Deck 14: Nonreactive Qualitative Research

Question 1

Historical research helps a researcher identify aspects of social life that are

A) specific to a particular point in time.
B) general across time or units.
C) hidden within a particular context.
D) narrowly defined within a particular historical context.
E) empirically specific to one unit of analysis.

Answer 1

B

Question 2

Describe five specific similarities between historical research and field studies.Be certain to emphasize how both approaches are firmly grounded in the interpretive approach in social science research.

Answer 2

-Both historical research and field research recognize that the researcher's point of view and both involve interpretation,which introduces the interpreter's location in time,place,and worldview; it recognizes that a researcher's reading of historical evidence is influenced by an awareness of the past and by living in the present.
-Both historical research and field research examine a great diversity of data,whereby the researcher becomes immersed in data to gain an empathic understanding of events and people in order to capture subjective feelings and note how everyday,ordinary activities signify important social meaning.
-Both historical and field researchers use grounded theory during the process of data collection.
-In both historical and field research,the researcher's meaning system frequently differs from that of the people he or she studies,but the researcher nevertheless tries to penetrate and understand their point of view.
-Both historical and field researchers focus on process and sequence in that they see the passage of time and process as essential to how people construct social reality.
-Generalization and theory are limited in historical and field research as is replication-neither deduces propositions or tests hypotheses in order to uncover fixed laws,and both regard replication as unrealistic because each researcher has a unique perspective and assembles a unique body of evidence.

Question 3

What are three different approaches a researcher can use when undertaking content analysis? Describe each one.

Answer 3

-Summative content analysis: The focus is on manifest and latent content where the appearance of words or particular content in textual material is recorded for frequency.Equal attention is paid to latent meaning and the development of codes in the data analysis process.
-Conventional content analysis: Codes are developed only during data analysis (grounded theory)and are derived from the data.Once codes are developed,patterns are detected and linkages among the codes are identified in order to generate a theory.
-Directed content analysis: It employs a deductive approach to theory where predetermined codes are derived from theory but codes are also determined during the data analysis when additional codes are added if they do not fit into the pre-existing and originally developed coding frame.

Question 4

What types of historical evidence do historical researchers draw upon? Who would have produced this evidence?

Question 5

Which the following,according to positivists,is a weakness of historical research?

A) It helps researchers examine aspects of social life that are general across units.
B) It raises new questions and stimulates theory.
C) It exposes weaknesses in research design.
D) It is often based on a small number of cases.
E) It helps researchers develop concepts that are not specific to one culture or historical period.

Question 6

Outline,in chronological order,each of the six steps in a historical research project.

Question 7

Which of the following statements is FALSE about historical research?

A) Historical researchers are flexible and adjust their initial concepts. They question or focus based on what they find in the evidence.
B) Historical researchers attempt to control bias that may arise from a point of view or perspective. They are totally neutral and objective.
C) Historical researchers often use "grounded theory."
D) Historical researchers focus on sequence and process. They tend to see social reality as constructed over time.
E) Historical researchers "translate" another culture or time period into terms that a reader can understand.

Question 8

Which approach to qualitative content analysis identified by Hsiu-Fang and Shannon (2005)most closely resembles quantitative content analysis?

A) Conventional
B) Statistical
C) Inductive
D) Summative
E) Directed

Question 9

What are the main emphases of historical research? What sorts of research questions does it address? What types of research is it most appropriate for?

Question 10

Describe five features that are specific and unique to historical research.

Question 11

Which of the following is a characteristic of a distinct historical research method?

A) It focuses on the macro-level only and excludes the micro-level.
B) It tests hypotheses about precisely operationalized variables.
C) It uses a deductive approach.
D) It sees causality as contingent and uses combinational explanation.
E) None of the above.

Question 12

Describe the main feature that quantitative content analysis and qualitative content analysis have in common with each other.What are the key differences between quantitative content analysis and qualitative analysis?

Question 13

Why is equivalence of crucial importance in historical research? Which feature of quantitative research does the problem of equivalence most closely resemble? What specific types of equivalence should be of utmost concern to the historical researcher? How are potential problems with equivalence dealt with?

Question 14

Which one of the following features is common to both historical research and field research?

A) Historical approaches and field research try to discover universal laws about human social behaviour.
B) Both perspectives share the view that people construct meaning within structures.
C) Both approaches attempt to link the macro to micro levels of analysis of social reality.
D) Both perspectives assume that social forces shape individual behaviour.
E) Historical approaches and field research both remove the researcher's perspective from the research process.

