Qualitative Research Methods in Cognitive Psychology: Foundations and Approaches

Hello and welcome to the course basics of experimental uh design for cognitive psychology. I am Ark Parma from the

department of cognitive science at ID Kpur. This is the first week of the course and we we're trying to have a

brief historical background about the evolution of uh you know methods in psychology.

In today's lecture, I'll talk to you a little bit about an uh you know, I'll try and give you an overview of the

qualitative research methods in psychology. Now, uh we've talked about this in the

previous lecture. There were two possible paths. One is the closer to the natural sciences uh you know approach

which basically is uh manifested best in the quantitative uh research paradigm. uh whereas this uh the other uh uh you

know uh path is the one that was uh advocated by Dily and uh others which basically say that you know uh there is

this mental sciences approach uh which Dily talked about and he said that uh you know psychology should follow uh

something closer to that. So psychology should go with the hermeneutic approach uh in trying to understand the

individual in context in terms of their personal and social histories. So let us try and see what are the assumptions

that drive or that underly this uh you know qualitative research uh methods approach.

Now uh one of the first uh and the most important things uh you know that is covered under qualitative research is

that when we are talking about the variables of interest uh qualitative researchers are actually not convinced

about this objective reality. Remember we were talking about this in the previous class that the fundamental

assumption of quantitative research methods is there is an objective reality that reality exists outside the mind of

an individual and in that sense that is a shared reality about which whatever uh you know about which when we make

conclusions these conclusions will apply to a large sample of people. On the other hand, uh qualitative researchers

are not convinced that there is such an objective reality and that we can measure and quantify aspects of this

objective reality. Reality under the qualitative approach is basically seen as constructed by different individuals

and therefore influenced by their specific in you know characteristics, their personal histories, their social

histories, their aims, their motivations, uh their emotional experiences, their cognition, their

their way of thinking and looking at the world and so on. So it is very uh interesting that the fundamental

assumption about the nature of reality is actually slightly different quite different actually uh between the

quantitative and the qualitative research methods and this is something that is you know the the most

fundamental aspect that we should uh you know keep in mind. Now we are talking about controlling variables. We are

talking about uh you know uh matching variables uh allowing not allowing the confounding or unplanned or irrelevant

variables uh you know while we are making measurements. Qualitative researchers believe that

these attempts to sanitize or control for uh variables basically makes this setting impoverished. It takes away the

naturalness. It takes away uh you know the natural context of human behavior. So whatever you measure at that point is

not natural. It's it's the classic criticism against lab-based studies. Uh a lot of uh you know even us

experimentalists a lot of times we wonder that okay we found this phenomena this is how this particular phenomena

say for example visual search or this and that they work in the lab. Do they work exactly in the same way outside the

lab as well? You know this concept of ecological validity that keeps popping up. All right. So qualitative

researchers basically say that when you attempt to control for possible confounding variables, we overs sanitize

the uh you know uh environment and this adds noise and this uh you know uh basically does not really re reveal the

actual real world scenario rather it turns the environment into into an artificial setting that uh you know robs

the participant of their natural ways of behaving and interacting with the environment. You remember in

naturalistic observation for example if you see uh how uh you know animal planet and discovery channel make their

documentaries about animals they're not there. They're not uh intervening in how the animal is interacting with this

environment. You're basically they've you know put there put the concealed cameras and gone away and then came back

and looked at the recordings and stitch them together through a narrative. All right. So this is something that is a

very uh you know important point that the qualitative researchers talk about. Now uh also uh something that is very

striking about qualitative research methodologies is they actually talk about and they acknowledge the possible

influence of the researcher's role in this research enterprise. They say yes the researcher may have an influence on

how the data is collected the method that are being followed and the interpretations that are made.

