A research methods myth that has to go?!
Here's my research methods myth that has to go! Qualitative research is easy; it’s just words after all. Over the last few months, I’ve heard several colleagues and students say, “I had no idea qualitative research was so much work!” 🤦♀️
Now this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this comment. In fact, it’s probably not even the 100th. When I started in health services research very few people were doing interviews. Numbers and clinical data mattered more. So, I would smile and explain why qualitative research was important and then showed them through my work what it brought to our understanding of healthcare.
Fast forward 10 years, qualitative research has spread and gained a firm foothold. Numbers are still tops but knowing how people think about their health and their work has gained importance especially as we’ve seen good evidence go unimplemented. Now, when I hear someone say, “gosh qualitative research is tough.” Sometimes it’s all I can do to stop from rolling my eyes and saying, “No duh, of course it’s work.”
I’ve been thinking about my knee jerk reaction to that comment a lot lately and realized it might not be fair…
As part of our research training, we all adopt a particular research method or analytic approach that comes more naturally. For some that’s statistics and experimental designs, for others that’s content analyses and observational research designs.
Qualitative research methods (interviews and focus groups) have always come easier for me. Words, and peoples’ intent with those words, seem to jump right off the pages of interview transcripts and into my lap. I can also connect those words and ideas across interview participants to theories and the larger literature with ease. There are times when my brain feels like one of these scenes from a thriller where the main character has connected all the evidence together with red string to reveal the larger pattern.
It's not that I can’t do quantitative research, in fact I have done a good many quantitative studies in my time (because your research question should always dictate your methods). But the difference for me is the amount of effort I need to put into those quantitative studies. It’s a lot more. I must think hard about study objectives, the variables that I want to include, and reread ALL the statistical analysis steps and ways to interpret the findings. Depending on the research question a draft of this kind of project protocol can take me an uninterrupted week. I must force myself to work through each of these steps because it’s hard for my brain to do this work. Whereas if you give me a kernel of an idea for a qualitative study I could knock out the objective, design, and interview guide in an afternoon. My brain gets it faster because it’s easier for me, which means I like it. The “work” of qualitative research doesn’t feel like work to me.
Okay, so connecting the red strings for you my kind readers…I’ve been reading “The Let Them Theory”, by Mel Robbins in my ongoing effort to be a marginally better human being. In a couple of different places in that book she talks about the work of Dr. Tali Sharot, who has found that people often don’t believe that warning labels, threats, and known risks apply to them. Or thought of another way, we all think that we are the exception not the rule.
Using myself as the example here, part of my frustration with not getting quantitative methods may come from the fact that I assume if I could understand and do one type of research I should be able to do another. But that’s just not how it works, for the reasons I outlined earlier. If this can be true for me in relation to quantitative research, I’m sure it is also at least partially the case for my colleagues and students who are surprised by how they feel the work of qualitative research.
If this is the case for me, could it also be the case for you? If so, then maybe a better question to ask is what research methods myth do YOU believe that needs to go?
I eagerly await your thoughts.
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