WEBVTT

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In quantitative research, we 
use numbers to make claims,

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and those claims are made about the 
reality that we think is objective.

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In qualitative research however we have 
a lot more flexibility and freedom on,

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how to think about what is reality 
and what is research about.

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It is useful to understand 
two different categories of  

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qualitative research and two 
different sets of assumptions.

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The realist assumption and 
interpretive assumptions.

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There are of course other 
classifications of qualitative research,

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but understanding these two 
is the most fundamental.

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So when you have an article that says,

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that it does a case study that 
uses the interpretive approach,

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that gives voice to the people experiencing 
the events and gives natives point of view,

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and uses that as part of a view of analysis.

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So what does that actually mean 
and why would one want to do that?

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Let's take a look at an example.

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So this is from a book about grounded theory,

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which is one way of doing qualitative 
analysis and qualitative research.

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And we have here a description 
of a case of Caitlin,

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who was diagnosed at age of 57 
with life-threatening cancer.

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And we could study this case 
using multiple different ways.

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We could study for example,

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what are the facts of the case, 
what is the age of the person,

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is she in some kind of risk group, 
how is the disease progressing,

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and things that are independent of 
how the person experiences them.

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Or we could study, how a person 
experiences the fact that they might,

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that she might die soon.

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And these experiences and 
how you perceive reality,

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how you attribute meaning to this diagnostic, 
varies from one person to another.

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So if we apply an interpretive lens,

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it means that we don't study, what is 
real based on how the person describes,

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but we study how the person 
experiences and interprets reality.

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And this is useful because 
people don't act simply based on

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what is happening independently 
of them in an objective reality.

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Instead, they act based on, 
how they interpret the reality.

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There is some philosophical debate on,

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whether reality is something that is 
unique to each individual based on

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how we experience things around us,

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or whether reality is shared 
and it's the same for everybody.

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I'm not going to go into 
that debate in this video.

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So when we compare the realist 
approach and interpretive approach,

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the interpretive approach puts a 
lot more emphasis on the person,

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who is telling us the story 
or providing us the data.

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Let's compare the approaches.

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I'm using this table from the book 
by Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill,

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and they present four different approaches 
for philosophies in management research.

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I'm going to only focus on two, but it's useful

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to understand what these two others refer to.

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So positivism is a view on science,

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that we can only study things 
that we can observe and

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then we build theories and

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we can use logic to derive 
consequences from those theories.

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That's a fairly rigid view and 
it's currently considered outdated,

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because it's not a good match 
for what social scientists do.

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So it's mostly about natural 
sciences, where this was done,

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but it has fallen out of 
fashion a few decades ago.

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Nevertheless, the word positivism is 
often confused with the word realism.

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And then pragmatism refers to the view of science,

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that the purpose of science is not to seek 
the truth but to seek things that are useful.

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So we don't really care,

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whether theories are true 
or not, or correct or not.

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We only care about, whether the 
theories are useful in the sense

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that we can make useful 
predictions using our theories.

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So you can have a theory that is incorrect 
but that allows us to do useful predictions.

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For example, Newtonian mechanics is 
an approximation, it is not correct,

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quantum mechanics is much more correct,

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but Newton's mechanics is still a very 
useful thing as we know from everyday life.

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It's an approximation that is slightly 
incorrect but it's very useful.

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I'm not going to talk about 
pragmatism either in this video.

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So let's compare realism and interpretation.

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The idea between, the difference between these is,

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how you perceive the reality to be.

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So, how you perceive the reality 
is in the domain of ontology,

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so how do we think that reality is.

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And realism thinks that reality is objective,

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it is shared by everybody.

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So we could simply if we have an 
informant, that means that we interview,

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we could switch to a different informant and

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if that person had experienced the 
same event as the first informant,

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we would get equally valid data.

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In interpretive research, we assume 
that reality is socially constructed.

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So that means that our reality is not only,

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what happens around us,

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but it is also our interpretations 
of what happens around us.

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And that is in some way more realistic 
way of viewing reality than realism,

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if we want to understand why certain 
things are failing organizations,

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we need to understand how, for example, 
people interpret the change in an organization,

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and then how they act on those interpretations.

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Then we have the epistemological view,

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how do we generate knowledge, what is knowledge?

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And the idea of realism is 
that we interview a person,

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we watch videos, we collect numbers,

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and those numbers are objective 
facts, or if they're not objective,

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we want to purify them from any 
biases that our informants may have.

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and we try to get to the facts that 
are independent of observation.

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So, what exactly is the nature of cancer 
that the person had in the example,

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and if the person says that she 
feels fairly positive about cancer,

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that would be just their bias, 
we're not interested in that.

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Then in interpretive research,

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we are focusing on how a 
person perceives the situation,

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what kind of meaning the person 
gives to the cancer diagnostics.

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In the example, she saw positive things as 
well coming out from the cancer diagnosis,

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not only negative things.

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And then, what kind of data we 
typically collect with these approaches?

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The realist approach quite often 
uses multiple case studies,

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because we want to produce something that 
is generalizable across different units,

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and to do that we need to 
collect more than one unit.

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In interpretive research, we 
typically have much smaller numbers,

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so we can for example study one event 
or one period of a company and then see,

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how people interpreted the 
events during that period.

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So the focus between these is like,

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if we consider a courtroom analogy.

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In the courtroom, a realist would like to know,

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what really happened and if 
the witness tells us something,

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then we need to purify the witness's 
biases from the witness's description.

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In the interpretive approach, 
we are interested in studying,

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what are the biases of the witness,

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so what the witness actually tells us, 
how the witness perceives the situation,

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is much more important than 
what the situation actually is,

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independently of the witnesses perceptions.

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So the difference is basically,

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are we interested in the person, or in 
the events that the person tells us about?

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Of course, this is not as clear-cut and

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sometimes there are approaches that 
mix elements from both of these.

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But quite often you can position a qualitative 
study within one of these two categories.

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And they're more than these two,

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but these two are the most useful to understand

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when you are beginning your 
career as a qualitative researcher