Consequently, uh they believe however that we should acknowledge this and the again the

costbenefit analysis is that uh this influence can be offset by a variety of factors. For example, the expected gains

uh uh you know from such an enterprise are more uh because they allow us a more nuanced understanding of the situation

more nuanced understanding of the individual acting in that context or in that scenario. also conclusions even

those reached on the basis of quantitative research and falsification are mostly relative. So they say uh this

is not very different uh from uh you know when you are actually carrying out their experiments uh in in the

laboratories. The most obvious biases however say for example if you are uh you know

conducting uh research on uh you know upper side or social discrimination and you are having a white male uh you know

interview uh black uh uh you know males or females obviously they there are uh possible sources of bias and they can

basically be uh handled best by being aware of them rather than polishing over them. All right. So this is again

something uh very interesting that qualitative researchers talk about. Qualitative researchers also talk about

the importance of embedded understanding. They they emphasize the uh the role of an individual embedded in

context. Okay. So qualitative psychology or qualitative research methods seek to develop an understanding of the

situation wherein the researcher and the researched are immersed in a given situation. the meaning of the situation

can best be understood through such a paradigm is what the belief is. So while the quantitative you know researchers

approach a situation with a preconceived ideas that okay uh this is the situation these are the variables this is how we

going to study it qualitative researchers typically enter a situation with an open mind. They say okay let us

observe let us collect data and we will see what variables play a part later post factor once the data has been

collected once we have captured the situation in all of its wholeness and richness that is a very interesting sort

of take on this. Okay. Now what are you collecting data for? So there is also a bit of a uh you know contrast in the uh

you know the approaches of the quantitative and the qualitative uh you know methods here that uh under

qualitative methods the emphasis is on immersion. The emphasis uh is on the fact that meaning implies they are not

really interested in generalizable knowledge. They are interested in the individual in the individual's personal

social history in the individual's emotion uh uh you know emotion cognition and vition uh they don't want to

generalize this data to everybody else. They understand that individuals are unique. They understand that the

situations are unique and the behavior of an individual must be interpreted in the background in the context of this

unique situation. So this is more uh you know u you know uh this approach is referred to as the nomtic approach as

opposed to the idographic approach that is tied to uh you know that is tied to you know the individual. Okay actually

I've mixed it. So the nomadic approach is where you are talking about searching for universal principles and the

idographic approach is when you're tying it to the uh individual. So the qualitative approaches are in that sense

more idographic also. uh what is the way of uh you know deducing knowledge? What is the way of

coming up with this knowledge, synthesizing this knowledge? So induction is pref is a preferred way of

uh you know creating knowledge as opposed to deduction. So uh quantitative researchers basically often make use of

predetermined variables because they have specific hypothesis which they are testing as part of the hypothetical

hypothetical deductive model. Uh so in that sense there uh you know the preferred way of reasoning is uh

deduction whereas on the other hand uh the qualitative approach to research does not endorse this previously

mentioned idea of making conclusions because it carries the risk of you know the researcher missing the uh overall

picture. You know you're focused on very specific phenomena and you're missing the overall picture. Remember the gest

schools what they used to say. So by focusing on details, researchers can easily lose sight of the wider picture

and is therefore extremely important to look at the situation with an open mind rather than fixating on a single detail.

That's that's basically what the qualitative researchers feel and in that sense instead of constantly using

deductive reasoning uh uh qualitative researchers uh prefer following the method of inductive reasoning. They say

let's reason from fact to theory. Let's observe the situation in all of its detail and richness. Let's enlist our

facts. Let's list Let's try to draw conclusion based on uh how all of these facts are linked together. What are the

convergent impressions or observations that can be derived out of this? Again uh the interesting thing here is

that in the qualitative tradition the data must be gathered and made available so that it can be verified by others.

