Theme 4: Post-reflections

Observation combined with content-analysis

For this week I chose a paper that used the qualitative method focus groups. During the seminar this week I realized that the two most common qualitative methods were interviews and, like in my paper, focus groups, which have some mutual parts. The other two most common qualitative methods were observations and content-analysis, which I’m not as familiar with. We discussed some regarding that observations might be challenging because of the participant’s feeling of being watched and thus leading to not performing the tasks in a natural way. This gets better if the observations are done over a long period of time, since the participants get more comfortable, but if you don’t have much time, this could be a problem.

After the seminar I thought more about this and realized that maybe content-analysis could be a solution to that problem, or at least a way around it. When conducting content-analysis, you gather information that the participant already have shared before you are collecting it (Stemler, 2001). This way you wouldn’t interfere the same way you do with having the participant video-taped or watched as in observations. I recognize that content-analysis doesn’t exactly gather the same type of data as observations do. With content-analysis you don’t get to see how the participant was sharing the information, only what the information was. But I believe that you might solve some of the problems with observations by combining this method with content-analysis. Then you would have the benefits of observations and the naturally shared information from the participant through content-analysis, which is harder to get in observations.

Developing new qualitative methods

One thing I found interesting was that there weren’t many other well-known qualitative methods except for those I have mentioned. I think that we should try to develop new types of qualitative methods and maybe think more “outside the box” while doing so, as mentioned in Creative methods –drawing, writing and photography (2012). The methods used now are good, but seem very non-creative. During the seminar it was mentioned that in an art study, the participants got to take or draw pictures of their experience during an experiment. This is creative and would be interesting to analyze. I think that more effort to try to invent new methods would help us gather more interesting and complete data and also cover more areas while doing so. Existing methods could be complemented with new and more creative ones, which could give a new dimension to the gathered data.

References:

Creative methods –drawing, writing and photography (2012). http://www.ucl.ac.uk/public-engagement/research/toolkits/Methods/Creative_methods.pdf. Downloaded 2012-11-20.

Stemler, Steve (2001). An overview of content analysis. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(17).