Everything the organizational researcher needs to know about qualitative methods

Citation

(2006), "Everything the organizational researcher needs to know about qualitative methods", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 1 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/qrom.2006.29801bae.001

Everything the organizational researcher needs to know about qualitative methods

A review of Catherine Cassell, Gillian Symon Essential Guide to Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research

The Essential Guide to Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research is brought together by Catherine Cassell, Professor of Occupational Psychology at Manchester Business School and Gillian Simon, Senior Lecturer in Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, both of whom have a disciplinary background as organizational psychologists.

Over the last ten years they have sought to raise the profile of qualitative methods to organizational research through producing edited volumes such as this one (Cassell and Symon, 1994: Symon and Cassell, 1998) that promote innovative and dynamic new research practices. This volume documents the variety of qualitative research methods available, provides accessible outlines of how to apply the methods in practice and introductions to other approaches not covered in the previously two volumes. In seeking to achieve these goals the authors acknowledge that they have been reliant on the expertise and commitment of their numerous contributors who gave accounts of their own research practices.

The essential guide gets together in 400 pages comprising 30 chapters the range of alternative methods available for undertaking qualitative data collection and analysis in organizational research. Reading through each method it soon becomes apparent that the demonstrated techniques can easily be applied to other psychology domains due to the straightforward way they are described and presented.

The variety of approaches documented in the guide demonstrates the rich diversity of "qualitative" techniques available to researchers to collect, analyze and interpret data. Each chapter focuses on a specific technique (i.e. using interviews in qualitative research, electronic interviews in organizational research, life histories, critical incident technique, repertory grids, cognitive mapping, twenty statements test, qualitative research diaries, stories, pictorial representation, group methods, participant observation, analytic induction, critical research and analysis in organizations, hermeneutic understanding, discourse analysis, talk-in-interaction/conversation analysis, attributional coding, grounded theory, using templates in the thematic analysis of text, using data matrices, methods and strategies in preserving sharing and reusing data from qualitative research, historical analysis of company documents, ethnography, case study research, reflection and update of soft systems analysis, action research and research action, co-research with insider/outsider teams, and the future conference) and reviews how the method has been used in organizational research, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using the method, presents a case study example of the method in use and considers reflexivity and epistemological issues. Each contributor provides a list of additional reading and sometimes recommends web sites at the end of their chapters so that interested readers can pursue the possibilities further. In addition reference to sophisticated software packages that handle qualitative data are noted.

The book is not an advocate of using qualitative methods over quantitative ones in organizational research. After all the research process follows the same systematic principles of collecting and analysing data with human participants in order to address a research question. The book serves as a reminder of the plethora of methods available to all organizational researchers to use in combination to qualitative methods. There is, of course, a bounding logic which prioritised certain methods of collecting and analyzing data over others. This bounding logic is the ontology one adopts. There are two overarching ontologies in psychology today. The first states that there is a reality independent of human subjectivity that can be measured objectively (the normative paradigm). The second states that reality is socially constructed, based on subjective experience, and should be analyzed via the human meaning it is awarded (the phenomenological paradigm). In effect, psychologists either use quantitative or qualitative methods to make sense of human behaviour. Although, focused on qualitative methods, the contributors articulate a clear message that quantitative psychological research can be limited and incomplete when it does not take into account the context in which the data were created or does not seek to understand how the individual makes sense of their working world.

In summary, Cassell and Symon have produced an excellent resource for students and researchers in the areas of organization studies, management research and organizational psychology. The variety of methods documented in the volume provides the researcher (i.e. professional or student), academic (i.e. research skills/methods lecturer) or practitioner with a range of options and opportunities for exploring diverse issues within the area of organizational research. The comprehensive and accessible nature of this collection makes it a thesaurus for different research methods of analysing, collecting and interpreting qualitative data.

Overall it supports the view that qualitative methods in organizational research are essential to make sense of the working world without ruling out the possibility of using these methods in combination to quantitative approaches. The book should stimulate psychologists to review the ontology they most favour and to consider utilising the best from both qualitative and quantitative paradigms perhaps in a mixed method approach in order to offer a fuller picture of human behaviour and experience at work organizations. The guide reminds psychologists that it is nave to believe that knowledge can be encapsulated by numbers without assigning meaning, and that the reductionism often associated with statistics can extinguish some of the richness and mystery of life (Boyle, 2002).