But the findings are typically not coded only in the numerical format. Rather they comprise an organized set of verbal

statements you know interviews and uh phenomenal experiences, diaries and case studies things like that. And these

verbal statements are then uh you know they they basically are uh analyzed in different ways to get to the core of

what data is there and what kind of evidence is there. For example uh one of the ways to capture this rich

information that the qualitative researchers are stressing is uh say for example you know carrying out

semi-structured interviews. What are semiructured interviews? The interviewer here uses a limited set of core

questions but allows the the participant to speak freely otherwise. So uh for example you want to capture the

experience of people who are displaced by uh you know uh the tsunamis or the earthquakes and so on. So you go there

you have your set of questions you keep putting your questions intermittently but for the most part you allow the

participant to speak freely. Now when you allow the participant to speak freely uh to speak freely what you are

allowing for is that you are allowing for the whole picture to emerge different uh you know aspects that you

might not even have thought about uh before walking into the scene. So in that sense the rich information is

captured the overall picture is better uh understood and this is something that uh you know is is one of the preferred

methods uh when you're talking about qualitative research just as I said uh two kinds of questions open-ended

questions open-ended questions are those that invite the interviewees to give their own point of view uh to basically

uh you know uh so you what you basically are trying to do is you're not asking the researcher to deliver perspective

laden questions. So for example, if you ask somebody uh you know uh do you think the food is uh very good here? Uh how do

you like it? Once you've given this thing, you're already telling the uh person that oh he has to uh you know uh

reply in a particular way. Uh so these kind of questions are also called nondirective questions where uh you know

the question already hints or already directs what kind of answer is expected. So typically open-ended and nondirective

questions are are given where there's freedom for the participant to provide his or her own perspective and

nondirective questions say for example you don't start with oh the food is very good do you also like it you basically

say do you like the food something like that which will not hint that a specific answer is already expected.

Another type of technique that allows for capturing the rich information here is the use of uh you know what are

called focus groups. Uh so focus groups is basically when some semistructured uh you know uh questions are given as the

basis of discussion in a in a group setting. So you have a group of participants say for example people

discussing about uh any issue say for example uh the issue is whether a particular uh kind of tradition should

be followed uh you know in a given society. So what you do is you create some questions around that uh particular

topic. You have people come and sit together uh in a room and then you uh uh just moderate the discussion. You

instigate the discussion and you let the participants exchange their opinions and while you are uh you know uh gradually

receded into the background and uh observing and documenting all of that. So focus groups sometimes also allow uh

for uh you know uh getting a nice picture getting an overall picture and the meaning of true meaning of a overall

situation. So that is also something that is preferred. Now once you have data like this once you have these

semiructured interviews once you have these focus group discussions how do you deal with this data we not doing

frequency and tally kind of thing that the quantitative people were doing. So what do we do? we transcribe data and

then we analyze uh data for themes and so on. So for example uh just to sort of describe it briefly the data obtained

from these semiructured interviews typically consist of audiary or visual recordings that then need to be

transcribed into text and that this text can be analyzed to uh you know uh basically reveal categories and reveal

themes and these categories and themes basically give us a better idea of how uh you know this data is organized. What

are the uh you know uh broad trends? what are the broad uh you know factors that are appearing from this data. So

the investigator basically uh will uh you know dig into this uh these raw materials. They'll develop say for

example a flowchart of core ideas based on multiple several close readings iterative readings of the material. The

researcher then tries to encompass this data as comprehensively and as systematically as possible saving

through the material and churning uh you know the data uh to reveal more and more insights as detailed insights as

possible trying uh to make sure that none of these aspects none of the aspects of the overall picture are

missed. We'll sample a couple of methods within this qualitative tradition. Let us try

and take some examples and see where things are. Uh so for example, grounded theory. Grounded theory is one of the

oldest methods within the uh qualitative tradition. Uh this is supposed to be uh you know rooted from a book written by

Glazer and Straw the uh you know in in 1967. And what entails this grounded theory is uh you know here basically the

inter interview interviewer is rewriting the raw material on the basis of questions. What kind of questions? What

is going on here? So what is the situation like? What are the things that are happening? what are the main

problems that you guys are facing? Or say for example, how do you try to solve them? So these are rather open-ended

questions that uh that can be posed about any phenomena to participants and then you allow the participants to

reveal their experiences and their thought processes to you. Later what you will do is these answers will be

recorded into a sequence of themes into you know a a group of categories. They can be mapped in different ways. uh and

then this categorization according to glazed and straws and others basically will allow for a theory to emerge mainly

