Creswell, Chapter 11

One of my biggest fears for Qualitative is not telling the story well enough. What if I don’t put it all together as Golden-Biddle & Locke would want! YIKES.

Creswell-Oh it’s been such a long time since I “interacted” with Creswell. In Chapter 11 Creswell returns to question whether or not we should write according to a “formula” if you will so as to conform to one of the “types” of qualitative (case study, narrative phenomenology, grounded theory, and ethnography) or to not conform and let the story just form in whatever direction it may form.

In writing the story for a phenomenological approach, Creswell writes he would describe his own emotions and experiences so as to position himself and acknowledge how the researcher’s biases must be put forward in qualitative research.

Creswell concludes with these six suggestions for answering “how does the approach to inquire shape the design of the study:

1. The focus of the study. My work is the examine a strengths-based philosophy. All the interviewees experienced the phenomena and thus my study desired to establish the essence of what that experience was like.

2. An interpretive orientation flows throughout the research. As noted above, the researchers biases are forthrightly presented in qualitative research. Whereas in quantitative the researcher seeks to remove the majority of biases, qualitative research acknowledges biases and writes about them.

3. The approach shapes the language of the study.

4. The approaches includes the participants who are studied.

5. The differences between the approaches is most noticeable iin the data analysis. Depending on which approach, the data analysis could be viewed from vastly different lenses.

6. The approach shapes the final product and the rhetoric used in the narrative or story.

What is quality? Well, that depends! It depends on the approach. However, this brings us right back to the original question: whether or not we should write according to a “formula” based on a chosen approach or to not conform to an approach and let the story form in whatever direction it may form.