Culture and career goals in high school: qualitative research validity

¶ … collecting qualitative data. The study in question is "Culture and cultural factors that impact high school academic and career goals and objectives." Culture/cultural factors would be the independent variable, and career goals/academic goals would be the dependent variable in this study. Both are qualitative in nature. The study, however, is correlational because it seeks to understand the links between the two sets of variables.

There major qualitative methods are participant observation, in-depth interviews and focus groups (FHI, n.d.). Surveys can also be used. They convey a lot of same information that an interview might, but are different in certain respects. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these methods. The first is the in-depth interview method. This method has a lot of appeal for the research question at hand. Interview provide an opportunity for the interview to learn a lot about the subject, and in particular the researcher can ask open-ended questions, which might be the best way to interpret things like academic and career goals. The interview format can be time-consuming, however, and it would be an extensive process to gather sufficient data. Furthermore, directly interviewing subjects can introduce an element of bias, in particular where a respondent's answer must be interpreted.

The survey technique is similar to an interview in that it allows the researcher to gather a substantial amount of qualitative information. It is more challenging in that the answers will need to be broader as there is no opportunity for the researcher to narrow down a response or ask for clarification. There is little room for open-ended questions, though they can be built into the study. However, surveys have the advantage of being easier to administer than interviews, and certain take less time and money. Surveys are also valuable in that it is harder to introduce bias into surveys because there is no interaction between the researcher and the subject.

There are a number of threats to validity that must be taken into consideration when evaluating the different options for qualitative research design. There are two types of validity, first of all. Internal validity threats include history, maturation, testing, instrumentation, statistical repression, selection, mortality, interaction, diffusion of treatment and more (Unit 5, 2016)). As noted, interviews introduce several of these threats to internal validity, because the interviewer interacts with the subject directly. Selection bias is another threat to internal validity, however, and can affect both of these qualitative research methods. It is important that the subjects are selected randomly, and not allowed to self-select, because that can introduce a certain bias to the study that will undermine it.

There are also threats to the external validity. These can include population validity and ecological validity. Population validity means that whether using interview or whether using a survey, the sample must accurately reflect the population being studied. If the sample ends up being convenience sampling, rather than random, that will introduce an external validity problem. This may be more likely the case with interviews, as some students may be uncomfortable with interviews. An example would be a culture that is mainly comprised of new arrivals who have minimal English skills. They might not wish to participate in interviews, selecting themselves out of the study. That could pose an external validity problem where a portion of the population is omitted from the sample.