through inductive reasoning. Say for example you want to talk about experience of you know pain in in uh you

know in uh terminal illness or something like that. So you start with something you know how's your experience of uh you

know illness X been and then you let the participant speak and then you hear the participant you talk to many

participants you get some data and then what you do is you start seeing through this and there different themes will

start emerging say for example the personal struggles the familial struggles the financial aspects the

aspects of uh being slightly helpless the aspect of uh cooperation or non-ooperation from people around and in

that sense grounded theory basically is uh you know trying to understand the overall situation and this will be

different for different individuals because they uh you know the situations will be different and so on. But if you

sort of put a bunch of these interviews together uh and you analyze them and you see them and you uh you know look at

categories and flowcharts and so on you might find that there are common themes across different experiences of uh you

know terminal illnesses. you can uh you know in that sense it allows you a a much deeper look. Okay, let's take one

example that is uh been presented by Brisbane Russell in in this book historical and conceptual issues in

psychology. Uh this is there is this study by Shaw and colleagues who were examining who were looking to examine

academic procrastination using grounded theory. Now academic procrastination is typically seen as a negative personality

trait but then nevertheless a lot of people do it. So uh what are the factors here? Let's try and uh see that. So this

study involved 67 students over a total of four phases starting from a combination of focus groups and

semi-structured interviews and then moving on to identifying themes uh which were found important with respect to

procrastination. Let's let's see what is happening here. So these are the four phases. The first phase is uh open

phase. You're trying to identify quotes within categories for further analysis. 26 participants, 20 in focus groups, six

in individual interviews that are participating here. Then you have the axial coding scheme where you basically

are trying to explore these codes in detail. You're trying to relate the codes to each other and construct these

themes. You know what are the higher categories. So you're building on knowledge. You are making a more

systematic uh sort of organization of this knowledge. Then what you can do is you can have more selective sort of an

idea. So construct paradigm models and discuss the themes in relation to the model. what are the themes emerging?

What is the model that we are looking at these themes through? So what is the guiding uh framework that basically we

will use to interpret this data and the emerging themes and then you test and validate and explicate the paradigm

model until you know all the explanations are exhausted and saturated. So again for each of these

things you will see a different number of uh you know participants are you know involved in each of these uh you know

let's say progressive steps in coming uh towards this uh you know this data. You can see for example what kind of

questions have been used. So how do you describe academic procrastination? Uh what do you do typically when you when

you procrastinate? Are there situations where in which you are more likely to procrastinate than others? How do you

cope with uh you know when you procrastinate? How do you deal with that? Uh what are the some of the

positive and negative consequences of procrastination? So you'll see that there are bunch of these questions and

these questions basically lead uh to different categories. For example, you can see there are coping strategies. So

uh you know some of these uh uh codes uh basically can correspond to oh what are the coping strategies that people

typically use or what are the consequences of procrastination that people experience and what are the

contributing factors so anticidence of procrastination what are the contributing factors to procrastination

and you'll see that the there are these quotes on the uh uh you know right side which may correspond to these specific

categories of analysis. Uh yeah so uh here you can see there and then you say sort of uh you know you're

seing the data you are uh more a nicer picture is emerging so you have these macro themes anticidence of

procrastination maybe it is linked to the kind of task you are supposed to do it's too difficult task too

uninteresting task maybe there is a higher uh chance to procrastinate self characteristics teacher characteristics

then you have amongst coping strategies there are cognitive coping strategies there are effective coping coping

strategies there are consequence quences. So within consequences, there are two themes that are emerging.

