1. What are the key characteristics of qualitative research? (exam question) According to M. Q.

Patton, in his book, Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods, Third Edition, pp. 4041, copyright 2002 by Sage Publications, Inc., there are twelve major characteristics of qualitative research Design Strategies 1. Naturalistic inquirystudying real-world situations as they unfold naturally; nonmanipulative and non-controlling; openness to whatever emerges (lack of predetermined constraints on findings). 2. Emergent design flexibilityOpenness to adapting inquiry as understanding deepens and/or situations to change; the researcher avoids getting locked into rigid designs that eliminate responsiveness and pursues new paths of discovery as they emerge. 3. Purposeful samplingCases for study (e.g., people, organizations, communities, cultures, events, critical incidences) are selected because they are information rich and illuminative, that is, they offer useful manifestations of the phenomenon of interest; sampling, then, is aimed at insight about the phenomenon, not empirical generalization from a sample to a population. Data-Collection and Fieldwork Strategies 4. Qualitative dataObservations that yield detailed, thick description; inquiry in depth; interviews that capture direct quotations about peoples personal perspectives and experiences; case studies; careful document review. 5. Personal experience and engagementThe researcher has direct contact with and gets close to the people, situation, and phenomenon under study; the researchers personal experiences and insights are an important part of the inquiry and critical to understanding the phenomenon. 6. Empathic neutrality and mindfulnessAn empathic stance in interviewing seeks vicarious understanding without judgment (neutrality) by showing openness, sensitivity, respect, awareness, and responsiveness; in observation it means being fully present (mindfulness). 7. Dynamic systemsAttention to process; assumes change as ongoing whether focus is on an individual, an organization, a community, or an entire culture; therefore, mindful of and attentive to system and situation dynamics. Analysis Strategies 8. Unique case orientationAssumes that each case is special and unique; the first level of analysis is being true to, respecting, and capturing the details of the individual cases being studied; cross-case analysis follows from and depends on the quality of individual case studies. 9. Inductive analysis and creative synthesis Immersion in the details and specifics of the data to discover important patterns, themes, and interrelationships; begins by exploring, then confirming, guided by analytical principles rather than rules, ends with a creative synthesis. 10. Holistic perspectiveThe whole phenomenon under study is understood as a complex system that is more than the sum of its parts; focus on complex interdependencies and system dynamics that cannot meaningfully be reduced to a few discrete variables and linear, causeeffect relationships. 11. Context sensitivityPlaces findings in a social, historical, and temporal context; careful about, even dubious of, the possibility or meaningfulness of generalizations across time and space; emphasizes instead careful comparative case analyses and extrapolating patterns for possible transferability and adaptation in new settings.

12. Voice, perspective, and reflexivityThe qualitative analyst owns and is reflective about her or his own voice and perspective; a credible voice conveys authenticity and trustworthiness; complete objectivity being impossible and pure subjectivity undermining credibility, the researchers focus becomes balance understanding and depicting the world authentically in all its complexity while being self-analytical, politically aware, and reflexive in consciousness. Based on the website (http://people.uncw.edu/pricej/teaching/methods/interviewing.pdf) Characteristics of Qualitative Research 1. With these methods we try to answer the general RQ What is going on here? To do that you focus is on peoples perceptions and experiences. How they make sense of their lives. Data = what they say they believe, what they do, feelings expressed, explanations given. Assumption: People make sense out of their experiences and in doing so create their own reality. They can share those experiences and that reality. What people say is valid and reliable. It is meaningful. 2. Qualitative is primarily interpretivist, rather than positivist like surveys and experiments. Not seeking to verify some truth. Multiple truths, realities, meanings, etc... Look for patterns to build explanations. Try to understand how participants understand themselves or their world. 3. Research design steps in Qualitative Research are not linear (unlike surveys and experiments). Come up with an initial game plan, but it can unravel in multiple ways. Always go back and forth between steps/research issues. Each influences each. Need to be flexible, open to change. More so than in surveys and experiments, every decision the researcher makes (explicit or implicit) about research design influences every aspect of research. 4. Two general ways to conduct qualitative research: a. Dont develop hypotheses apriori. Let the data do the explaining. Theory is created from the data. Dont test hypotheses or theory. Or, b. Develop preliminary conceptual hypotheses, and gather evidence to support/refute them.(more positivist approach) 5. Cant anticipate all issues/problems apriori. Have to deal with them in the field (unlike surveys and experiments, where you deal with them ahead of time or afterwards, statistically). 6. Researcher is the main data collection instrument. Researchers beliefs, values, predispositions influence the entire process. So there is a potential for bias here, and replication of findings is more difficult than in quantitative research. Hence, more so than in surveys and experiments, researchers make their values/biases explicit in the research. They share their motivations for doing the study up front (intro). In the Methods section they say how their beliefs/values influenced the research. Example: Gay Friendships study and my ideas on masculinity, inequality, sexuality 7. Goal is to produce an understanding/explanation that is true to all the data. No error. Different from experiments and surveys. Inductive rather than deductive. 8. Not a standardized data collection. 4. Why is qualitative research important for educational research? (exam question)

