Many people are a little intimidated when beginning qualitative research, and having been through the process I would like to share my experience, and the books, links, and advice that helped me.
When I began learning about qualitative methods, I thought I could just read around my topic, conduct some interviews, whizz the text into nVivo, do some analysis using what I thought was grounded theory, and hey presto: results, paper, recommendations, publications. I was surprised, and more than a little bit intimated by finding that I needed a philosophical background to my work and that I would have to work out my epistemology, whatever that was.... This all felt pretty alien to me. Like many coming from a science background, this all seemed very alien and, I admit, silly. Facts are facts, after all, I thought, in my positivist mindset.
Having duly learnt the definition of ontology and epistemology, I thought, OK I'll get this over with - I'll write down all the different paradigms - social constructionism, positivism, interpretivism, etc, and I'll find definitions and then just choose the one that makes most sense to me. Three days into that process, I was far more confused than I had been to start with, and I had a bit of a meltdown. Why, I exclaimed to my qualitative research friend, why are there no clear definition of each of these? How am I meant to know what my epistemology is anyway, especially given that the boundaries between each are so confusing? My supervisors were sympathetic but reassured me that I wouldn't really understand until I'd been researching for several years.... which was not very reassuring at the start of a PhD that had to be finished in three years. Frustrated, I set about finding useful advice from the internet, and I'll share the process here, because I've learnt that this is quite a common difficulty for those starting qualitative research.
Firstly, if you have ten minutes to relax about this, you should know that there are some fabulous 'what's my epistemoloy' quizzes online - they shouldn't really be taken seriously, but they are quite fun and helpful for thinking around the topic. Here are two examples: Epistemology and You from ProProfs, and Whats your Epistemology from qzzr.com. You can also find out which philosopher you would have been. Bonus. This will help restore any sense of humour loss that has occured in the prior 'what's my epistemology' frustrations.
The next thing that I needed was to understand why an epistemology is even necessary. For me, this was bound up in learning that my positivist mindset was basically a product of my education, and learning that there is much more to life than what we think we are seeing. The thing that made the penny drop for me was finding that concepts that I'd taken for granted as fixed (gender, disease paradigms, the scientific process, randomised trials as a gold standard), were not as fixed as I thought, and began to understand that all these concepts which we think are 'facts' are built on culture and history. Personally, I found the book 'When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health' invaluable here, and though it's not available freely the website gives some excellent information and case studies, and the book is not expensive, so I'd recommend it. The premise is that randomised trials absolutely have their place, but it's vitally important that other types of evidence, including qualitative research, are more widely accepted, because real life isn't an 'either/or' controlled setting. You can also read a very interesting/useful blog with one of the authors here. I also recommend reading Public Health Research and Lay Knowledge by Popay and Williams.
I also found it useful to read around social constructionism, which is quite a wide epistemology and quite applicable to many concepts, and therefore a good place to start. I'd recommend reading The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann, which is available freely online at this link.
Armed with a much broader mindset and humbled by the fact that I realised I didn't really 'know' anything anymore, I found some other very useful links that I could apply to my research:
- My absolute favourite: The Research Paradigm - methodology, epistemology and ontology explained in simple language by Salma Patel
- What on earth are ontology and epistemology? by Sally Vanson
- What's your epistemology? think about it by Roland Grad
- Epistemology for Dummies
- I'd also recommend the free Qualitative Research Methods course available at Coursera
Final tip: if I got stuck on any concepts, I found it was pretty helpful to look for online discussions between researchers, such as "Paradigm, Ontology, Epistemology" on Postgrad Forum (this one discusses how you'd answer the question 'who's the better footballer, Ronaldo or Messi' from different epistemologies - golden!) "What importance is there to stating an ontology and epistemology as part of the method section in a journal paper?" on ResearchGate; while you have to ensure that you apply your own knowledge to the answers (not everyone is right on the Internet, apparently!) I found that it was useful to read discussions in 'normal' language and different views.
It would be great if others could post the texts that they found useful below. Really my point is this - if you're struggling with working out your epistemology, your ontology, and with understanding what on earth it's all about: don't worry, you aren't alone! And there is plenty of support and many resources out there to help.
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