David Silverman
Prof David Silverman is Professor Emeritus in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, London, Visiting Professor in the Management Department at King's College, University of London and the Business School, University of Technology, Sydney as well as Adjunct Professor at QUT, Faculty of Education. He has authored 15 books and 45 journal articles on qualitative research, ethnography and conversation analysis. He has supervised over 30 successful PhD students, three of whom are now full Professors.
Session
Qualitative research is often regarded as the poor relation of quantitative research: less rigorous and less credible. In this talk, I suggest three reasons why this critique might be justified.
1. Too much qualitative research is based on brief data extracts selected to give uncritical support to researchers’ claims.
2. The overwhelming dependence of qualitative research on ‘manufactured’ data such as interviews and focus groups is questionable.
3. Qualitative researchers’ claims to be able to offer ‘authentic’ descriptions of people’s ‘experience’ naively mirror the assumptions of psy professionals and social media postings.
By contrast, I suggest that qualitative researchers do best when they employ rigorous data analysis to study behavior using naturalistic data. Rather than compete with quantitative researchers, this means our work can be complementary to them, studying phenomena unavailable to quantitative methods.
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