SOC 220 - October 29
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Overview
Jeff Brassard explains qualitative research methods in SOC 220, finishing ethnography with visual, participant-produced, auto-, and institutional approaches, then reviewing purposive and theoretical sampling, saturation, and fieldwork closure. He introduces qualitative interviews as flexible, open-ended conversations and gives practical guidance on writing and piloting interview questions, building rapport, recording reliably, and choosing a safe interview setting.
Key takeaways
- Qualitative sampling is usually nonprobability sampling: purposive sampling finds information-rich participants, while snowball sampling uses one contact to reach others.
- Theoretical sampling is an iterative grounded-theory strategy in which early analysis determines what data to collect next, continuing until categories and their relationships reach saturation.
- Semistructured interviews offer preparation without rigidity: a guide of roughly 10 to 20 open-ended questions provides direction, while the interviewer adapts order and adds probes as participants respond.
- Questions that invite stories produce richer data than yes-or-no questions: ask “Tell me about an argument you had” rather than “Do you sometimes argue?”
- Interview guides should be tested through a mock interview or pilot, with revisions for unclear wording, jargon, leading assumptions, and questions that produce overly brief answers.
- Interview safety and recording quality require advance planning: test phones or lavalier microphones, meet in a quiet public setting, and do not conduct in-person interviews at participants’ homes.
Chapters
- Field notes are a key source of ethnographic data and should be written in the moment or by the end of the day.
- Researchers can use mental notes or scratch notes before producing fuller field notes.
- Mini assignment five combines a 10 to 15 minute observation in a public place with interview-question work.
- Record the date, time, location, setting, observations, and separate reactions, questions, and hunches.
- Visual ethnography uses photographs, films, videos, or illustrations as research materials.
- Visual materials can serve as memory aids, primary data, or prompts for interviews and focus groups.
- Sarah Pink distinguishes a realist approach, which treats visuals as documentation, from a reflexive approach that considers how research relationships shape them.
- A filmed police ride-along is one example of research presented through visual material.
- In photovoice, participants create images or videos, often using their phones, and interpret them from their own perspectives.
- Photovoice is collaborative and can give marginalized communities greater control over meaning-making and attention to social change.
- Autoethnography studies the researcher’s own behavior, such as a student’s ethnography of their gaming.
- Autoethnography avoids recruiting another participant but has limited scope and cannot easily support claims beyond the researcher’s experience.
- Institutional ethnography studies everyday organizational practices to reveal power relations and ruling relations.
- Potential sites include hospitals, corporations, religious institutions, and organizations such as Alberta Health Services.
- Researchers connect daily activities to policies, memos, emails, and other institutional texts.
- The analysis can show how institutions organize or exclude people, as well as how workers resist policy through collective action, jokes, or everyday coping.
- Qualitative research generally uses nonprobability methods rather than probability samples designed for quantitative work.
- Purposive sampling selects people because they are likely to provide rich information about the group or setting under study.
- Snowball sampling uses an initial contact to identify other potential participants, and it can be combined with purposive sampling.
- Convenience sampling can recruit through personal contacts, posters, Reddit, or Facebook, though purposeful selection may produce more useful information.
- Theoretical sampling, associated with grounded theory, selects people, settings, events, or contexts to develop a theory from data.
- Researchers collect and analyze data iteratively, using emerging findings to decide what to study next.
- Theoretical saturation occurs when no new relevant data emerge, categories are well developed, and relationships among categories show established patterns.
- For a course project, purposive sampling is often more practical than claiming theoretical sampling unless the project is explicitly building a theory.
- Research may end because of time, funding, graduation, personal factors, or a lack of new findings.
- Leaving an ethnographic field site can be difficult after researchers establish regular contact and close relationships with participants.
- Researchers may need to share results and explain how participants’ contributions were used.
- Interviews are a widely used qualitative method and are also frequently included in ethnographic research.
- Life-history interviews ask people to narrate experiences such as childhood or work.
- Oral histories examine historical events through accounts from people who experienced them, such as truckers, police officers, and Ottawa residents describing the convoy protests.