If you look again at the two major scientific methods (exploratory and confirmatory) and the five major objectives of science (in chapter one) you will notice the importance of theory generation and exploration. Qualitative research is especially strong in describing and exploring phenomena and generating tentative explanations. Furthermore, qualitative research is very helpful in adding new dimensions of understanding (e.g., understanding groups from the insiders perspective, understanding the importance of local context, studying complicated processes that occur over time, etc.). Qualitative research is an exciting interdisciplinary landscape comprising diverse perspectives and practices for generating knowledge. Researchers across departments in the social and behavioral sciences use qualitative methods. In addition, the research process itself, takes center stage in qualitative research. (The Practice of qualitative Research bu Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber & Patricia Leavy. SAGE, 2010)

5. What are the key characteristics of phenomenology? (exam question) Here is the foundational question in phenomenology: What is the meaning, structure, and essence of the lived experience of this phenomenon by an individual or by many individuals? Some key characteristics include: Attempting to describe participants experiences of a phenomenon. Attempting to gain insight into participants lifeworlds (or lebenswelt), typically through in-depth interviewing. Getting participants to bracket or suspend their preconceptions. Searching for the invariant structures or essences of participants experiences. Here is the foundational question in phenomenology: What is the meaning, structure, and essence of the lived experience of this phenomenon by an individual or by many individuals? Some key characteristics include: Attempting to describe participants experiences of a phenomenon. Attempting to gain insight into participants lifeworlds (or lebenswelt), typically through indepth interviewing. Getting participants to bracket or suspend their preconceptions. Searching for the invariant structures or essences of participants experiences.

1. According to Van Manen (1990), main characteristics of phenomenology are:

In phenomenology, the objective is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as they are consciously experienced, without theories about the causal explanations or their objective reality.

Phenomenology therefore seeks to understand how people construct meaning. It investigates experiences as they are lived by those experiencing them, and the meaning that these people attach to them. Critical truths about reality are grounded in peoples lived experiences. There are four aspects of these lived experiences, namely: 1. lived space; 2. 3. 4. lived body; lived time; lived human relations.

Phenomenology consists mainly of in-depth conversations. In phenomenology, the researcher and the informants are often considered as coparticipants. Person-centred rather than being concerned with social processes, cultures, or traditions.

(Van Manen M. (1990) Researching Lived Experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. London, Ontario: Althouse) 7. What are the key characteristics of ethnography? (exam question) Here is the foundational question in ethnography: What are the cultural characteristics of this group of people or this cultural scene? The key idea of ethnography is to discover and describe the culture or cultural scenes of a group of people. Everything revolves around the conceptual framework of culture (i.e., a system of shared beliefs, values, practices, perspectives, folk knowledge, language, norms, rituals, and material objects and artifacts that members of a group use in understanding their world and in relating to others). This involves understanding the etic and emic perspectives, not being ethnocentric when collecting and interpreting data, searching for the wholes, staying in the field for an extended period, etc. 1.Exploring: it is about discovery. 2. It relies on collecting data in the natural environment. 3.Value is placed on context: it cannot study people independently of their environments. 4. It does not de-contextualise as with an artificially structured interview.

5. It observes what people do: it does not rely totally on what people say, but sees, visualises and creates a picture through first-hand experience of it. 6. Phenomena cannot be analysed, divorced from their social and cultural contexts. 7.It is about immediate social and cultural contexts and broader socioeconomic and political contexts. 8. Emphasis is on the natives perspective. 9. Multiple perspectives including researcher and researched (emic and etic). 10. Intimate relationship between researcher and researched. 11. Uses a variety of different methods: multi-modes of data collection. 12. Works with unstructured data. 13. No variables purposively manipulated. 14. Becoming progressively focused: starts with broad descriptive inferences. 15. Being reflexive; conscious thought; researcher as prime instrument of data collection. 16. interpreting meanings of human action. 17. Analytic induction. 18. Being guided by, and generating, theory. 19. Culture, holism, naturalism, flexibility. (Lambert V, Glacken M, McCarron M (2011) Employing an ethnographic approach: key characteristics. Nurse Researcher. 19, 1, 17-23.)

