Qualitative Research from Start to Finish Qualitative Research from Start to Finish Robert K. Yin THE GUILFORD PRESS New York London To Karen and Andrew, for many years of love, devotion, and tolerance, and for being willing to entertain the possibility that social science can be a lifelong and stimulating endeavor © 2011 The Guilford Press A Division of Guilford Publications, Inc. 72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012 www.com All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher. Printed in the United States of America This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Last digit is print number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Publisher.) ISBN 978-1-60623-977-3 (hardcover) Preface Qualitative research has come of age. Published studies abound. Their findings cover nearly every worldly topic. Of equal importance, compelling methodologi- cal works now define the craft, placing it in the mainstream of social science.
Your interest in qualitative research may reflect a desire to do it, teach it, or just learn about it. In any of these situations, this book can help you. The Book A Practical Approach As its main theme, the book presents qualitative research from a practical per- spective. Such a view reveals insights into how qualitative research is done, at the ground level.
The approach should be especially useful if in fact you are actually wanting to conduct a qualitative study—whether it is to be self-standing, part of a larger study, or an academic or training assignment for an undergraduate, gradu- ate, or continuing education course. An Inductive Approach Along the way, the book presents numerous examples of successfully completed and published qualitative studies, covering many different academic disciplines and professions such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, public health, social work, community development, evaluation, and international affairs. The examples typically take the form of vignettes and quick studies, strewn through- v vi Preface out the book. Both provide more details about individual studies than the stan- dard citations often found in other texts.
Moreover, the studies come from widely available journals and books. Their ready availability enables you to inspect these materials in greater detail, if you wish. Besides providing a more concrete foundation for understanding how quali- tative research has been done by a broad variety of scholars, the numerous exam- ples also convey the breadth of qualitative research. The topics extend over many different types of social settings and everyday lives, while also covering the major variations in qualitative research, including action research, grounded theory, case studies, feminist works, narrative inquiry, and phenomenology.
As a most impor- tant characteristic, all of the illustrative studies are completed ones. As such, they should boost your confidence in being able to finish (and publish) your own quali- tative research. Similarly, two completed studies, and how they were conducted in relation to the material in Chapters 8, 9, and 12, are presented in depth at the end of those chapters. The studies examine two topics (K–12 in one case and university admin- istration in the other) intended to appeal to all readers because everyone has expe- rienced the two environments.
An Adaptive Approach The book deliberately presents qualitative research in an adaptive fashion, which actually befits the craft. Rather than conveying it in a dogmatic, much less ideo- logical manner, the book presents critical methodological topics—such as how to design or analyze qualitative research—in the form of optional choices. These choices will enable you to customize your own study. For instance, you can create your own design, based on the eight choices pre- sented in Chapter 4.
The result can be a qualitative study that will range from the old-fashioned way of doing qualitative research to a more pragmatic approach that takes advantage of current techniques and tools. Similarly, you have the choice of starting fieldwork before finalizing your research questions—an option examined in Chapter 3. You also can decide whether or not to code your data, and whether or not to use computer software to assist in analyzing your data, as discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. If you have trouble starting a qualitative study in the first place, the ideas in Chapter 3 about creating a “study bank” offer insightful options.
The Author My own experiences probably account for the book’s three preceding features—its practical theme, devotion to understanding how other studies have been done, and need for being adaptive. The practical guidance and inductive orientation come from having done over 30 years of social science research. During this time, I have directly overseen, led, or participated in nearly 200 studies—including those that Preface vii deliberately mixed qualitative and nonqualitative methods. The adaptive orienta- tion reflects the fact that the studies have covered a wide array of fields, such as pri- mary, secondary, and postsecondary education; health promotion, HIV/AIDS pre- vention, and substance abuse prevention; neighborhood, community, and urban development; crime prevention; technological innovation and diffusion; commu- nications; and organizational development and program evaluation.
All of the studies came to a formal written conclusion, either as an academic publication or as a final report of some sort. Successfully arriving at such a conclud- ing step means that I have practiced the entire research cycle many times—from start to finish. Each study started with an intensive scan and review of other compa- rable studies, which exposed me to the ways in which other scholars have designed and conducted their research. Because each of my own studies was done under dif- ferent circumstances and addressed different research questions, I became exposed to the diverse ways in which studies can be designed, analyzed, and presented.
