Concept
qualitative research
A family of methods using interviews, focus groups, observation and text reading to understand how people make sense of the world; it produces interpretation rather than numbers.
Qualitative research asks “what does this mean to these people?”. Its tools: in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, ethnography, and textual or discourse analysis. What they share is small, deliberately chosen groups, open-ended data and interpretation; the price is that they cannot answer “what percentage?”.
The qualitative tradition developed its own criteria: Lincoln and Guba proposed credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. Examples in communication include Morley’s 29 group interviews with Nationwide viewers and Ien Ang’s reading of forty-two viewers’ letters in Watching Dallas. Merton and Kendall’s 1946 article on the “focused interview” is entangled in the history of today’s focus groups. See content analysis.
Example
Talking with older viewers about what the evening news means in their daily lives.