respondent. It only requires fewer special skills but limited probing for questions. In the research statistical and summarization are the main types for analysis for the quantitative data, and for qualitative analysis, summarization is the main type.
3.3.1 Qualitative Research
Qualitative research emerged from cultural anthropology and American sociology (Kirk & Miller, 1986) and has only recently been adopted by the other social sciences. This paradigm is a constructivist approach (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) in that it allows the researcher the opportunity to listen to informants in their natural setting and then construct a picture based on their perceptions and experiences. Researchers utilize qualitative methodologies to discover, understand, and give meaning to a specific social situation, event, role, group, or interaction (Locke, Spirduso, & Silverman, 1987).
Various researchers have developed key assumptions and characteristics that are unique to qualitative research and that distinguish it from quantitative research methods.
Marshall and Rossman (1989) suggest that the researcher enter the informant’s world in order to be immersed in the everyday setting chosen for the study. In so doing, the researcher does not experience the situation under question in isolation. Rather, since the focus of qualitative research is on the process that is occurring, the researcher observes the interaction and impact of other forces and gains insight and an understanding of how and why things are what they are (Frankel & Wallen, 1990). By entering the natural setting where human behavior occurs and being immersed in the events as they unfold, the researcher is able to construct a more realistic and holistic picture.
Qualitative research is based on assumptions, rather than theory or hypotheses that are established at the onset in the quantitative paradigm. It is an investigative process that takes place gradually whereby the researcher, as the primary instrument for data collection (Men-iam, 1988), interviews and interacts with the informant seeking their perspective and meaning to the situation. The data that emerges from the qualitative study is based on what the respondents stated. The data is descriptive rather than in numbers, as would be the case with quantitative data (Frankel & Wallen, 1990). The researcher seeks and pays attention to the particulars of a situation rather than trying to generalize the data.
Next, the researcher “makes sense of a social phenomenon by contrasting, comparing, replicating, cataloguing, and classifying the object of the study” (Miles & Huberman, 1984). Through the inductive process, the “researcher builds abstractions, concepts, hypotheses, and theories from details” (Merriam, 1988). The researcher’s primary interest is to emerge with meaning relating to “how people make sense of their lives, experiences, and their structures of the world” (Merriam, 1988). Outcomes are often negotiated as the researcher attempts to reconstruct the multiple realities of the meanings and interpretations obtained from human sources (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Reality is therefore constructed by those involved in the research situation.
3.3.2 Quantitative Research
Although this study was qualitative in nature, quantitative research methodology was utilized to obtain specific numerical data from those interviewed. Numeric values and comparisons could then be made about some specific
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