Qualitative: I quite dig it!

I am in the midst of writing my final proposal for the qualitative class. When I first took the class, I was quite disoriented. I've been trained so much in quantitative that everything was alien to me. I was prepared to reject everything that I learned about qualitative research method. Surprisingly, it's not so bad!

What I quite like about it is the freedom. You don't have to have a detailed conceptual framework; a description on research traditions is sufficient (at least for the proposal stage). And you can change things quite a bit after you collected the data and at the stage of analysis. With quantitative stuff, if you don't have a good framework you're pretty much done for. My instructor last semester told me if your idea is not good, and your theory is not linked to the idea, your methodology will be crap too! So in that sense I like qualitative. Of course I just took one class on it; there's so many different approaches to it though so I can imagine how complicated it gets when you start delving into the specific methods.

Would I consider choosing it for my thesis? Unfortunately, NO. For one, my department is completely quantitative. The last expert for qualitative left last year, I think. The program is also mainly quantitative; so if you're going for a purely qualitative approach, you're in the wrong department! Secondly, for us to be considered doing mixed method, I have to take another class to be considered 'competent'. And that I will not do because I can't afford to spend more time on my coursework. What I am open to is choosing to use it later for future research. It's not so bad after all...