Re: What is "research"?

[dennis roberts]

At 05:33 AM 1/22/2003, you wrote:

 Even when a qualitative researcher

first point ... one is not a qualitative researcher ... either you are a researcher or not a researcher

 studies one person very
thoroughly he cannot say what people are like in general. However, he
has created knowledge about what people may be like and how they should
be studied to learn something important about them.

i disagree ... just like any n=1 study ... unless you replicate this with other n=1s ... to see if others do similar things or not ... all you have is a lot of (perhaps very good) information about 1 person

what you can't get from an n=1 study is the RANGE of behaviors that you might see ACROSS people which, then, tells you something about what is typical of people ...

if we were interested in some population characteristic ... and opted to take samples of size n=1 ... the sampling error you would see is the same as the entire range of behavior of the population characteristic you are studying so ... where does YOUR n=1 sample happen to be? you have no idea

These aspects and
points of view can be adapted in studying other people, i.e. they are
generalizable.

all you can pose as questions are: i wonder if what i see in this person will be seen in other people? to answer these kinds of questions ... you MUST examine other people ...

so, in a real sense, the notion of generalization from one person is ... well, of little value

there is nothing wrong with doing in depth case studies (ie ... n=1 studies) but, one can't have it both ways ... you can't say that you have something meaningful ... AND that generalizes to larger groups of people ... at the same time

Kai Karma
Sibelius Academy
Helsinki, Finland


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dennis roberts, educational psychology, penn state university
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