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

Qualitative research in practice
of saying it’s not ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ here. It’s
people not understanding what the issues are for each
other. I think also that the observations would be
weaker standing alone because it would be harder to
observe if you didn’t talk to staff, if you didn’t value
their views, to come in as a researcher and say I’m
interested in visitors—I’ve got no interest in your life
other than that this is where you work. I thought I’d
have a lot of resistance to interviews, but in fact the
staff really liked being interviewed. Nobody talked to
them much about their work or their perspective on
things. And some of them had very practical and good
ideas of what they’d like to do but felt constrained by
their workload or by the attitude of [senior staff]. So
I think [without the staff interviews] the observations
would have been harder to do and I would have
understood less.
Comments
Mixing methods is an increasingly common approach to research.
Whatever epistemological concerns researchers may have, in practical
terms it makes good sense. Real-world research questions, by
their very nature, tend to be complex and very often require a range
of research approaches in order to answer them adequately. In this
chapter’s stories, Liz Kelly and Catherine McDonald have explained
their rationale for using both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Cheryl Tilse provided an equally clear rationale for the combination
of qualitative approaches that she used, convinced that no one
approach would have yielded the depth and range of understanding
possible with a mixed approach.
Just as ‘eclectic’ counselling practice, when clearly thought
through and purposeful, can respond to complex needs more
adequately than any one approach on its own, a mixed-methods
approach to research also has this potential. An important key
though is the need to be clear about which approaches are being
used, what the purpose and intended outcome of each is, and how
they interrelate. While complex problems can be responded to and
investigated more adequately, the risk in letting go of specialisation
is that research skills will become too thinly spread, potentially
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