Brief Description of a Qualitative Study
The purpose of this qualitative case study was to scrutinize the collective concerns and dynamics accompanying organizational individuality from the vantage point of faculty affiliates employed during the 2011-2012 academic year in the Facility of Tutelage at Mersin University in Mersin, Turkey. The example of this study involved 14 faculty members, containing professors, associate professors, and assistant professors from the Faculty of Education.
Type of Design
This was a qualitative study, qualitative researchers use a logical standpoint, struggling to comprehend the significance of events, interactions, and relationships that occur from the perception of those involved (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992).
How data Might be used to Inform my Practice.
Qualitative research inclines to ask the kinds of interrogations that clinicians ask and can explore such questions in ways that are clinically meaningful. It makes a well-dressed balance to do in counseling research what is done in counseling practice, and the cohesion between the methods may permeate new identifications across both.
In terms of design, qualitative research is more unsolidified than quantitative research, so that although the research purpose is explicit prior to the research, the research questions established to guide the research are acknowledged to be shifting in response to the data collected. In essence, the researcher must be willing to be surprised by the data collected and to be informed by the data to pursue that which is emerging as important rather than sticking to the original design if no longer compatible. Qualitative research questions tend to be more open-ended and exploratory and are based on discovery rather than verification. Rather than asking if some phenomena are true, the question seeks to understand what the phenomena are. The approach is therefore holistic rather than reductionist.
There is a rationale for using qualitative methodology that goes outside philosophies of efficacy. Merchant and Dupuy (1996) have commented that there is a basic epistemological fit between multicultural counseling and qualitative inquiry because of the emphasis on identity as variable, shifting, and primarily understood through the eyes of the beholder. Social identities are complex and multiple, intersecting with each other as well as with the context and the shifting meanings ascribed to them by both the perceiver and the perceived. An area of identity, such as gender, cannot be understood as a pure construct from other aspects of identity; in effect, gender is raced and classed. Identities of race, class, gender, culture, sexual orientation, age, religion, or disability have a sociohistorical and political focus but are held by individuals who make meaning of them in contextual and shifting ways. Although it cannot generate one-size-fits-all answers, qualitative inquiry is peculiarly suited to explicate such complexity in the construction and experience of identify.
Process research that emphasizes the study of change (Greenberg & Pinsof, 1986) may be better answered by qualitative methods because significant change events are often infrequent, complex, and context specific. In essence, we would be using such research to develop microtheories, rather than global frameworks, both respecting complexity and accepting the futility of seeking stable answers.
We would be seeking pattern discoveries, one of the strengths of qualitative research, as opposed to the frequency/aggregate approach to data that may be less suitable for our purposes. All The underlying assumptions of such positions include (a) the ontological one that reality (as known by human beings) is subjective and multiple; (b) the epistemological assumption that there is a relationship between the researcher and the researched, and such relationship is therefore necessary to explore and articulate; (c) the axiological assumption that research is value