Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

From practice to research
consumer feedback may require a combination of questionnaire
items with predetermined response categories as well as a number
of open-ended questions such as ‘How did you expect to benefit
from this service?’, ‘What were the most useful/least useful aspects
of the service?’ and ‘What suggestions could you make for
improving the service?’
The latter type of question does not presuppose a particular
classification of responses, and in analysing such data the researcher
has to inductively derive categories from the individual responses.
This involves making qualitative judgements about their meaning
before they can be allocated to a particular category. Of course, one
can ‘allow the data to speak for itself’ by reproducing all of the individual
responses but this merely leaves the task of making sense of
the responses up to the reader. It is possible to turn qualitative data
of this nature into quantitative data if the categories are clearly
defined. Thus, with some risk to the diversity and nuances of the
data, and recognising that those with literacy problems may remain
unheard, it is possible to take some qualitative data from the swamp
up to the high hard ground and analyse it there.
In other situations, questions from both the high ground and the
swampy lowland emerge from the same setting but cannot be transformed
into quantitative data. Thus a social worker in an oncology
unit of a hospital who is interested in establishing a support group
for women with gynaecological cancers may ask herself a range of
very different questions. As she looks at a list of the patients in a
particular ward she may ask the following sorts of questions: How
many women in the ward at this time have a similar diagnosis?
How many with this diagnosis are at a similar stage in the trajectory
of their condition? What is their average length of admission? These
are fairly straightforward numerical questions for which the data
already exist.
The next question she may ask is of a very different order: What
are the multiple meanings of such a diagnosis for these women and
significant others in their lives at this time? This is a hermeneutic
question, that is, it is about the construction of meaning. The
responses to such a question are unlikely to be easily classified into
mutually exclusive categories that could be quantitatively analysed
and, even if they were, it is likely that much damage would be done
to their complexity and subtlety. One of us has argued that
‘meaning construction’ is at the heart of much of the work in the
human services field and that the core traditional professional tools
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