Question 15

Which of the following research questions is directly applicable to historical research?

A) How do recent changes in big cities like London, Toronto, New York, and Tokyo reveal the rise of a new urban global system?
B) What was it like to live in a hamlet in a remote region of the Yukon during the Gold Rush days?
C) What is the causal relationship between gender and occupational earnings?
D) How do residents feel about recent episodes of vandalism in their neighbourhood?
E) How do members of the Amish community in the Kitchener-Waterloo region engage in helping behaviour?

Question 16

In relation to primary sources,what two criteria does a historical researcher use in order to evaluate documents and other sources? Briefly describe this evaluation process and the kinds of issues that each mode of evaluation is concerned with.

Question 17

Students often use the labels "qualitative content analysis" and "discourse analysis" interchangeably,but they pertain to distinct practices.What is discourse analysis and what makes it unique?

Question 18

What are some problems that the historical researcher confronts when dealing with narrative history (accounts of the past written by historians)?

Question 19

In culture A,teachers' primary role is to provide intellectual training for a fee.In culture B,teachers are community members who provide informal instruction to young persons,especially with regards to moral matters.However,when writing a book on teachers,Emit Elliot claims teachers in culture B perform the same function as teachers in culture A.What mistake is Emit making?

A) µistake of contextual generalizability
B) Mistake of conceptual generalizability
C) Mistake of historical compatibility
D) Mistake of contextual equivalence
E) Mistake of conceptual equivalence

Question 20

Professor Regina Aniger is in an archive,gathering evidence on a group of elite male politicians and governors in the 1770s for a book she is writing on how political conflict shaped the West.She discovers that all the existing evidence and documents about them ignore the roles of commoners.What does this missing information refer to?

A) Strangeness
B) Primary data
C) Synthesis
D) Missing cases
E) Silences

Question 21

A specific type of qualitative analysis of texts that focuses on how knowledge and meaning are created through the use of language is

A) summative content analysis.
B) directed content analysis.
C) discourse analysis.
D) conventional content analysis.
E) quantitative content analysis.

Question 22

Professor Randy Rudiment conducted a study of First Nations in Ontario between 1880 and 1920.He interviewed elderly Aboriginals about what they remembered about their childhood and the stories told to them by their parents and grandparents.His data is an example of

A) running records.
B) recollections.
C) supporting evidence.
D) nonsource-based knowledge.
E) primary sources.

Question 23

Which of the following statements is an example of evaluating a letter by General Peabody written in 1900 using the technique of "internal criticism"?

A) Checking that a letter was not actually written in 1864
B) Checking to be sure that general's wife was not the letter's author
C) Checking that the general witnessed events referred to in the letter and that the meanings within the letter are consistent
D) Asking why the letter survived to the present
E) Researching the type of paper on which the letter was written

Question 24

A great deal of primary historical data is located in archives.Which of the following statements is correct about doing archival research?

A) Virtually all archival materials are now stored electronically, so scanning through large amounts of material online is very easy.
B) Most archives are located in one or two large cities, so even if one needs to visit an archive, it is easy to find one. Most are open 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.
C) Archival materials are usually very well-organized and sorted. All material is clearly labelled and categorized for easy searching.
D) Archival research is often painstakingly slow. Often there are gaps or holes in a series of papers or destroyed documents, but reading new material can reveal new ideas or connections.
E) Common events and individual persons are easy to track in archival material. All materials are in one location, and everything related to a person or event of interest will be clearly connected and include everything of relevance.

Question 25

________ means evaluating the authenticity of a document to be certain that it is not a fake or a forgery.

A) Back translation
B) Narrative history
C) Internal criticism
D) External criticism
E) Equivalence

Question 26

In conventional qualitative content analysis,the coding process begins

A) with keywords.
B) with theory.
C) with selecting only the latent codes.
D) prior to data analysis.
E) with observation.

Question 27

Which of the following statements best describes the fundamental premises of oral history?

A) Oral history consists of the events, beliefs, or feelings in the past that were directly experienced.
B) Oral history is a type of writing about a historical setting in which the writer attempts to "tell a story" by following chronological order, describing particular people and events, and focusing on many colourful details.
C) Oral history precisely measures and operationalizes variables.
D) Oral history is information about events or settings that is documented or written later by historians or others who did not directly participate in the events or setting.
E) Oral history consists of files, records, or documents that are maintained in a relatively consistent manner over a period of time.

