A conversation exploring a research methods text that introduces and integrates qualitative and quantitative practices
Conversational context. Professor David Shaffer is author of ‘Quantitative Ethnography’ – a highly readable text exploring qualitative and quantitative research methods in Education and, importantly, the way in which they may be integrated. The purpose of the conversation was to provide an ‘advance organiser’ for those who might go on to read the book.
Conversational themes. The discussion covers motives for writing the book, alternative perspectives on the ‘mixing’ of methods in research, a cultural perspective on learning and human action, the demands of coding data and the imperative for ‘meaning making’ as it might be pursued through the creation of patterns from qualitative and quantitative analyses.
Download conversation transcript: as Microsoft Word file. Or as PDF file
Further study
David Shaffer can also be heard presenting this method in a seminar video directed at a professional audience. There is also a Q&A session associated with this presentation. The book ‘Advances in Quantitative Ethnography‘ provides a set of case studies illustrating this mode of analysis. You may also find it useful to note the professional society that has grown in association with this work. Finally there exists a series of international conferences for research practitioners to share experience around quantitative ethnography.
The questions asked
o.00: An introduction and framing for the discussion
1.40: How far did instruction motivate this book (rather than exposition of a scholarly idea) and how you went about that?
3:30 The research novices perception of quantitative study as ‘proper’ research. Is it your experience that statistics are often intimidating and so there is uncertainty in the novice about adopting a qualitative approach that is legitimate?
5.50: You seem to want to give a special meaning to the familiar phrase “mixed methods”?
8.10: Do you seem them both as pattern-seeking enterprises?
9.30: Are you saying that you have a way to act by mixing the methods ‘simultaneously’ (rather than successively) in the same project?
10.55: How realistic is it for the novice researcher to adopt your ‘trans-disciplinary’ stance in doing analysis?
10.46: Where do you find this ‘Big Data’ in the classroom?
15.00: The book is not just about digitally captured data?
16.40: Is there a danger that enumerating frequency data distracts us from investigating action at the margins of the ‘mean case’?
20.22: Does the acting in the quantitative tradition distract the novice researcher from noticing the need to find meaning elsewhere?
24.50: Given a commitment to a ‘cultural approach’ why did you chose to align with the ethnographic tradition?
29.50 Do researchers have a responsibility to ‘interrogate’ action-as-data (as well as pointing at it)
33.50: Do you feel you are doing justice to the researchers responsibility to take up the task of engaging with research participants to ‘extract’ meaning?
38.55: Does the emphasis on textual transcription in the book risk overlooking other media for capturing action (video etc)?
42.15: Two challenges to coding – structuring data into units and attending to the context of action when interpreting it.
48.50: What do you think about approaches that require finding the codes (rather than working from ‘given’ codes) – thematic coding?
53.00: Comment on the notions of trust and transparency in qualitative study
56.55: Are their areas of qualitative research that this method will not penetrate – e.g., narrative method?
59.50: Where next?
Authored by:
David Shaffer
David Shaffer is Vilas Distinguished Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Department of Educational Psychology, with a focus on Learning Analytics, and a Data Philosopher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Professor Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the US Peace Corps in Nepal. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Shaffer taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and was a 2008-2009 European Union Marie Curie Fellow.
Charles Crook is Emeritus Professor of Education and a member of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham
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