Creswell Chapter 8

Chapter eight was helpful in developing a visual model of the qualitative process. The “spiral” helped provide a structural framework for each step in the process. I also appreciated his “enter & exit” analogy in relation to the spiral. It simplifies the research process in my mind when it is thought of as entering the process with data such as text or images and exiting with a descriptive narrative or account.

The spiral, and other aspects of the chapter, provided a clearer picture of where the different approaches are similar and where they differ. While describing the development of coding and categorizing the information, Creswell used the term “winnowing” to describe how the data is organized and often even discarded. I was struck for the first time while reading this section of the chapter at how much influence the researcher has on the data in qualitative research. I think it really calls the researcher to an extremely high standard in accurately representing the data that was gathered.

Another aspect of the chapter that I appreciated was the guidelines or parameters that he mentioned for establishing the number of categories in a qualitative study. With hundreds of pages of data, it must tempting to identify hundreds of categories that can be coded. However, Creswell’s standard of not developing “more than 25-30 categories of information” helped me realize that the point of qualitative research is to identify the categories and data that speaks the loudest and carries the most depth. Although there are probably hundreds of findings that could be reported on in a qualitative study, he stresses that it is important for researchers to limit themselves to the most meaningful.

The table on pages 156-157 was helpful in further understanding the "spiral" for each of the five approaches. By reading through the processes for each approach, I better understood the differences in the approaches that were introduced in chapter five. This was particularly true when examining the process of moving into the describing, classifying, and interpreting phases. Although theoretically similar, these phases of the process look quite different.