontology and an interpretive epistemology the this differentiation is a very broad brush and I hope you know it's not outright and always like this but it's I say to show you the the link between things on the screen you can see um like these broad stroke characteristics Squall versus Quant quantitative approaches are different from qualitative in the purpose with for which they conducted they have different processes they

12:23 generate different kinds of data they are different in how they make meaning from that data and how findings are communicated these distinctions are useful when we want to start talking about the approaches to research but we cannot see them as two mutually exclusive categories these are the extremes with many possibilities in between there are many quantitative studies that do not conform to all of these characteristics on the table and there are qualitative studies that are not completely on on that side either rather than just looking at these artificial boundaries and contrasts between qualitative and quantitative you must rather think about it as a general orientation this is why we call it the research approach each

13:09 specific method that you will use has its own characteristics but your general methodological orientation is what is important here you could have a quantitative survey as part of a qualitative study if that survey is helpful to bring better understanding or tasting your interpretations or getting an overall idea of something uh that is in essence a qualitative thing you can also have a partially structured interviews that is qualitative traditionally as part of a quantitative study if you use those interviews to strengthen your findings or refine your measuring instrument or something like that now of course it's very possible to just use a single research method that aligns with your general orientation so you can

13:55 have a qualitative approach with a single qualitative method maybe focus groups or you can have a quantitative approach and a single quantitative method such as a questionnaire based survey these studies are called Mono method studies so single method studies but in social sciences we often have the need to to combine aspects of both approaches or we are specifically inclined to combine different approaches these studies then are called multi-method type of studies let's talk about that next some philosophical positions like pragmatism critical realism and even transformative a critical position specifically calls on us to use

14:42 um mixed our multiple research methods so then we can say that our general orientation towards our research is a multi-method approach on the screen is a flow chart that shows you some of the options of combining methods okay on the left you see mono method but then towards the right you can see the different options for multi-method studies multi-method studies are those that combine one more than one research method for full data collection now in one study you can get a multi-method qualitative or multi-method quantitative study where you use multiple methods from one approach so two or more qualitative methods used together in a qualitative

15:28 study or two or more quantitative method methods used in a quantitative study in other words you use multiple methods but you don't cross the line between quantitative and qualitative so you are not mixing methods mixed methods refer to the crossing of that line between qualitative and quantitative there's also two types here the first is mixed method research and that's one is probably the best known it is where you use both quantitative and qualitative methods but they stay as as what they are you analyze them each separately and might off offer an overall integration when it comes to drawing conclusions or interpreting but your quantitative data is analyzed quantitatively and your

16:14 qualitative data is analyzed quantitatively there there might be various reasons for for doing this you can look at the screen for a summary you may want to use two methods so that one can strengthen the other or corroborate the other or improve validity and reliability this is called methodological triangulation methodological triangulation is when the methods help one another this means that they are not focused on different areas of the research they are focused on the same thing and the convergence the complements the contradictions whatever you find from combining their findings say something about the validity reliability trustworthiness and strength of your data you cannot call it

17:00 triangulation if the two methods are used to cover different research questions or cover different populations to make this more complicated you can also triangulate other things other than methods you can triangulate data sources or investigators or and there's theoretical triangulation but for this discussion we are talking about methodological triangulation not the rest if you are mixing methods for other reasons then the two methods corroborating each other you are still using mixed methods but you are not triangulating the other reasons for mixing methods include facilitation where one method is used to facilitate the other like when you do interviews but the interviews are done

17:45 for you to refine your survey questionnaire or when you do an observation of social media page to get a feeling for what's going on it's explorative before you dive into a critical discourse analysis other reason can be um that the methods complement one another an example here is that when you do a questionnaire based survey and then use interviews to fill in the gaps of meaning and understanding for instance the survey might ask respondents about their attitudes toward a certain bank group and the interview data is then used to further expand on those attitudes and provide more detail then there's the reason of generality this is when one method is used to show the importance of your specific study

