How Things Work - Doha Academy of Tertiary Studies

26 QUaLItatIVe ReSeaRCH
community. It could be a phenomenon such as the use of cell phones in
rural China. The thing is what is being studied: a person, a family, a riot,
a corporate merger. A research project could have more than one thing,
or none at all, but most qualitative studies will have a thing. The title
of the book means: Qualitative Research: Studying How Things Work.
Keep the word thing in mind as you read this book.
The community of researchers encourages each individual researcher
to choose what things he or she will study. Of course, if the researcher
works for someone else, the researcher will have less choice but, even in
the most restrained organizations, will have some opportunity to define
the content to be studied. Others may criticize the choices researchers
make, but it is generally agreed that research quality depends on giving
researchers freedom to decide the things to study.
The benefits of research are not evenly spread among the researcher,
the research community, the home institution or corporation, the public,
and others. Science and the professions push, sometimes against
each other, to have the research benefit them. Policy and practice can
be improved by good research and hurt by bad research. Some benefits
occur by studying how people feel about things; we may call it survey
research or polling. Most social research asks not how people feel but
how things work. It often helps to have people report how they see things
working, but most good data come from observations researchers make
about processes, products, and their artifacts. These ideas about “the
thing studied” are developed more in Section 5.2 on interviewing.
1.7. cOMPaRiNG thiNGs
Science seeks understandings of how things generally work, understandings
of causes and effects. That includes functional relationships such
as “The higher the emphasis on student performance on test scores, the
greater the teaching to the test.” One of the most common ways of arriving
at such generalizations is to compare things, such as comparing the
states having high- stakes testing with states having low- stakes testing as
to how much teaching becomes oriented to the content of the standardized
achievement tests. One could also, for a number of schools, examine
levels of emphasis on test scores and levels of teaching to the test and
see how they correlate. One could also do case studies of a few teachers,
looking at their perceptions of pressure for increasing test scores and
separately looking at how much they depart from the prescribed curricu-