In a qualitative type of investigation, "WHAT" type questions are descriptive, while "HOW" types are exploratory. Can these two questions be asked successively to develop a theoretical framework? And if so, what would be the overarching, or central question?
Dear Mohamed
I do not think, there is any pre-ordered sequence of asking questions in qualitative research. Almost all research in social/cultural anthropology is exploratory. You keep on asking to precisely know the nature of a phenomenon. This may involve, for example, all types of questions, some of which may be as follows:
a. What happened?
b. How does it work?
c. Who all are/were involved in its functioning?
d. Why did not others join in that effort?
e. Whose contribution is the maximum/symbolic?
f. Where did they go to do this, and so on?
The idea is to discover the truth, and the factors that contribute to its state, say today or an earlier date.
Dear Mohamed
I do not think, there is any pre-ordered sequence of asking questions in qualitative research. Almost all research in social/cultural anthropology is exploratory. You keep on asking to precisely know the nature of a phenomenon. This may involve, for example, all types of questions, some of which may be as follows:
a. What happened?
b. How does it work?
c. Who all are/were involved in its functioning?
d. Why did not others join in that effort?
e. Whose contribution is the maximum/symbolic?
f. Where did they go to do this, and so on?
The idea is to discover the truth, and the factors that contribute to its state, say today or an earlier date.
I would be tempted to say yes though it will depend on the type of topic that you would be exploring.
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/is4800sp12/resources/qualmethods.pdf
Let us say the topic is “People’s experiences of health needs, health care, accessing care and keeping healthy”.
You may start with “What type of health needs were you looking for?” Based on the answers you may start to question “Why a particular health need is important to you?” Based on the answer start developing a “Framework for the type of health needs that require special attention for a segment of people”. This may then be utilized further exploration with further questions like the ones Prof Debi has given above.
This is purely a hypothetical situation, but gives some idea of how the scenario can be expanded.
http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/48453_ch_1.pdf
Thank you for the question Mohamed! And your responses dear Professors.
I would say yes. Descriptive analysis can be used for the how questions, and other statistical analysis methods may be utilized for analyzing the what questions.
It depends on the topic, but for process research, I agree with some previous replies that you could add a question 'why' (or why not): this can be even a central question. Also, it may be very important when something happened.
I too agree with Debi taking risk of downvoted. However, it is not necessary that qualitative research is "social/cultural anthropology and exploratory". What about qualitative research in nursing, psychopathy and health care or about clanging environment. These researches come out with certain themes that shed light on underlying dimension of the problems/issues which simply cannot be discovered by empiricism.
I think most interesting and innovative research works the way you, Mohamed, describe. I, on a personal and -not yet- theoretically elaborated level, understand that as an actualization of Weberian "understanding sociology" (or anthropology, cultural studies... you name it. The central part is the "understanding"). The main difference to other research is that you part from experience that you try to understand on a theoretical level and not theories that you try to prove empirically.
Well, actually, there are lots of approaches in this, maybe the most relevant being "Grounded Theory".
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