18:31 before you move on to your actual main method for instance you can conduct interviews with female Mine Workers about their inclusion in safety communication processes and use the findings to show that there is a real problem here this becomes a motivation for you to say this is why I'm doing this work you can also mix methods when one helps with the interpretation of another or when you need different methods to solve a problem left unanswered by your first method or methods there are also those mixing of methods that's used to cover different aspects of your research like answering different research questions for example you use qualitative content analysis to measure statistically how prevalent is

19:16 the use of certain exclusionary marginalizing words and phrases in news coverage of industrial action or activism or whatever your topic this will be counting and calculating and categorizing words and phrases in a specific and exact way you can then answer another research question about what these words and phrases mean to people and What feelings they conjure up when they are read or heard by by talking to people in partially structured interviews these two methods are used in the same study but they answer different research questions and focus on different aspects of the of the project okay so this was mixed methods but there's another maybe lesser known multi-method approach called mixed model

20:03 approach where quantitative data is qualitatively interpreted or qualitative data is Quantified in some way examples here are that you might have conducted a quantitative questionnaire based survey done the analysis and interpreted the whole thing then you your quantitative findings are used as a document of text that is then thematically analyzed thereby qualitizing your quantitative work there's also the possibility that you conducted focus group interviews which is a qualitative method but then you took the verbatim transcriptions as text and analyzed it quantitatively by looking at the number of times participants see the specific words Express the specific emotion or whatever

20:50 themes you are looking for but in a quantitative way so that you can say throughout the six focus groups the issue of gender-based violence in the workplace was raised a total of 46 Times by 12 different participants what is most important here is the following you can use multiple methods of the same orientation so two qualitative methods in a qualitative design or two quantitative methods in a quantitative study you can combine qualitative and quantitative methods in studies with only one research approach like a quantitative approach or a qualitative approach this depends on the general intention of using those methods if you mix methods in a qualitative

21:36 approach the quantitative method will probably be secondary and carry less weight when you are using also a qualitative method in a bigger quantitative approach the qualitative will be secondary you can call your research approach a mixed method approach if your Paradigm is pragmatism or critical realism or another paradigmatic position that specifically calls for mixing of approaches not all instances of mixed methods can be called a mixed method approach not all mixed methods also are triangulation you are triangulating methods only when they are used to strengthen or increase validity reliability trustworthiness and

22:22 so on okay I hope you're still with me next I would like to talk about research approaches that cannot be classified as qualitative quantitative multi-method or whichever of the well-known research approaches there's an increasing number of Scholars that are stepping away from this conventional typology towards research approaches that are somehow customized or more suitable for their contexts or for the lived realities on on the ground of course um stepping away or ignoring the the traditional Euro Western typologies can in itself be an act of decolonization and many decolonial scholars do at least something to

23:08 signify that they are de-linking um from Euro Western conventions or disobeying Euro Western um rules for for doing research now this area of new research approaches it's emerging it's happening every day and and what I can share with you is like only surface level um we can only scratch the surface in this exciting new area of of thinking about methodology you can explore what I call here the space in between in your own study in various ways you can choose whether you want to be radical and not use qualitative quantitative at all or you can customize a qualitative method or use a method associated with the

23:54 colonial research but still call it qualitative you can even be inspired by the contextual relevance of thinking outside of the western box even if you are not working from a decolonial worldview or a transformational stance or so like for all other research approaches and Designs lend your ears to those that share the space with you other researchers in your field your supervisor your lecturer your own beliefs and values the context of your study the audience of your of your work this is a new frontier and it's about pushing boundaries spanning boundaries confronting boundaries rejecting boundaries rebelling against boundaries in in mostly in a celebration of of our africanists or maybe in the pain of our

24:40 africanists I will talk about three things but in all honesty I might get some of this wrong because things are changing all the all the time in this Arena the first concept I want to share with you is the idea of third space methodology then the concept of post-qualitative approaches and then we will talk a bit about other ways to be in the space between um conventional and research approaches the idea of the space in between or the third space comes from homie Baba and other Scholars have expanded on it of course in the meanwhile they say something like when different cultures interact or even just different people like in a shop or in a school the people the entities and contexts in