- Focus groups bring participants together to discuss a topic and are another major qualitative interview format.
- Qualitative interviews can be standalone research or one component of a broader ethnography.
- Unlike a quantitative structured interview that administers a survey, qualitative interviewing is conversational and open-ended.
- The aim is to understand interviewees’ perspectives through detailed accounts of experiences, life histories, and social groups.
- Tangents can reveal issues researchers did not know to ask about, so interviewers need to balance following them with returning to the research topic.
- Interviewers often ask participants whether they may be contacted again for follow-up questions.
- An unstructured interview uses little preparation and may rely on one broad opening question plus two or three topic prompts.
- The interviewer lets the conversation develop through follow-up questions rather than following a detailed list.
- Broad openings such as asking someone to describe their community can generate free-form answers.
- A short guide can help interviewers remember key topics when the open format feels difficult to manage.
- A semistructured interview uses an interview guide, also called a script or schedule of questions, with roughly 10 to 20 open-ended questions.
- As a rough planning estimate, 10 questions may take about an hour, while 20 may take closer to two hours.
- Interviewees may answer later questions early, so interviewers can cross them off and ask the remaining questions in a more relevant order.
- New probing questions should be created in the moment, using an improv-like “yes, and” approach rather than arguing with or shutting down participants.
- Questions such as “Did you enjoy the art program?” often produce a brief yes or no and make follow-up awkward.
- Ask “What activities did you enjoy?” or “What did you think of the instructors?” to elicit specific details.
- Replace “Do you have many friends?” with prompts such as “Tell me about your friends” or “How do you get along with people your age?”
- To explore conflict, ask for a concrete example, such as “Tell me about an argument you had,” rather than asking whether arguments happen.
- Start with the research question and identify known unknowns: what the researcher knows they still need to learn.
- Revise the interview guide when an early interview reveals an unexpected issue, then add questions for follow-up or later interviews.
- Use a loose question order, broad open prompts, and language participants understand; avoid academic jargon and leading questions that suggest a preferred answer.
- Mini assignment five asks students to prepare a 10-question guide and conduct a mock interview as a pilot, then revise questions that produce confusion or short answers.
- Research interviewees and their settings beforehand to avoid basic mistakes and build rapport; Jeff Brassard describes connecting with a writer after learning about her work on Gilmore Girls.
- Test recording equipment before the interview; a phone or paired lavalier microphones can capture both interviewer and participant.
- Choose a quiet public place or a library room with visibility, balancing privacy with safety.
- Do not physically interview participants at their homes; a recorded Zoom or Google Meet interview is a different option.
Transcript excerpt
0:20 Oh, I hear Yeah. I just didn't want to interrupt the story. So, >> I hate spiders. >> Yeah.
1:10 >> Oh, any day. I had a friend who she went and backpacked through Australia >> and she would send me pictures of like a giant spider that just sat on the outside of their tent and I'm like, "No, no, thank you. I don't like this. Oh, all the time. Yeah. >> Canadian. >> Yeah. >> Apparently, the houses aren't very well sealed, so animals get in a lot. What's that? >> Apparently not. They also get really cold like >> in the winter, which is not that cold
1:56 there, but they have basically no central heating. So, Yeah, >> fun times. Reasons not to live there. Okay. Um, and I mean, reasons not to live here. It took me two hours to get to work yesterday, so that's fun. Ah, good times. All righty. So, I don't think there's anything especially interesting to announce. I don't think. Um, I guess obviously that first mini assignment is due on Sunday night. Remember to check your Canvas for various times. Um, because I
2:46 I don't know. Is is the app still showing the wrong time on Canvas or is have they fixed it now? I don't know because I don't use the app, but whatever. Doesn't matter. Just make sure you check the the time. It should be, you know, 11:59 on the Sunday like all the assignments are due. Um, so yeah, let's not worry about that too much for the moment. So today we're going to finish talking about ethnography. We've just got a couple of little slides um left to go and then we're going to jump into talking about oh one of my very favorite topics which is interviews
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Summary, takeaways, and chapters were generated by AI from the video's transcript and may contain errors. The video belongs to its creator, Jeff Brassard.