9. What are the key characteristics of case study research? (exam question) Here is the foundational question in case study research: What are the characteristics of this single case or of these comparison cases. Case study research is eclectic. It uses the conceptual organizer of case and cases in delineating the world. The quintessential characteristic of case studies is that they strive towards a holistic understanding of cultural systems of action (Feagin, Orum, & Sjoberg, 1990). Cultural systems of action refer to sets of interrelated activities engaged in by the actors in a social situation. The case studies must always have boundaries (Stake, 1995). Case study research is not sampling research, which is a fact asserted by all the major researchers in the field, including Yin, Stake, Feagin and others. However, selecting cases must be done so as to maximize what can be learned, in the period of time available for the study. The unit of analysis is a critical factor in the case study. It is typically a system of action rather than an individual or group of individuals. Case studies tend to be selective, focusing on one or two issues that are fundamental to understanding the system being examined.

Case studies are multi-perspectival analyses. This means that the researcher considers not just the voice and perspective of the actors, but also of the relevant groups of actors and the interaction between them. This one aspect is a salient point in the characteristic that case studies possess. They give a voice to the powerless and voiceless. When sociological studies present many studies of the homeless and powerless, they do so from the viewpoint of the "elite" (Feagin, Orum, & Sjoberg, 1991). References: Tellis, W. (July, 1997) Introduction to case study, The qualitative report, Vol 3, (2) [online] Available at: http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR3-2/tellis1.html [Assessed 28 November 2012] 12. What are the key characteristics of grounded theory? (exam question) Here is the foundational question in grounded theory: What theory or explanation emerges from an analysis of the data collected about this phenomenon? In Glaser and Strauss words, Grounded theory is a general methodology for developing theory that is grounded in data systematically gathered and analyzed. Glaser and Strauss wrote the first book on grounded theory. In short, grounded theory uses an inductive or bottom-up approach to generate or develop a theory or explanation. 1. Key features of grounded theory are its iterative study design, theoretical (purposive) sampling, and system of analysis. An iterative study design entails cycles of simultaneous data collection and analysis, where analysis informs the next cycle of data collection. (Lingard, Albert & Levinson, 2008) Qualitative Research: Grounded theory, mixed method and action research. www.cfd.med.utoronto.ca/resources/Lingard-Grounded_Theory.pdf 2. Grounded theory method of research consist of systematic inductive guidelines for collecting and analyzing data to build theoretical frameworks that explain the collected data. (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994). (Eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. 3. The theory is developed from the data, rather than the other way around. That makes this is an inductive approach, meaning that it moves from the specific to the more general. (Essortment, 2012) Grounded theory. (http://www.essortment.com/grounded-theory-21638.html)

18.

What is the difference between segmenting and coding? (exam question)

Segmenting is the process of dividing data into meaningful analytical units; coding is the process of marking segments of data with symbols, descriptive words, or category names. Mafa & Chaminuka, 2012 ) -Segmenting is the process of dividing data into meaningful analytical units

~Mafa, O., & Chaminuka, M. L. (2012). Perceptions of Teacher Trainees Towards their Teacher Education Curriculum in the Context of Inclusion. Online Journal of Education Research, 1(2), 36-43.

******READ UP also ON SAMPLING, TYPE OF OF SAMPLING, READ UP ON VALIDITY ON QUALITATIVE RESEARCH , characteristic in evaluating collective research (validity reliability)

SAMPLING The terms sampling refer to process of selecting individuals who will participate. Population refer to all members of particular group. The group that the researcher would like to generalize the result. A target population is the actual population to whom the researcher would like to generalize. A representative sample is a sample that is similar to the population on characteristic

Random vs Non random sampling

Modules / Topics /

units of study

Course introduction: Talking about language learning; language and disciplines within linguistics. What arelanguage teaching, learning and acquisition? The nature of applied linguistics and how it relates to questions in language education. History of language teaching. Concepts of Language: Look at the trends in linguistic theory and their relationship to language teaching Concepts of Society: Examine the role of disciplines like sociology and anthropology on the study of language and language learning Concepts of Language Learning: Examine the theoretical base for language teaching which relates both the individual learner and to the language learning process as a whole. Concepts of Language Teaching: Deals with the study of education and its relevance to language teaching. Understanding Language Teaching: From Methods to Post Methods 1: Language Teaching Methods Understanding Language Teaching: From Methods to Post Methods 2: Postmethod Perspectives