Qualitative Method

Human experience is often too complex and layered to survive being reduced to a number; a great deal of that richness is simply lost the moment a respondent's experience is squeezed into a fixed, close-ended question. If a researcher genuinely wants to understand how a mother makes sense of losing a child, for example, they need to hear her actual story to grasp how her experience is organised and what meaning she herself has given to her suffering; no amount of quantification could capture that. To handle this kind of data, psychologists rely on qualitative methods, one important example being narrative analysis. Qualitative data is also generated whenever a researcher uses participant observation or an unstructured interview, since the resulting information usually takes a descriptive form: the participants' own words, field notes taken by the researcher, photographs, audio or video recordings of interviews, or informal conversations, none of which can be meaningfully converted into scores or subjected to statistical analysis. Instead, the researcher works through a technique called content analysis: identifying recurring thematic categories within the material, and building up and illustrating those categories using actual examples drawn from the data itself, producing an account that is far more descriptive in character than a quantitative o …