SOC 7141 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Unstructured Data

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 7141
• Professor: Kathleen Rodgers

Document Summary

Qualitative research is an umbrella term for an array of attitudes towards and strategies for conducting inquiry that are aimed at discovering how human beings understand, experience, interpret, and produce the social world. (sandelowski 2004: 893) Other definitions include emphasis on wording and experience rather than numbers and statistics. They do not seek to explain an outcome by determining the frequency and cause and effect of the issue but rather empirically reason with the problem such as a similar process when solving a riddle. Otherwise, it is not something simple and are looking at a set of features that are continuously shared together. Ex: discovering how human beings interpret and understanding their social world. Thus, all inquiries require a cross-word puzzle or riddle that involves relating ideas and clues through existing knowledge. What the above demonstrates is that the features of qualitative methods are not straightforward. Identifying systematic patterns of association (ex: statistics) impact on the end result.