[MUSIC] Hi. In this module, I'm going to talk about the sources for qualitative research. One of the most long standing sources for conducting qualitative research, indeed going back into the 19th century has been official documents. Historical and comparative research relies heavily on official documents held in archives. I'll give some examples of the topics of this research in just a bit. This is especially the case in sociology and political science where people conducting qualitative research on things like social movements. On historical and comparative topics, make use again of official documents. These documents may include reports, meeting records and other official documents that provide insight into the deliberations and the negotiations of government officials and other elites, especially as it regards to policy. Now, one of the limitations of official documents is that they represent a view from above. They were compiled by elites, official-dom, and quite often their perspective that they have is one from above. And when these documents report on the population that was being administered, they may not be entirely reliable, and we have to look for others sources for those topics. But if you're planning to use documents, official documents, to study elites, then there's a less of a problem. But again, you need to be careful making use of official documents to try to understand grassroots phenomena. Because again, you're getting an elite perspective that may not be essentially realistic when it comes to talk about what's going on among, you might say the common people, the people down in the working classes, and so forth. Now I'd like to provide some examples of research questions that often make use official documents as well as archival documents more broadly. A classic topic in which the use of archival documents especially official documents is especially common is in the study of international relations. So when we think about the study of the formation of alliances, the writing of treaties, the process of going to war, decisions about participating in agreement, these studies almost always make use of some sorts of official documents that record the deliberations of elites or interactions of officials between different countries. The study of social and political movements often makes use of, if not official documents then at least archival documents. So quite often when we think about especially historical social and political movements, the leaders of these movements typically leave behind a rich trove of correspondence, meeting minutes, and other documents that are archived. And then which provide an important perspective from the leaders of these movements about the goals of these movements, the strategies, and their outcomes. Then there's policymaking, research on the origins of policies of course makes use of official documents and other archival documents. So, as we're trying to understand the deliberations, the calculations, the negotiations that go into the formation of policy within a national government, official documents, minutes of meetings, and other correspondence, and so forth, all play an important role. Another big source for qualitative research is diaries, letter, and other private sources. So, these diaries, letters, and other private sources are very useful for what we referred to as history from below. That it the study of, you might say, the common people, that is the people who are not elites. They are especially valuable for historical research, for studying populations in the past that we have no way of interviewing or approaching through other methods or through other data. They often provide understanding of meanings, motivations, understandings of social and cultural phenomena of changes that are taking place. I'll give some examples in just a moment. They help us to understand how people understood and contributed to social and political change that may have taking place around them. Now, caveat is that even though we may think of diaries, letters and other private sources as a tool for conducting a history from below, there's a limitation that many populations in the past where education was uncommon. In those populations, only the elite may have been able to write and leave diaries and letters, and other documents behind. So now I'd like to talk about some of the research questions that are often addressed by making use of these private sources. One again is understanding social and political change. How did people understand, respond to, contribute to the social and political transformations that are going on around them? So, in diaries and letters, people often reflect on, talk about what's going on in their daily lives, how different kinds of social changes are affecting them. So this gives us a window into the way that people were thinking about these changes in past times, people that we don't have the opportunity to interview now. Another big area for applying the analysis of these sorts of private sources is understanding race, gender, ethnicity, and understanding how the members of marginalized groups experienced and negotiated their situations. So when we look at groups that were discriminated against or marginalized in the past or unfortunately sometimes even in the present, things like diaries and letters give us insight into how they experienced the pressures, the stresses, the constraints. But face them in their daily lives and then how they sought to negotiate around these pressures and these constraints. Finally, there's relationships. That is understanding how people in different contexts related to each other and related to institutions. So people look at letters written to government agencies, to political leaders, as well as letters written by people one to another to understand how they formed connections with each other, what sorts of expectations they had of each other. Another source of qualitative data is interviews and focus groups. So open-ended interviews and focus groups yield insights into how individuals understand and react to contemporary topics and issues. Such data yield insight into their meanings, their motivations, how they understand the world around them, information that's not typically available in a quantitative study. Now, most such data is collected by the researcher, him or herself even though data from interviews and focus groups is typically preserved, it's still uncommon for people to conduct secondary analysis of these preserved data. So if you're going to make use of interviews or focus groups, you're probably going to have to collect the data yourself. Some examples so, meanings. How do people understand features of the social world in which they are embedded? Motivations, why do people do what they do? For example in a study of fertility behavior, people maybe asked in interviews or focus groups to talk about why they have particular fertility preferences for having more children, for having fewer children and so forth, to explain this in their own words. And then to get people to talk about their strategies. How do they go about achieving their goals, and defining those goals? Finally, there's ethnography. Ethnography yields insights into the norms, the values, the practices of specific social groups. This typically involves immersion into specific social groups and intense observation of interactions and behavior. This may yield insights that are not available from simple or straightforward interviews and focus groups because in an ethnography, people are being observed in a natural setting. In recent years, people have paid more and more attention to the fact that the observer, the ethnographer has a relationship to the people he or she is observing. So in decades past, the ethnographer often thought of him or herself as a dispassionate observer like a scientist looking through a microscope at a collection of bacteria on a petri dish. We now realized that that's an incorrect distinction that the ethnographer actually interacts with the people that he or she is observing, and may influence them. So, there's a lot more attention to this self-reflexive process in ethnography nowadays. Finally, as with interviews and focus groups, even though ethnographic data is preserved, most of the time, secondary analysis of ethnographic data is rare. Most people go out and collect their own data if they're conducting an ethnographic analysis. Some examples of topics that are studied through ethnography. Studies of neighborhoods and communities rely heavily on ethnography. The basic question being how how do communities, how do neighborhoods structure themselves, organize themselves? How do they keep themselves together in the face of various challenges from outside? Subcultures, so there's a lot of interest in understanding specific subcultures, whether it's the members of particular professions, members of religious groups, people with particular hobbies. How do these groups distinguish themselves and sustain themselves and essentially turn interested people into members of their groups? How do they sanction particular behaviors or punish others? Organizations, so how do organizations including firms and government agencies, how do they maintain themselves and pursue their interest? Social movements, so how do movements of various sorts, social movements, political movements, how do they define their goals, achieve them, and respond to challenges? A final approach, or a final source, within qualitative research is content analysis. So this is the content, the meaning, the motivation, intended audience and consequence of texts. When we say texts we do so with a very broad definition. Texts may be written text, they maybe oral recordings, they maybe visual or other media. This differs from qualitative approaches and that the content of the text is itself the object of study. Conversation analysis which is one part of content analysis examines the interactions embedded within conversations. And one of the key features of content analysis is that, the results are supposed to be reproducible that different people looking at the same records, the same transcripts of a piece of content should hopefully come to the same conclusions. Some examples. So in politics, people conduct content analyses of political party platforms, political speeches, to try to understand what sorts of signals candidates or parties are trying to send. And trying to understand who their intended audience is. Media, people conduct content analysis to understand how different issues, how different people's, how different groups are represented in the media. Interactions, how do people navigate interactions with each other, communicate with each other and react to information? Finally, reactions. When people are discussing phenomenon, are experiencing phenomenon, perhaps an illness, perhaps some other unexpected events, how do they describe those events? How do they essentially process them, how do they categorize events by attaching particular meanings to them? And this is again done with content analysis. So this has been a very brief introduction to qualitative sources, in fact qualitative researches extremely diverse and training will require extensive study and there are sources beyond the once that I've talked about here. Hopefully though, I've given some taste of what the key sources are for conducting qualitative research.
