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The schedule below will help iMET students track progress toward the completion of the master's portfolio.

A little to read about qualitative research

Looking at qualitative research with a note about the WebQuest perspective.

What is qualitative research? Rob McBride and John Schostak define it as "Enquiry Learning".

Using Sharan Merriam's Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education (1998), we take as a principle assumption that individuals construct reality by interactions with their social environment.  Following this, qualitative researchers are interested in understanding the meanings that people construct.  Qualitative research can reveal how parts fit together to reveal the whole.  In contrast, quantitative researchers understand the whole by taking apart its components and testing them.  These components become the variables of a study.

Other characteristics of qualitative research (p. 5 - 8):

• researcher is the primary data collection instrument
  • collects, processes, clarifies and summarizes data as the study evolves
• usually involves fieldwork
  • observations
  • interviews
  • review of documents
• primarily an inductive research strategy
  • often a lack of theory requires that the researcher builds a theory that explains the data
• richly descriptive

Merriam further describes qualitative research as generally having "emergent and flexible" designs with small, non-random, purposeful samples.  The researcher -the primary instrument of data collection- spends long hours in the natural setting (p. 8).  These, and the major characteristics outlined above, may match nicely with the research plans that iMET students consider in their action research design.  In some respects, the characteristics of qualitative research may also be embedded in the designs of WebQuests.

Howard Becker, in Tricks of the Trade, provides some highly useful ways to think about all research (Becker, 1998).  Below are some of the "tricks" Becker feels researchers must scrutinize as they look at their areas of focus.  I highly recommend this book.

• Null Hypothesis Craziness:  If you reject your Null, look closely at the the deviations.  What constraints, or confounds, operate on your new knowledge? (p. 24)
• Coincidence happens! (p. 28)
• The image of society as a machine:  Reverse engineer the machine and you change the produce.  This forces the researcher to rethink some of the variables.  (p. 35)
• The image of society as an organism:  Think about it. Problems contain parts that are usually not disconnected.  Consider the Red, White and Blue Tough Puzzle once again.  It's not organic, but its connected logic has all the elements of a convoluted problem of real life.  See the Phorum for further explanation of this.  (p. 40)
• Turning people into activities:  Putting people in containers limits their actions.  Study their actions in context. (p. 44)
• Everything has to be someplace:  Situate the problem. (p. 51)

Becker's words can summarize much of the above list:  "When an analyst of causes has done the job well, the result is a large proportion of variance explained.  When an analyst of narrative has done the job well, the result is a story that explains why this process had to lead to this result." (p. 57)  

Finally, ask "how" not just "why".  Becker quotes Charles Ragin in describing the investigator thinking about his research problem: 

"...pondering the possibilities gained from deep familiarity with some aspect of the works, systematizing those ideas in relation to kinds of information one might gather, checking the ideas in the light of that information, dealing with the inevitable discrepancies between what was expected and what was found by rethinking the possibilities and getting more data, and so on, in a version of Kuhn's image of the development of science as a whole." (p. 66)

Simple summaries of the characteristics contrasting qualitative and quantitative methodologies can  be found at the following locations:

• San Diego State University
• Southwest Missouri State University

A more in-depth summary:

• A study by Donna McKereghan, a doctoral student at Gonzaga University, details need for clarity with regard to qualitative versus quantitative research.

Online meetings

All online meetings will be held on Wednesdays or Thursdays except where individual arrangements are made.