Qualitative Data Collection - Essay Example

Therefore, qualitative research in education approved of the researcher’s point of view as a critical aspect of the research. Thus, qualitative research in education asserts that the bias or subjectivity of the researcher is fundamental. Consequently, the perspective and value judgment of the researcher are profoundly bonded to the research (Darlington, 2002). In this perspective, the rapport or researcher and the issue that is being studied impossible to disconnect. In simple terms, what a researcher prefers to investigate is connected to his value judgment.

There is an idea that research information and researcher’s value-laden conclusions or research interpretation cannot subsist independently. To a certain extent, information and researcher’s perspective are firmly interwoven with each other. Specifically, a researcher is regarded to be an ‘insider to the research’. In principle, this perspective is founded on a ‘subject-subject relationship’ (Darlington, 2002, 15) in which realities in human societies are subjective. There is an assumption that the researcher responds based on his personal value judgment.

In any research approach, whether quantitative or qualitative, one of the most important steps is the data collection. In qualitative research in education, there are four major data collection methods, namely, ethnography, educational criticism, action research and case study. Ethnographers try to record, in a systematic manner, how indigenous people behave and how they rationalize their behavior. And ethnography, in principle, is a systematic account of this documentation. Indigenous people are individuals in circumstances anywhere, including youngsters and adolescents in schools, not merely people who subsist in isolated and hostile environments such as jungles or peasant villages (Sherman, 2001).

Many researchers