Qualitative Research Methodology
There are two main categories of research method: quantitative and qualitative. As quantitative research method is mostly used where a large set of data has to be analysed statistically, the purpose of qualitative research method is to help in the understanding of social phenomena in a natural rather than experimental setting, with an emphasis on the meanings, experiences, and views of the participants rather than on providing quantified answers to a research question (Meadows, 2003).
The researcher choose a research work done by Alex Broom and Philip Tovey (2009) which concentrated in examining the role of the Internet in cancer patients’ engagement with complementary and alternative treatments through a qualitative interview based research design. Especially, the researchers in this study employed interpretive research methodologies which focus primarily on understanding and accounting for the meaning of human experiences and actions. This qualitative research approach is also referred to as interpretivist research. Interpretivist research is primarily exploratory and descriptive, designed to discover what can be learned about the area or topic of interest. The interpretivist researcher views the world as a sociopsychological construct, where multiple realities form an interconnected whole that only can be understood as these multiple realities form (Bernard, 2000). Interpretivist research is typically used to answer questions about the complex nature of phenomena, often with the goal of describing and understanding the phenomena from the participants’ point of view (Leedy & Ormrod, 2001).
In this article, Alex Broom and Philip Tovey (2009) carried out the qualitative research spanning a fair time of well over 30 months which is enough for collecting primary data through interviews. Interviews usually take longer time for the researcher as compared to quantitative method which can collect a large data through questionnaire based surveys in a very short time. Thus, considering the research method the time of 30 months seems appropriate in this study.
Alex Broom and Philip Tovey (2009) have utilized relatively unstructured interview method which is considered preferable in view of the study goal of capturing the voices and opinions of the cancer patients using internet and their beliefs about, CAM and biomedical cancer treatments. In fact, in-depth, open-ended interviews are strongly encouraged when one is working with phenomena to redefine or build theory (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Strauss & Corbin, 1998; S. J. Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). S. J. Taylor and Bogdan noted that structured interviews are not considered in studies in which the researcher needs to “asked to talk about their attitudes towards, and experiences of, the Internet in the context of their cancer care, building theory from their accounts rather than imposing it on them” (p. 145)
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