Quality of life, how does procrastination affect your quality of life? How does procrastination affect

the quality of work that you're going to do? So you can see here very systematically from these broad

categories to these uh themes uh a nicer picture is emerging and it is a systematic uh overall picture of how

procrastination happens that emerges out of this. All right. uh eventually on the basis of the model that they uh you know

discovered uh you know in this previous slide that we were seeing this is the broader model they basically uh uh

distilled six principles that affect students procrastination. For example they uh found out that minimum time

students have uh busy lives with the following sequence of priorities. you know personal relationships, work and

study the amount of study time is minimized to maximize the time available for friends uh for family for having uh

work and so on. So procrastination typically is an interesting tool that enables students to delay as much uh

study as possible until the last weeks of the semester you know just when the exams are about to happen. uh optimum

efficiency uh you know u there's a there's a saying uh you know which I've often heard is that the work expands to

fill whatever time you allotted. So for example, if you have to do something, you give it five weeks, it'll take 5

weeks to be done. Uh you give it one week, it'll be finished within one week. So some kind of optimizing strategy.

Maybe uh students look at procrastination as an optimizing strategy as well. Rewards, there are

rewards also associated with procrastination such as there is more rapid feedback because you're doing it

at the last time. You're submitting your assignment on the last day and the teacher is supposed to uh you know give

you the feedback on the next day. So immediately uh you know the feedback is there. So you can see how again I'm not

really a qualitative researcher so I'm not really going into a lot of detail about this but you can see uh I guess

that how does the uh grounded theory approach help in uh you know developing uh interesting insights in in the

behavior of procrastination. Remember we are not following the experimental method here. We are not controlled for

any number of variables. You're not controlled for uh the type of participants that are used. We've not

controlled for the type of settings that are used but we have gone out and generally collected data with a bunch of

people. Yes, some kind of uh you know u factors have gone into the sampling and so on but this is allowing us to get a

more general holistic picture of procrastination. Now another uh interesting uh you know

methodology that is used within the qualitative tradition uh is the phenomenological analysis. But why does

this come up? Because there are uh some uh you know shortcomings of the grounded theory that were pointed out. Uh for

example, the assumption within the theory that there is an object. See in some sense you will see the way the

grounded theory works uh it still is working towards an objective reality which is closer to the quantitative

tradition uh than uh and the mainstream psychology than qualitative issues. Another is that grounded theory stresses

the importance of inductive reasoning and verification both of which we have seen are in some sense uh you know

difficult to sort of defend uh and were eventually discarded by 20th century philosophy of science people. Finally,

uh you know, one important problem with uh grounded theory uh was that uh it does not really take into account that

the data that is provided by the participants actually comprises mainly of their perceptions and interpretations

of uh you know uh so it it it did not really take into account uh the perception and interpretation of

individuals. You know in some sense it became apparent that grounded theory had found its origin in sociology where

you're talking about an individual embedded in society. So when you're collecting data when you are uh you know

seing and making these broader categories what you're doing is you're still performing some kind of

generalization. You're not really doing a personentric uh you know the the uh preferred idographic kind of analysis

that is required. you're not uh diving deep into what does procrastination for example mean if you take this particular

case an example for a given individual in question. All right. So to address some of these

concerns, psychologists stressed that the primary aim of qualitative research should be to examine what reality looked

like for the individual participants and it should give enough scope to the view of person dependent reality in contrast

to the view of objective person independent reality. Okay. So this is something that that was uh you know

leveled as a criticism against uh you know grounded theory. Now Huzzle's phenomenology. So some of this some of

the criticisms or some of the uh newer uh you know inspiration was drawn uh from Edmund Huzzle as well and Huzzle's

phenomenology emphasizes that psychology uh should be a reflective study of an individual's consciousness as

experienced from the first person point of view. Okay. So again uh let's not generalize uh let's dive deeper and

let's pay more attention to the individual in picture. Okay. So it seems uh you know if if you look back that

psychology has been mostly uh you know eager or too eager in in in some sense to study the objective reality the world

uh than for example uh the world as compared to the way in which the world is perceived by

individual uh you know entities. uh in that sense when you want to have that kind of view of reality what one does is

uh one approaches this uh you know uh investigation with uh artificial concepts artificial variables that you

have created and in that sense uh you know uh these variables uh are not uh these variables are not capturing the

actual experience of the individual and in that and that is something that uh you know uh you know Huzzle offers that

can be captured or should be captured by newer methods uh one of them being the interpretative phenomenological

analysis. So let's let's talk a little bit about this interpretative phenomenological analysis.

