Lesson 6: Importance of Qualitative Research Across Fields

• Advantages of Qualitative Research 


  • It adopts a naturalistic approach to its subject matter, which means that those involves in the research, understand things based on what they find meaningful.
  • It promotes a full understanding of human behavior or personality traits in a natural setting.
  • It is instrumental for positive society changes.
  • It engenders respect for people's individuality as it demands the researcher's careful and attentive stand toward people's world views.
  • It is a way of understanding and interpreting social interactions.
• • It is a way of understanding and interpreting social interactions.
  • It increases the researcher's interest in the study as it includes the researcher's experiences or background knowledge in interpreting verbal and visual data.
  • It offers multiple ways of acquiring and examining knowledge about something.

  Advantages of Research
• Research Problem


  The ultimate goal of the research is not only to propose ways of studying things, people, places, and events, but also to discover and introduce new practices, strategies, or techniques in solving a problem.
• Background of the Problem


  Spend time getting the background knowledge about the problem that triggered off your research topic to discover its relation to what the world, particularly the experts, professionals, and learned people know about your topic.
• Research Questions


  • aim at investigating specific aspects of the research problem.
  • any method or technique of collecting, collating, and analyzing data specified by the research design depends greatly on the research questions.
• 1. Establish a clear relation between the research questions and the problem or topic.
  2. Base your research questions on your RRL because existing published works help you get good background knowledge 
  3. Focus research questions that can arouse your curiosity and surprise you with your discoveries or findings.

  Guidelines in Formulating Questions
• 3. State your research questions in such a way that they include all dependent and independent variables referred to by the theories, principles, or concepts underlying your research work.

  4.Let the set of research questions or sub-problems be preceded by one question expressing the main problem of the research.

  Guidelines in Formulating Questions
• 5.Avoid asking research questions that are answerable by “yes” or “no” and use the “how” questions only in a quantitative research.

  6.Be guided by the acronym SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bounded) in formulating the research questions.


  Guidelines in Formulating Questions