Qualitative Research & Ethnography Flashcards

A researcher studying gang culture gains trust with members over months but then witnesses an illegal act. This scenario best illustrates the tension between:

Answer: Researcher role and legal/ethical obligations

Deep field immersion can create conflicts between the researcher's commitment to participants and their legal or ethical obligations as a citizen.

In ethnography, 'going native' refers to a risk where the researcher:

Answer: Becomes so immersed that objectivity and analytical distance are compromised

'Going native' describes over-identification with participants, causing the researcher to lose the analytical perspective needed for sociological interpretation.

Which of the following is a characteristic feature of constructivist grounded theory as developed by Kathy Charmaz?

Answer: The researcher and participants jointly construct meaning through interaction

Charmaz's constructivist grounded theory posits that theories are co-constructed through the researcher-participant relationship, not discovered objectively.

A sociologist is interviewing formerly incarcerated individuals about re-entry experiences. Using open-ended questions is preferable because:

Answer: They allow participants to define what is meaningful and frame their own narratives

Open-ended questions honor participant voice and allow emergent themes rather than imposing the researcher's predetermined categories.

Axial coding in grounded theory involves:

Answer: Reassembling data around categories and examining relationships between them

Axial coding follows open coding and focuses on exploring how categories relate to each other — their conditions, contexts, strategies, and consequences.

Which of the following best describes transferability in qualitative research?

Answer: The degree to which findings can be applied to other contexts based on rich contextual description

Transferability is the qualitative analog to external validity — it depends on sufficiently rich description so readers can judge applicability to their own context.

A researcher studying online communities of chronic illness patients primarily analyzes their forum posts without interaction. This method is best described as:

Answer: Non-participatory netnography or online document analysis

Analyzing existing online texts without researcher participation or intervention constitutes non-reactive, document-based online qualitative analysis.