Monday, October 4, 2010

Summary 5 of Presentation 5: Qualitative Research Methodologies (Ethnographic Research & Historical Research

a) What is Ethnographic Research?
·         Documenting or portraying every experiences of individuals by observing and interviewing them and relevant others.
·         It is in-depth interviewing and continual, ongoing participant observation of a situation.
·         It requires 3 things :
o   A detailed description of the culture-sharing group being studied;
o   An analysis of this group in terms of perceive themes or perspectives; and
o   Some interpretation of the group by the researcher as to meanings and generalizations about the social life of human beings in general.
The ethnographic concepts are:
·         Culture, a holistic perspective, contextualisation, an emic perspective, thick description, member checking, a non-judgemental orientation.
Data analysis in ethnographic research:
·         Triangulation, patterns, key events, visual representations, statistics, crystallization
Advantages:
·         It provides the researcher with a much more comprehensive perspective than other forms of educational research.
·         One may gain a much deeper and richer understanding of the observed behaviours.
b) What is historical research?
·         It focuses directly / exclusively on the past
·         To help people learn from the past failures and success
·         4 Steps in historical research are : defining problems/ hypothesis; searching for relevant sources material; summarizing and evaluating the sources and ; interpreting the evidence obtained.
·         4 basic categories of historical sources : documents, numerical records, oral statemens and relics.
·         Advantage: it permits the investigation of topics that could be studied in no other way.
·         Disadvantage :  controlling for many of the threats to internal validity is not possible in historical research.
 Reference:
 Fraenkel J.R., & Wallen N.M.(2010). How to Design and Evaluate Research in Education,7,500-553.

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