Reflection of week 46

This week’s topic is qualitative method and I think it is a very important method in research.

First about the seminar, our group member had four different types of qualitative: interview, focus group, content analysis, and observation. Interview content analysis is based on the face-to-face interview or online questionnaire. After discussing, I realized that interview research could bring researchers surprise. When dealing with data, more causality can be dug out, which may provide possibility to enhance the depth and wideness of the research.

The most interesting paper in our group should be the 8 hours observation one. I consider it as the most suitable way to discover public behavior or evaluate a specific staff. Despite the disadvantage of time consuming, observation method can eliminate the tension testees and make the result more reliable and stable.

The above two type of method have the similar researching steps. The first step is carefully sampling. It should be random and comprehensive. The next step is carefully surveying. Researchers should try their best to exclude the contingency like testees’ sentimental affect. The last part, as other method, is the data analysis.

I found another paper researched in content qualitative method (the former one is not typical). It is about the female image in a Chinese magazine. In this paper, the author did statistic about all the words or phrase used in describing women imagines in every magazine in one year. Then she divided them into different categories such as whether women have the experience studying abroad and so on. Finally she concluded them into several types of women imagines in modern Chinese society, and used this image as examples to describe today’s hot words about woman. I like the way of research and appreciate the paper’s value very much.

Later, I listened to the lecture given by the author of actDress. Her essay is a good example of design research and I considered her research method as “case qualitative method”. She first stated the basic theories, and then concluded them and created her actDress theory. Next, three cases that adopted actDress theory to enhance products are described and finally prediction about the theory utilization are depicted.

At last, the teacher aroused me to think. Quantitative method is the way to find rules, but qualitative method is the way to get essential of one phenomenon. When dealing with qualitative, researchers should concentrate on the depth of researching. I also thought that empirical data should be analysis in design research. Without applying the design into practice, design itself is just an armchair strategy. Thus, researches should use experiments to certify and correct the theory to enhance the practical applicability.