Question 28

Which of the following is NOT one of the steps in historical research projects?

A) Locating evidence
B) Compressing data
C) Organizing evidence
D) Synthesizing
E) Writing a report

Question 29

directed content analysis

Question 30

Which social theorist is most closely associated with critical discourse analysis?

A) Max Weber
B) Michel Foucault
C) Rutherford
D) Emile Durkheim
E) Karl Marx

Question 31

Terry Timmons likes historical research that presents the past in a neat,tidy way.When writing up his own historical research,Terry weaves his findings about historical events and settings into coherent wholes and includes as many interesting and colourful details as possible.Which sort of historical writing does Terry produce?

A) Discursive history
B) Contingent history
C) Recollected history
D) Oral history
E) Narrative history

Question 32

You read a book called British Columbia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.While reading it you notice that the author discusses only the lives and ideas of five individuals based upon their diaries.The author avoids making any sort of generalizations or integrating some possible themes.What problem with secondary sources is illustrated with this example?

A) Historians often use vague concepts with inconsistent definitions to organize the primary sources they read.
B) Historians select a tiny fraction of the mass of information they read, but the selection process is largely unseen and unknown.
C) Historians often have an individualistic bias and tend to focus on actions of the specific individuals revealed in primary sources.
D) Historians, especially those who write in a narrative form, separate out significant from trivial information, but rarely make their social theories explicit.
E) Historians are influenced by various "schools" of historiography.

Question 33

Professor Freeze Iceberg visited the national historical library and also the archives at Revenue Canada.He looked up the tax records paid each year by the 20 largest companies in Canada between 1950 and the present.This type of data is best classified as

A) running records.
B) recollections.
C) secondary sources.
D) primary sources.
E) supporting evidence.

Question 34

conventional content analysis

Question 35

Primary historical evidence on racism in British Columbia in the early 1900s would potentially include which of the following items?

A) An article written in 1972 titled "White Canada Forever"
B) A Vancouver police department report found in the back of an old filing cabinet detailing police raids on Japanese Canadian businesses conducted in 1928
C) A magazine article in last month's Maclean's magazine comparing recent attempts to change immigration laws with the Chinese Canadian Head Tax years
D) Signed documents by mining company owners on illegal labour practices against Japanese Canadians
E) B and D only

Question 36

Which of the following is NOT one of the general steps taken in performing a critical discourse analysis?

A) Discuss your emerging themes with colleagues.
B) Keep notes around any themes you see emerging.
C) Move from a general research question into a more narrowly defined topic area.
D) Read your data numerous times to familiarize yourself with its content.
E) Identify the data you wish to study (i.e., the form of your text) and collect that data.

Question 37

Graduate student Fanny Farquarson's thesis involves qualitative content analysis of self-help literature for men in unhappy marriages.Before commencing with analysis,Fanny reviews existing theory on gender and marriage and uses it to develop coding categories.Which approach to qualitative content analysis identified by Hsiu-Fang and Shannon (2005)is Fanny using?

A) Directed
B) Summative
C) Conventional
D) Inductive
E) Deductive

Question 38

conceptual equivalence

Question 39

Which of the following statements best describes the difference between qualitative content analysis and quantitative content analysis?

A) In qualitative approaches to content analysis, manifest content is usually the focus, while in quantitative approaches attention shifts to revealing implied meanings and motives.
B) Quantitative content analysts use segments of text to identify instances of a code, while qualitative content analysts are more likely to examine entire texts at once for their meaning.
C) Quantitative content analysis organizes and links general themes into a coherent theory about social life, while in qualitative content analysis the goal is to identify general themes that run through the different texts.
D) Qualitative content analysis often finds patterns by using sophisticated statistical techniques, while in quantitative content analysis patterns and linkages are discovered through the coding process.
E) Quantitative content analysis is presented through the use of statistical tables, while qualitative content analysis provides evidence in the form of graphs and summarized statistics.

Question 40

contextual equivalence

Question 41

secondary sources

Question 42

critical discourse analysis

Question 43

oral history

Question 44

equivalence

Question 45

post facto explanations

Question 46

running records

Question 47

recollections

Question 48

adawx

Question 49

qualitative content analysis

Question 50

archives

Question 51

external criticism

Question 52

primary sources

Question 53

nonreactive

Question 54

historiography

Question 55

narrative history

Question 56

summative content analysis

Question 57

internal criticism

Question 58

history

Question 59

discourse analysis