"Other researchers think they can be used in combination only by alternating between methods: qualitative research is appropriate to answer certain kinds of questions in certain conditions and quantitative is right for others. And some researchers think that both qualitative and quantitative methods can be used simultaneously to answer a research question" (Barnes et al., 2005).
There are two sets of challenges that enfold the idea of frame and discourse analysis. The first takes place in the areas of data collection, analysis, and final presentation results. The challenge surrounds definitions and conceptualizations. Ideational concepts are intrinsically inaccurate and distinctions between frames, ideologies and discourses are often indistinct. Discourse and frames are connected and sometimes overlap. Cultural discourses can comprise frames. Ideologies frequently do the same things frames do and are sometimes called frames (Johnston, 2002).
A second set of challenges has to do with verification and proof. Both frame and discourse analyses tackle the difficult tasks of describing and presenting evidence for concepts that exist in the black box of mental life. Attaining access to mental life has forever been a challenge to social science, but with the utilization of questionaries and focus groups, or by inferring from general texts or observed behavior, it is likely to represent the mental constructs within the limits of the chosen method (Johnston, 2002).
Frame and discourse analyses frequently use qualitative methods of data reduction and presentation. Qualitative data reduction orders a wide diversity of written or spoken textual materials by categories that represent more universal factors. The coding of texts by these categories is founded on the decision of the researcher. Presentation findings rely on texts that are assumed to be representative of a particular category, and without numerical gauge of the categories' contents. Since textual data come contextually entrenched and are frequently gathered in ways that offer insights into their explanation that are lost in survey methods, qualitative analysis presents higher validity of the findings but less reliability. Coding categories are produced...
"It is typical that textual materials are analyzed in a two step process, first, to refine theoretical categories and generate new ones, often by review of an exploratory sample of texts, and second, to apply newly refined codes to the broad body of text" (Johnston, 2002).
The majority qualitative discourse analysis intensively analyzes textual materials with the objective of laying exposed the relationships between movement discourse and the discursive field of the broader culture. "A convincing case for this kind of discursive embeddedness may be made by moving between a movement's textual material and those of the broader culture, but this is a research strategy that only secondarily and implicitly can take up the central why questions from the field, such as why a movement succeeds, why a movement fails, or why a movement has a particular trajectory" (Johnston, 2002). Qualitative discourse analysis is distinguished by a concentrated focus on movement-related texts to recognize patterns, connections, and structures of ideas. This typically precludes systematic assessment of patterns over time and how they may vary according to other pressures, a realistic constraint of the method rather than inherent to its reason.
References
Barnes, B., Conrad, k., Demont-Heinrich, C., Graziano, M., Kowalski, D., Neufeld, J.,
Zamora, J. & Palmquist, M. (2005). Generalizability and Transferability. Retrieved from http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/research/gentrans/pop2f.cfm
Hathaway, R. (1995). Assumptions underlying quantitative and qualitative research:
Implications for institutional research. Research in higher education, 36 (5), p. 535-
Johnston, H. (2002). Verification and Proof in Frame and Discourse Analysis, in, Methods of Social Movement Research (pp. 146-172). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Methodologies. (2011). Retrieved from http://onlineqda.hud.ac.uk/methodologies.php
Talja, S. (n.d.). Analyzing Qualitative Interview Data: The Discourse Analytic Method.
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