Now uh IPA uh proceeds by systematically going through the transcriptions and identifying themes that can be clustered

into higher order categories but the categories are made uh you know in in such a way that they capture the essence

of the essence of the phenomena under investigation. It is centered more on how participants make sense of their

personal and social world. It attempts to explore the personal experience more than the shared and generic experience

questions. For example, how do you uh elicit these uh responses that will give you this information is how is this

perceived by you? How do you perceive procrast? What does it mean for you? Not about what is procrastination in

general, but what does it mean for you? Why would you do that? Okay. uh what meaning does the participant so how do

you view your tendency to procrastinate how do you say for example and how does it what kind of individual consequences

this has for you okay so questions broadly are similar open-ended uh semiructured questions but the focus of

the questions is different now the focus is not the phenomena in general but the individual's experience of the phenomena

and this is some difference between the IPA and the grounded theory it seems okay uh also The IPA acknowledges the

input from the researcher as do uh some of the other uh things other traditions within qualitative psychology that uh

you know what is the so you can look at data and you can basically ask questions like what is the person trying to

achieve here? What kind of contribution is the person actually making in terms of eliciting the truths that the person

is after? Okay. uh and therefore you can sort of acknowledge it and you can basically guard uh you know against the

individual biases creeping in. Say for example when the person is taking this interview is something else leaking out

there uh which is not the uh you know the phenomenal individual experience of the participant we are studying. Okay.

So uh see as the qualitative approaches generally say it is better to acknowledge and be aware of the possible

influences of the researcher rather than just assuming that there is no influence from the researcher in the research

enterprise. Broadly just summing up some of the highlighted uh you know some of the key

elements of IP as uh highlighted by Reed and colleagues that uh IP is an inductive approach. It goes from uh you

know data to understanding is not concerned with testing hypothesis and prior assumptions. It's you know a more

open-ended sort of approach. You go you discover and then you make categories later. It aims to capture and explore

the meanings that the participants individually assign to their own experiences and the participants are uh

treated as the best experts on the. So there is no uh you know guide guided uh you know thing uh telling the

participants that you answered in these these terms and so on. It aims to reduce the complexity of the raw data through

rigorous and systematic analysis. So again you know developing categories and so on. Uh the analysis are broadly

interpretative and researchers are also encouraged to reflect upon their own uh role in this process. So let's let's

look at some example. So Dixon and colleagues for uh for example they were looking at the experiences of people

living with the chronic fatigue syndrome. So this is a disorder and they wanted to understand using IPA the

experiences of people who uh underwent this chronic fatigue syndrome. So what did they do? They had semiructured

interviews in-depth interviews with 14 patients. Each participant was interviewed individually through a

number of non-directive open-ended questions which were used in a flexible way. For example, uh tell me about your

experience with CFS, not about CFS, how it generally is. What aspects of your life has CFS impacted most? What are the

ways in which your life gets affected by CFS? And how have the other people reacted to your condition? You know, how

are people around? So now you can see the the stress is more upon the individual, the experiences of the

individual, the experience of the individual in relation to the personal and social history and so on. Okay. What

comes out of this? So for example they discovered that there are three uh recurrent uh in and but interrelated

themes that come out. Uh there is this idea of identity crisis uh agency and embodiment. So this theme comprised a

feeling of personal loss characterized by profound diminishing personal control. See once you're if you're tired

all the time chronic fatigue syndrome is basically when a person experiences tiredness all the time you know uh is

does not have strength to do something. Okay. So, uh this is exemplified by the statement such as uh you know by a by an

individual that CFS seems to be a dict CFS is a dictator. It dictates my everyday life. It determines what I can

and cannot do. It controls my body and my mind and every part of my being. So here you can see that the participant is

talking about the individual experience with CFS. Is not talking about how how CFS is uh how CFS uh is experienced by a

large number of people but his own individual or her own individual experience.