Only in retrospect have I realized that these career experiences, along with research questions that inevitably address “how and why” questions, have included an extensive amount of work with qualitative methods. Although I have not spent long periods of time doing ethnography in the field, I have directed or conducted numerous field-based studies using participant-observation, case studies, qualita- tive interviews, field photography, and site visits. I have then had to struggle with the options for analyzing the resulting data, drawing conclusions from them, and presenting the studies before expert advisory panels or otherwise responding to peer reviews. The career experiences underlie my attempt to have this book cover qualita- tive research comprehensively.
The various chapters address virtually every phase of doing qualitative research, including some topics that also tend to be overlooked by other texts. For instance, nearly every qualitative study calls for presenting the meaning of social reality from the perspective of a study’s participants (people whose lives are a large part of the subject of study). Yet, there are different ways of presenting their words or life histories, and this book explicitly addresses these variations (see Chapter 10). As another example, most books do not discuss the var- ious ways of drawing conclusions from qualitative research, but this book identifies at least five such ways (see Chapter 9).
Finally, contemporary qualitative research can come from brief site visits to the field that are different from the traditional ethnographic stints, and this book describes the basic site visit procedures (see Chapter 5). The Organization of the Book The Sequence of Chapters Because books have to be presented in linear fashion, they follow a particular sequence of chapters. However, as with all of qualitative research, nothing is lin- ear. Understanding specific topics depends on being knowledgeable about other viii Preface topics that a book might not yet have presented.
In a way, a reader needs to know everything at once and then to revisit specific topics recursively. As a result, read- ers should feel free to tamper with the sequence of chapters in the book. Readers wanting to get started with a qualitative study can jump right into the book and start at Chapter 3 or even Chapter 4. Conversely, readers wanting to understand the deeper issues in doing qualitative research might want to read Chapters 1 and 2 first.
I personally wanted in my early days to understand the evidentiary basis for qualitative research, so I would have started by trying to understand the fieldwork and data collection activities in Chapters 5 and 6. You can see that the possible sequences are nearly endless. Working Features To stimulate a reader’s active involvement with the book, the book has some addi- tional features. First, the chapters all start with a brief abstract, overviewing the contents of each chapter.
Then, the sections within each chapter all start with a preview box, briefly covering what you should learn from this section. Finally, every chapter ends with a recap of the terms and concepts presented in the chapter. Second, each chapter also ends with an exercise reflecting the practices cov- ered by the chapter. The exercises are intended to serve as out-of-class assignments that can be done on a weekly basis.
As an alternative, the Appendix contains a comprehensive, semester- or year-long project that can be done in lieu of (or even in addition to) the individual exercises. Third, to save you a little bit of trouble, the book includes a brief glossary of special terms used in qualitative research. Also at the back of the book, the edi- tors at The Guilford Press permitted one discretionary stretching of the standard American Psychological Association format: The reference section includes the authors’ first names, not just their initials. Contextually, knowing the first names clearly reduces confusion among persons who might have the same surname as well as similar initials.
Such knowledge also might help readers to connect the cited authors with real-life people—who might even be teaching or have taught at one of your academic departments. As a final goal, the book also introduces you to a variety of methodological works, whether dealing with issues of research ethics (Chapter 2), research design (Chapter 4), handling peer reviewers’ comments (Chapter 11), or engaging in mixed methods studies (Chapter 12). In covering these and related topics, I have tried to create a scholarly mix of citations to classical as well as contemporary works. Likewise, the relevant concepts range from understanding the value of “thick description” to challenging the rationale for the “gold standard.” At the same time, books such as the present one do not replace research readings.
Textbooks cannot reproduce the rich spirit of a research field or its deeper meanings. Instead, good texts should provide two things: practical knowledge so you can pursue research, and clues in the form of citations where you can learn more about the spirit of a field. So it is with the present text. Acknowledgments My 30-year span of research experience covers work done at several different research and academic organizations.
Within each have been key colleagues who have contributed to my understanding of the breadth of social science research, including qualitative research. At MIT, I studied under Professor Hans-Lukas Teuber. Together, we focused on the topic of face recognition. Although the research used methods from experi- mental psychology, the topic—how people easily recognize and discriminate an extremely large number of faces despite their similarity according to any objective measure—still in my mind represents a qualitative question of the first order.
Later at MIT, but now in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, I also had the pleasure of knowing Lawrence Susskind and Lloyd Rodwin, both of whom strongly encouraged my work on neighborhood development. That topic attracted a variety of research methods, ranging from the anthropological to the demographic. Work at the New York City–Rand Institute and at the Rand Corporation’s office in Washington, DC, pushed me further into the investigation of urban as well as related policy topics. Peter Szanton made his mark on my thinking, through his incessant questioning and sage advice on how to examine these topics.