Descriptive and interpretive approaches to …

Chapter 11 Descriptive and interpretiveapproaches to qualitative researchRobert Elliott and Ladislav TimulakQualitative research methods today are a diverse set, encompassing approaches such asempirical phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, protocol analysis and dis-course analysis. By one common definition (Polkinghorne, 1983), all these methodsrely on linguistic rather than numerical data, and employ meaning-based rather thanstatistical forms of data analysis. Distinguishing between measuring things with wordsand measuring them in numbers, however, may not be a particularly useful way ofcharacterising different approaches to research. Instead, other distinctive features ofqualitative research may turn out to be of far greater importance (Elliott, 1999): emphasis on understanding phenomena in their own right (rather than from someoutside perspective); open , exploratory research questions (vs. closed-ended hypotheses); unlimited, emergent description options (vs.)

an open-ended strategyfor obtaining the data.By ‘open-ended’ we mean not only that participants are encouraged to elaborate on their accounts, or that observations are not restricted to certain pre-existing categories.

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