According to Babbie and Mouton (2007: 74), a research design is a plan or blue
print of how a person intends conducting the research. Research design focuses of the end product, what kind of study is being planned and what kind of results are aimed at. Research brings out factual data on existing situations. There are two main types of research: quantitative and qualitative. According to Matthews and Ross (2010: 141), quantitative research methods are primarily concerned with gathering and working with data that is structured and can be represented numerically. Research questions in a quantitative method may be set out as testable hypotheses.
The research methodology that has been used in this study is the qualitative method. According to Neuman (2003: 137), qualitative researchers are more concerned about issues of the richness, texture and feeling of raw data because their inductive approaches emphasise developing insights and generalisations out of the data collected. This means that the researcher has given the impression of being at the deepness of the study in question; analyses the relevant data collected and make some generalisations on the data collected. Qualitative researchers may only have a general idea of what is being looking for. Qualitative approaches enable the researcher to explore concepts in more depth with the research participants and to hear them talk about concepts in their own words.
Qualitative research methods are primarily concerned with stories including subjective understandings, feelings, opinions and beliefs. Unlike quantitative research, in qualitative research questions may be developed using subsidiary questions. The research questions may be gathered by describing and explaining events and gathering participants understanding, beliefs and experiences. In the quantitative method the researcher normally knows what he is looking for. Unlike quantitative research, in qualitative method the researcher may only have a general idea of what he/she is looking for. As already mentioned above this research study is qualitative in nature.
61 According to Babbie & Mouton (2010: 270), qualitative research distinguishes itself from quantitative in terms of the key features:
conducted in the natural setting of social actors. It is appropriate to the study of those attitudes and behaviours best understood within their natural setting. focuses on process rather than outcomes.
emphasises an insider‟s perspective is emphasised. The researcher must understand people who use a different language, have very different world views and beliefs, and whose cultural practices and customs are vastly different from own.
understands social actions in terms of its specific context rather than attempting to generalize to some theoretical population.
the research process is often inductive in its approach, resulting in the generation of new hypotheses and theories.
the qualitative researcher is seen as the main instrument in the research process.
3.4.1. Qualitative research
According to Matthews and Ross (2010: 111), designing research means going back to research questions and thinking about what you want to achieve with the data collected. The researcher looks for similarities and differences in the data collected. Qualitative approaches work with data that is constructed by the research participant in their own way and interpreted and structured by the researcher as part of the analytical process. After data is collected by the researcher, an analysis is conducted based on the data conducted and the researcher makes conclusions based on the data collected. The qualitative approach enables the researcher to conduct unstructured interviews that enables the research participant to talk about a set of questions or topics in their own way (Matthews and Ross 2010: 147).
Bogdan and Biklen (1992: 2), maintain that qualitative researchers do not approach their research with specific questions to ask or hypotheses to test. Once data has
62 been collected researchers continually attempt to understand the data from the participants‟ subjective perspective. It is important for the researcher to understand the insiders‟ views. According to Christensen, Johnson and Turner (2007: 52), researchers, when collecting data also take the role of “objective outsiders” and relate the interpretive subjective data to the research purpose and research questions. According to Miles and Huberman (1994: 38), qualitative research issues of instrument validity and reliability rely largely on the skills of the researcher. Other authors however argue that reliability poses serious threats to the trustworthiness of much ethnographic work. Ethnographic studies typically examine larger entities or units of analysis such as communities, social settings, and cultural groups. Ethnography is the work of describing culture. The essential core of this activity aims to understand life from the native point of view (Babbie and Mouton 2007: 270). Therefore validity may be its strength.
This research was conducted in a natural setting. There was no manipulation of variables, imitation or externally imposed structure on the situation. According to Chritensen et.al (2007: 353), the researcher makes generalisations about the population based on the sample results. The researcher maintained accuracy in the collection of information. When results are generalised they can be applied to different populations with the same characteristic in different settings. When results are not generalised, the results are applicable only to the people in the same sample who participated in the original research, not to any others (Salkind 2006: 86).
A qualitative study cannot be called transferable unless it is credible, and it cannot be deemed credible unless it is dependable. Credibility looks at the compatibility between the constructed realities that exist in the minds of the respondents; transferability refers to the extent to which the findings can be applied in other context or with other respondents; dependability is an inquiry that must provide the audience with evidence that, if it were to be repeated with the same or similar respondents in the same context, its findings would be similar. Conformability is the degree to which the findings are the product of the focus of the inquiry and not of the biases of the researcher (Babbie and Mouton 2007: 277).
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