Beyond Creswell\'s Five Approaches the First Approach

Beyond Creswell's Five Approaches

The first approach identified other than the five approaches identified by Creswell is Thematic analysis is the method that stresses on describing and organizing rich data sets. It goes beyond counting words and phrases to recognizing explicit and/or implicit ideas within collected data (Guest & MacQueen, 2012, p. 12). Researchers review data, take notes and sort these notes into categories. It helps researchers as a strategy data move to analyze from a comprehensive reading of the data to developing themes and determining patterns. Understanding these codes usually include relating theme frequencies, recognizing theme co-occurrences, and vividly displaying relationships between different themes (Guest & MacQueen, 2012, p. 17). Thematic analysis is usually done inductively or deductively (Braun & Clarke, 2006). In an inductive thematic analysis approach, the themes that are identified are very linked to the data because assumptions are data-driven; coding very often occurs without the researcher trying to fit the data into a pre-existing frame (Braun & Clarke, 2006). With the deductive thematic analysis, the assumptions are theory-driven. This means that analyzing data is less descriptive because the data is limited to the preconceived frames (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

The other qualitative approach identified for qualitative research is the Historical qualitative approach. This is an objective evaluation and a systematic collection of data that relates to past incidences or events and that are used for hypotheses testing. The researchers revisit these events because they are concerned with the causes and effects of these events and how they have affected or will affect the future or future events (Wicks & Whiteford, 2006). Historical research helps the researchers to answer questions like where the people involved come from, where they are, who they are and where they plan on going. In historical qualitative approach to research, the researcher needs to recognize the historical problem or identify the need for a certain historical knowledge (Thies, 2002). Then they have to gather as much relevant information as possible about the problem.

My potential topic for dissertation is about domestic violence in Cameroon. The Republic of Cameroon is dominated by a strong presidency of more than 30 years and has always had extremely limited laws concerning women and human rights (Duarte, 2008; U.S. Department of State, 2011). Using a historical approach in this study could help the researcher understand why the system has always discriminated women and how this has affected the present and future laws and events in the country. The only problem is that there tends to be bias in information, sometimes limiting the researcher's information gathering process (Guest & MacQueen, 2012, p. 12-13). The main concern too when doing a thematic analysis for research is reliability as a result of a wide variety of interpretations from multiple researchers and thematic analysis could miss some important data (Guest & MacQueen, 2012, p. 17).