MFW I've just applied for a PhD project on my dream topic, but it means changing from quantitative to qualitative research. Any advice from those who've done the switch?
Posted Apr 5, 2018, 12:18 AM UTC
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The most important thing is to remember not to use leading questions, or any language that might give the subject a bias. Also, ethics are more important to every aspect of the study when you're researching human subjects/participants. Other than that, stick with the scientific research method we know and love! :)
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Yes, never had to get ethics approval to hit rocks with a hammer. Thanks! :)
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No advice but I'm so excited for you. How awesome to experience a breadth of research areas! Great for employment opportunities down the road. You'll be a force to be reckoned with when you graduate!
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I made the switch and honestly I fucking love qualitative research. Have you looked into the coding and analysis tools? I really enjoy tagging and organizing transcript data, and the data is so rich and inherently interesting. Some of it is super tedious and time-consuming (especially if you have to transcribe your own interviews), but so is some of quant work!
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No, I haven't yet. Just dipping my toes in so far. I'm excited (maybe naively so) about the prospect of qualitative data analysis! :D
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I took a mixed methods class intended for quantitative researchers that went over qualitative methods pretty well. I can send you the syllabus and readings if you want them.
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That would honestly be amazing! I'll send you my email, if that's OK?
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The project will involve interview and survey dsta, my background is smashing rocks into bits and then sticking them in a mass spectrometer. Kind of the same thing, right?
Jokes aside, if you've done a similar transfer (or the other way even) I'm keen to hear about your experiences.
Oh! I did that! My PhD was in neuroscience, and these days I do STEM education research, which is very qualitative.
It's a big change, and requires getting used to thinking about research in a very different way. There are lots of new words and concepts to understand. If you join an actual sociology lab with people trained in these methods it will be easier, because you'll be able to learn from them (I'm in a group with a bunch of other recovering biologists, so it's the blind leading the blind). I think the most important thing to do is to keep an open mind. As natural scientists we're sort of trained to trust numbers over feelings and experiences, and as such lots of scientists don't hold qualitative research in high regard. But keep in mind numbers DO lie (or rather, scientists often manipulate numbers - like through p-hacking- and use them in biased ways- quantitative science is not free from bias), and that a lot of very smart people have done lots of work on finding the best ways to keep qualitative research as unbiased as possible. There's a lot of theory to it. Actually, sometimes I think qualitative scientists do a better job of understanding the fallibility of their data and not jumping to inappropriate conclusions from it- something biologists could definitely learn from. Be patient with learning this new field. It's not as easy as it sounds.
I get a lot of help from a LinkedIn group for social scientists. I'm always asking them questions about methodology and such and they're really helpful. Here's a link: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4292855
Sometimes I miss working with my hands the way I did in lab science, but mostly I really love doing qualitative research. It's pretty fun!
I am absolutely OK with asking for help, I'm sure I'll need it! I have had some exposure to qualitative research, but never been responsible for designing and running my own research, so I think the learning curve will be steep. But it was similarly steep when I learned about quantitative research methods, and I survived, so I'm confident I can do it. What you've mentioned is key though, to get advice from more experienced researchers.
It is a steep learning curve, but if nothing else your PhD training will have taught you how to learn new stuff. Good luck!
The biggest impact I felt was genuinely convincing myself that I didn’t need a bigger dataset, and being able to undertake genuine lit review across both methods in pretty niche topics.
Otherwise I actually found the switch the qual really intuitive.
Enjoy.
Ooo this sounds really intriguing (I'm a geochemist too) - could you/do you mind sharing what the project you applied for is? The only time I've really heard people going into something more qualitative is in history/sociology/psychology things.
It's in risk management, and kind of moving into sociology. I really hope I get in, because quantitative research doesn't really get my motor racing the way risk management does. I'm such a nerd.
That sounds so fun! (I do more GIS stuff/mapping in general now, hooray for different things!). I hope you get in too, sending you some good juju :)
Thanks! :)