25:28 that interaction all become hybrids in a way that that is constructed or networked in between them at that moment if we take this to a research setting our approach to research to data collection might be one thing in our minds prior to starting a project but the moment there is interaction with people with contexts with phenomenon things change so that an approach is no longer what we thought it up to be initially but something else this means that the year of waste and rules about approaches and methods um it's difficult to see those as valid because they were conceptualized in ways

26:15 that are being fixed in their place it's qualitative or quantitative or mixed or whatever and if they change when they are used in different settings and always become some kind of hybrid in a practical sense it can never be those classifications again when a researcher sets out with a simple qualitative approach and they plan to get an understanding of their participants but when they come into contact with their participants it's no longer that simple as the participants have a whole different mindset and they're not puppets that will just follow along but their mindset has an influence on how the research is actually done so maybe you plan the qualitative study and you are doing

27:01 qualitative interviews but the participants are all talking about numbers and money and also bringing their histories and then the design cannot just stay a simple qualitative interpretative thing but must become something more something that is a bit quantitative something that is a bit critical but not quite so so it sits in in between different designs and approaches maybe a Euro Western researcher will stick to their guns and keep going with a simple qualitative approach but if you want to be relevant and contextually responsive you may have to move making your approach more a third space approach to research if we take it even further do a research

27:47 approach theme we can say that such a third space is about integrative research approaches that is not binary and exclusionary in terms of qualitative quantitative and so on but borrows from them and combines them and combines borrowed elements with like a more democratic justice-driven responsible ethical research approach or whatever else we encounter as relevant while doing our research there are also other ideas that speak to this space in between quantitative and qualitative research by using terms like methodological pluralism and post-qualitative approaches when I say methodological pluralism I mean that

28:33 researchers move back and forth between different knowledges different ways of organizing different research processes different ways of analyzing in in ways that might not make sense if we view it from a conventional qualitative quantitative mix type of categorization post qualitative research is is something like the next step in methodology where the way research methods have been involving can no longer work and we must rethink even the basics of doing research for instance post-walitative research is about questioning whether the things we study like languages signs behaviors and so on are even good at being a representation of the underlying realities that we are actually wanting

29:19 to know something about it asks what would research look like in a post-humanist world for instance such a post-humanist world is like the one described in decol and philosophy that recognizes entities that are not humans like from the natural world or from the spirit world or so on one of the ways in which researchers do this post-qualitative approach or tackle methodological pluralism is by doing something like methodologies without methods or to avoid using stable identifiers and terminologies to identify their approach also by maybe not using like the fixed labels and terms like data and interpretation and meaning and so on

30:06 to show an entanglement of all of those things and also to open up the possibility to critique those set categories in in some ways there are other ways in which to approach the research that is not along the lines of qualitative and quantitative categories that is not necessarily post-humanist or post qualitative or third space some decolonial Scholars create their own research orientations While others use the language of decoloniality to position their research approaches in a space that is neither qualitative or quantitative it is possible to describe your research approach without identifying it as qualitative quantitative mixed or whatever to show that you don't

30:51 recognize those boundaries necessarily decoloniality has a relational ontology as well as a relational epistemology we spoke about this in previous tutorials researchers who assume this about the nature of reality and the nature of knowledge might call their research approach a relational approach that is beyond quantitative qualitative or mixed or whatever but it could be all of it it could be a hybrid of it it could be an adaption of it or it could be some new creative methodology many of the terms we use when we talk about decolonial and Indigenous research come to mind and maybe you want to call your research approach a contextual research approach or a reflexive

31:36 approach or a respectful approach or an ethical approach as I said earlier depending on how radical you want to be in your approach you can use existing methods but be specific in your intention and motivation for certain decision decisions so that your overall orientation emerge from that you can also contextualize methods by adapting them to be more respectful more reflexive more relational so and then fit under your umbrella term what you term your overall research approach foreign with a lot of information um this is the end of this tutorial and we will speak about many of these same

32:24 themes again in the tutorials to follow and um in the next tutorial specifically we will start talking about research design all right until next time bye-bye