Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

Mixing methods
Yvonne:
that overarching analytical framework that puts it all
together, then you’ve just got a pastiche.
There’s also something about your purpose, isn’t there,
because you’re very clear that the purpose of the
survey was to identify organisations for the next stage
so you could argue in a sense that this was to get to
the point where you could use the theory?
Catherine: Yes, that’s right—to really test out whether it was a
living and breathing theory. People often do it the
other way around, like they do qualitative work so
they can go and determine what the key concepts are
and can then do quantitative work by using instruments
that measure what they’re looking at. I had the
theory first and I was going from the theory down into
the field. A lot of people start in the field, find the
theory—use the qualitative, find what the important
constructs are and the central relationships between
them, which then hopefully would lead them to a
body of theory from which they can then construct
their quantitative work. So it depends which way
you’re going, how you do it.
Yvonne:
Without the quantitative stage, you would have had to
do considerable prior qualitative work to try to identify
the services inductively, before you could start to test
the theory. The survey enabled you to use the
construct of organisational commitment to find the
services quite quickly, so you could then commence
the qualitative research at a theory testing stage.
Catherine: Yes, it’s a real shortcut. I just don’t know how I would
have done it otherwise. I would have had to do an
awful lot more than 24 interviews, which was not
possible . . . And I’d never really know that I was
sampling right and that’s the whole bedevilment when
you’re doing theory testing. It’s a very different way of
using qualitative work. One of the things that became
clearer and clearer to me was that this was essentially
a positivist model. I was using qualitative work within
a positivist framework.
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