Reading Notes

Qualitative research is the act of finding out a person or persons' total story regarding a particular topic. Both articles made the point that qualitative research methods are used for finding motive, and reasons for an occurrence; the details. Conducting qualitative research, one can find important data that might have been labeled as transient or erroneous.

This quote from Airy Fairy seems to sum up what is unearthed by qualitative research: "Direct quotations are a basic source of raw data in qualitative evaluation. They reveal the respondent's level of emotion, their thoughts, their experiences, their basic perceptions." Qual is interesting to me because one is able to peer into another's life and find out WHY things are happening not just that they ARE happening.

Much along the lines of what the Methods workbooks says is that in life there is no control, things are always changing; "In order to find the relationship between two variables, all others must be controlled, whether by a reduction of actual variety, or by the establishment of control groups, or by statistically factoring out other variables. But how do you control the lifetime of experiences that a person brings to an experiment? What is the significance of a causal relation that does not occur independently outside the laboratory? And do results established by examining group tendencies then apply to individuals. Control is problematic in complex physical systems; imagine the problem with human beings." This seems to be extremely true.

I can understand that it is important to know how frequently things are happening but I find more substance in knowing why.