Cheers from Hong Kong on a wet and humid Wednesday morning.
This all appears to be moving rather slowly. Maybe I can spend an extra hour in bed!
To nudge things along I thought I might take up two points from Tom's contribution: being open to the possibility of unpredicted outcomes and "easy" versus "hard" methodologies.
[quoting Reeves, 18 Mar 97] The failure to consider alternative interpretations is another flaw. If qualitative researchers fail to find anything that seriously surprises them or runs counter to the expectations they had going into a study, there may be a problem. In my own experience, instructional technologies and other innovations rarely work as planned and it is usually the unintended outcomes that are the most notable.
The possibility of unpredicted outcomes is one of the great strengths of the qualitative approach. The three Case Studies in my paper all bring up issues which were unexpected. Judith Kearins' work, in particular, deserves close scrutiny: you will recall that she found it was not just aboriginal children who were considered by teachers to be "lazy, inattentive underachievers", but all children who scored well on the "spatial relocation test," suggesting that it was teachers who brought a particular, culturally determined value system into the classroom rather than (or in addition to) the aboriginal children. This is a wonderful can of worms and it is a pity that her research as not been followed up. (Or has it?)
Daniel Lam's findings about the ways in which the fishing families reinforce their traditional beliefs about food and health with the modern slogans of the "health food" lobby was also quite unexpected. (By the way, Daniel's study is much wider than the snippet I quoted and he would be happy to correspond with other people working in this field. His address is: tplam@hku.hk.
Even in my project I was surprised to find such strong evidence of metacognition and distributed cognition.
I would agree with Tom that if there are no unpredicted outcomes from a qualitative study then the methodology may be suspect. The self-filling prophecy is a real danger of such studies: e.g., it is very easy to use extracts from interviews to reinforce a previously held belief. Journalists to it every day (and they call it research.)
Qualitative research, done well, is more difficult than most quantitative studies, and it often challenges our most cherished assumptions about teaching, learning, and technology. Ironically, some researchers seem drawn to qualitative inquiry because they perceive it as easier (i.e., no statistics), but nothing could be further from "the truth."
There is a continuum rather than a gulf between what we sneeringly term "journalism" and that upon which we bestow the accolade of "research." The difference is in the rigor with which the data is collected and analyzed--and the attention given to the data rather than to the hypothesis. One of the difficulties of qualitative research is that it is a long and painstaking process, involving a lot of typing, photocopying, and adhesive tape. In recent times the process has been made more manageable by the development of computer tools such as The Ethnograph and NUD*IST. These programs eliminate the need for cut-and-paste and provide a framework for analysis as well as a variety of means of searching, theory-building, and testing. They also assist with the presentation of data. A NUD*IST tree, for example, can be exported as an Inspiration file--which is the basis of the concept map on my WWW page.
But they are not a panacea. I know that many copies of NUD*IST were purchased in the hope that the researcher could "feed data into it" and it would emerge out the other side indexed, sorted and organized--a utopian view of a warm and fuzzy SPSS perhaps. The floppy disks now languish among the paper clips at the backs of drawers.
Another reason for the lack of acceptance of qualitative research, as I said in my paper, is that the gatekeepers distrust it. One of the reasons may be the influence of Psychology on educational technology research as opposed to Sociology or Anthropology. It is interesting that qualitative thinking and methodology have gained a great deal of popularity in the health professions, particularly Nursing. All the best developments of Strauss and Glaser's grounded theory approach have been in health research.
I look forward to your views.