Also uh another theme that you can see here that emerges is skepticism and the self. So this theme typically refers to

uh difficulties in social interactions because of the skepticism about the wider society you know uh something like

say for example uh how is the person feeling in relation to the society becomes less trusting of the overall uh

system. So you can see this uh you know in in this excerpt from an interview well people thought you were a malinger

you know it's not that uh you know you're not afflicted from a disease but you are just like that you are a

malinger you basically uh you know linger on and you sort of delay things and so on that you were at it you were

trying to consciously uh do something and there was this idea that you were just lazy okay this led to a sense of

crisis of the self I started thinking to myself am I just making this up Is it all in my head? So you can see this

skepticism and self-doubt that uh arises out of an individual's experience with chronic fatigue. Okay. So there are

there are this is basically just a demonstration uh of how uh the IPA might uh you know uh lead to uh you know a a

slightly deeper picture of the individual experience uh when uh you know you're considering particular

phenomena. Now uh this is just a very broad survey of qualitative research. I've not

covered it exhaustively and I I I I'll not pretend to know uh all the nitty-g gritties about this. Uh but this

overview tells us a few things. Okay, it tells us that there are certain strengths in qualitative research. For

example, uh it is more focused on understanding situations and solving problems. understanding the individuals

in uh all of their totality, understanding the human experience in totality. At Diliy would say it also can

lead to generation of new ideas and elaboration of theories. You know once you start discovering these themes you

can actually come up with newer ideas. You will probably discover a world of variables that you had not even thought

about if you had gone with uh you know a narrow and scaffolded uh view of how a particular phenomena works. You let

people talk uh you let their experience uh shine and in that sense you'll probably uh you are giving yourself a

better chance of understanding the phenomenon in its totality. It is also more perceptive to the needs

of the participants. See what is the purpose of conducting psychological research in the first place. So uh

qualitative methods it seems uh are more perceptive to the individual experience are more perceptive to what the

participants need. Okay. Uh so in that sense these these are strengths of this uh overall method but again there are

some limitations as well. For example uh the broadly preferred methods are inductive reasoning and verification.

We've discussed in the past about possible pitfalls with the method of verification. We've discussed the

possible pitfalls about uh inductive reasoning. Also which theory do you choose? You we

saw two examples grounded theory and IPA. uh there can be other theories like discourse analysis and so on. How do you

choose? Because each theory will give you some aspect of the truth. Probably the whole truth. Uh you know if you go

by the by those respective theorists. Uh how do you choose? What is it that you're looking for? Say for example in

quantitative methods we can choose between descriptive correlational and experimental research because we can say

oh we want to decipher causal relationships and the uh experimental method allows us the best chance to

decipher causal relationships. uh in qualitative methods uh you're ill sort of you're not in the best position uh to

decide how this would work. All right. Uh also uh this is broadly based on introspection. So uh while it's

interesting and gives a lot of insight when you're talking to participants uh in the grounded theory approach or in

the IP approach the the you know the excerpts I was reading out but most of these are excerpts that are participants

expert excerpts based on their introspection. Okay. Uh and again uh if you've done any simple course on history

of psychology you'll know that introspection has its own pitfalls. Sometimes uh you know our uh ideas about

a particular experience are colored by uh several other factors. We might not uh you know uh we might not be experts

in in our own experiences after all you know something like that. Also uh there is obviously uh always a chance of the

you know the researcher uh playing an important part in the kind of outcomes that you get. Say for example when

you're describing your troubles and your p your uh problems that you're facing your uh experiences uh I'm sure they

will be different when you're talking to a friend to a stranger or to a family member. All right. And in that sense uh

there is it seems uh you know a very uh important role of the researcher in this research enterprise. Yes. the uh general

qualitative research uh uh theory basically says that you acknowledge it and you find ways to get around it.

Okay. So uh again this is probably uh all that I will talk about today. There was just a very brief uh you know

overview of qualitative research enterprise. Uh in the next week we'll start with uh a more focused discussion

on uh quantitative research methods. We'll go into detail about some of the experimental designs and so on. Thank

you.