Theory building
Well, I've finished my first foray into qualitative research.  Here are my thoughts:
1) It is VERY time consuming. 
2) It take A LOT more mental effort that quantitative (statistical) analysis of pre-packaged data.
3) It is more fun. 
4) It is more rewarding because you actually get to be creative. 
We are learning a technique called "grounded theory", in which you build theory from the bottom (data) up instead of imposing a theory on already collected data. Our task this week was to do interviews and then "open code" the interviews, looking for emerging concepts.  It was HARD. I really enjoyed doing the interviews.  I interviewed two dads for my project, as my goal is to explore some issues of fatherhood.  Namely, I was looking to see how men understand their role as father, their relationship to their child, and especially how their wife factors in to their thoughts and feelings on being a father.  There is a suggestion in the literature that men's connections to their children are filtered through their connections to the biological mother of their children. What I found was that the men, in fact, discussed their wives and their relationship quite a bit when responding to questions about being a father.  Now, considering that I really had NO idea what I was doing when I was "coding", I don't know how well the assignment actually went.  I'm really looking forward to getting feedback from the professor because I feel like grounded theory is an amazing tool and one that I could really get into using. 
Now that I've experienced the freedom and creativity of qualitative design, I'm loathing my largely quantitative thesis - but have to muster up some passion to actually work on it. More on that later, hopefully. For now...It's off to other things.
1 comments:
I'm such a dork, but I can feel the excitement in your post. I'll even offer to proof your thesis! I'm so glad I'll be seeing you soon because I want to hear all about it. I think fatherhood is a smashing topic for a thesis. We get a lot of verbage in our culture about the virtues/downsides to motherhood, but deadbeat dads and Rhett from That 70's Show are about as deep as it gets for fatherhood references. Go, M-lo!
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