Qualitative research

So I'd like to bring us back to that part of the appendix of how did you know when you were done?

Well, it's kind of funny.

I mean, there's a kind of consensus, I would say, for qualitative researchers that you know when you're done, when you've achieved saturation.

But what does that feel like? You know when you've heard what someone is saying before a lot, right? You know what they're going to say.

And so I definitely achieved that with the doctors who felt like they were speaking in unison, even though I was meeting them one after another.

And I kind of love that, because each person has a unique kind of thing to say to the prior people that you've been thinking with in your research.

So it's just a really novel and I think really respectful way of treating your data points, you know.

But I also think the other thing I really like about it is there's a little bit of flexibility about the question that I think is really important for qualitative researchers.

Very good addition.

And that hints me on the chapter, which I would really like to discuss with you on the methods, because I know that you contributed greatly on the research methods, particularly qualitative research.

You edit an encyclopedia.

We also had a guest earlier, Henry Shields, who also contributed on this topic as well.

So qualitative research for audience is a process where a person reads closely and makes meaning out of the content they are consuming.

Now there are tools that claim to do the coding, the themes, even the interviews.

Obviously AI is very efficient in these.

I don't know that I'm willing to hand over very much of the research practice, actually.

Sure.

So I would say I'm probably the industry's leading provider of research, qualitative research, to the game suppliers.

Currently, I work with Aristocrat, IGT, Blueberry, Aruse, electronic pull tab providers, state lotteries, online mobile social games, iGaming, as well as doing qualitative research for casino operators.

What happened was I originally worked for a casino operator 30 years ago, Station Casinos, then Empress Casinos, then Horseshoe Casinos.

At the time, they were all doing qualitative research.

And what we found was there were researchers who were doing gaming research who didn't actually understand the industry.

So they would waste a disproportionate amount of time asking follow up questions that weren't actionable because they didn't understand how slot machines worked or how casinos worked.

It's making sure you're speaking to the right person.

And so I like to assume that people listening don't necessarily know about some of the things we're talking about.

How would you describe qualitative research methods? What are those?

So I'm going to start with what it's not, because I think that most people, when we think about research, think of more quantitative methods, stuff we can count when we do an experiment and we see results.

you know, if I teach you one way, do you score better on this test than if I teach you another way? Or if I teach one group of kids using one method, do they learn better than the group of kids who were taught using a different method? And that very like things that I can count and measure and run statistics on.

And that is one very important kind of research.

qualitative research is more interested in describing things as they are and that is really the approach that I have taken in most of my work so far approaching autistic language.

I want to describe it as it is instead of comparing autistic language to non-autistic language because we know that an autistic person is never going to be neurotypical and that's okay.

And that, for me, is part of finding out how can we teach autistic kids better.

Um, that is really bringing us to another level in terms of getting scale out of the data.

So if when we're running qualitative research, we might be talking to 10, 20, 30, 40 people, but it's very rare that we'll go in excess of, let's say, 50 or so respondents.

So it's hard to come up with hard numbers to say, you know, X percentage of people prefer A or B and so on and so forth, or build any sort of meaningful statistical models around it.

But Amy's kind of counter that because now you're able to launch AI moderated interviews and you're not bound by the schedule of one moderator or two moderators.

That's one piece.

We're setting up the project.

There is a piece where we're collecting the data, whether it's, you know, qualitative research where we're talking to people or it's quantitative research before answering surveys and the analysis of it.

So let's call that the second big phase.

I will come back to that in a minute.

But first, the first question is, what is your understanding of your study and has it changed? You might have written this methods chapter in that qualitative course, but how long ago was that? And how much do you know or how much more experience do you have with qualitative research? And when was the last time you actually looked at that chapter? Did your chair look at that chapter? Did they give you feedback on that chapter? Now that you have a better understanding of your study than you did when you were taking that class, does that chapter match your current understanding? I often think back to my first qualitative course, Dr.

Jory Hall, amazing, brilliant.

Introducing me to qualitative research absolutely changed my life.

I was obsessed, y'all.

And I just started trying to make studies for fun while I was in the libraries, but probably trying to do some other class assignments.

I've taken additional qualitative courses and so to go back and see like, oh, that's a beautiful start.

I just now I understood differently that I wouldn't have been able to defend it because it wasn't complete.

What a l- what a legend.

So the second part of qual- of, um, social science that I wanted to cover is what we call qualitative research.

And this is, um, quite different to using survey studies 'cause here we want to understand the depth and the complexity and the messiness of human experience, which is really hard to do in a survey when you want to put people in kind of boxes or put their experience in boxes so you can compare them statistically.

So with qual methods, we have to throw out a lot of the assumptions that we make with quantitative methods.

Um, I've got four studies that I'm just going to very briefly show within this, uh, within the qualitative component.

The first, um, is by a researcher called Erica Cheung, who's conducting a PhD, um, at the moment.

And, um, this is a really interesting study because I think quite a few of us within the qualitative research field have found that owner, that horse owners, when weighing up decisions about welfare, are, uh, kind of caught between the, "I know this is what's ideal, but this is the situation I'm in, and this is what I have to do in that, that situation." So, you know, for example, most people, it's very common in qualitative work that people are like, "Uh, I don't think horses should be box rested for a long period of time.

I don't think that's right," or, "I don't think two-year-old horses should be ridden.

I think I did a post a while back about like what is proven really mean, right? Like we come from this space of research where, I mean, I also, it's, it's funny.

I heard you, which we do in qualitative research so much be like, I know it's just called, I know it's not that many people.

Right.

Even though I think, I think

that.

It's, it's my favorite.

And I really think – I mean, I begrudgingly started to become a qualitative researcher, I think, in my sports psych master's.

Like, there wasn't other – for some reason, there was – most people did a phenomenology study in where I went to in JFK, which is now, like, a different university.