Qualitative Research Analysis, Article Review Example

This study investigates the positive effects of vigor on the work environment (Shraga & Shirom, 2009). The study defines ‘vigor’ as comprising physical strength, emotional energy, and cognitive liveliness. The study’s relied on interviews with randomly selected 38 employees. The study had all the hallmarks of qualitative research. The researchers wanted to know what employees mean when they use the term ‘vigor’. The researchers wanted to understand the effects of vigor on the workplace and their implications for the field of management. The authors of the study carried out the interviews themselves, thus, they were the primary source of data collection and analysis.

The authors aimed to develop a new theory out of their interviews and critical analysis of data rather than setting out to test the accuracy of an existing theory. The conclusions reached by the authors were mainly descriptive in nature and explained their rationale for the conclusions they reached in the study.The aim of the authors from the beginning was to go for uncontrolled study in which they gave the interviewees complete freedom to express their opinions and ideas instead of staying within specific guidelines. In addition, the objective of the authors was to provide qualitative evidence of the impacts of vigor at the workplace. The employees were asked to describe events which are usually descriptive in nature with almost no quantitative elements that can be analyzed for their information value.

The authors chose the sample from the employees in different large Israeli organizations who were going under routine periodic health examinations as part of a fringe-benefit package. The authors excluded employees who had been diagnosed with a cardiovascular disease or diabetes, had undergone a stroke or a mental crisis, or were taking antipsychotic medications or antidepressants. Thus, even the sample was chosen on qualitative factors rather than quantitative factors which makes sense because quantitative factors such as age and income would have been a poor choice to select sample as they have little or no relation to vigor.

The design strategy for qualitative research employed by the authors was purposeful sampling as they chose a sample which could offer useful manifestation of the phenomenon under investigation, i.e. vigor. The authors employed various analysis strategies includingunique case orientation and induction analysis to make sense of the interviewees’ responses. The authors used open ended questions in the telephone interview. The benefit of open ended questions was that the interviewees could explain their responses with freedom. In addition, open ended questions yield more information and better understanding of the interviewees’ perspectives. The interviewees are also more responsive and enthusiastic since they are allowed to set their own borders instead of choosing a response from the given options.

One of the disadvantages of open ended questions is that the interviewees may go off topic. In addition, open ended questions usually yielded long answers and thus, are costly in terms of time and costs. It also takes more time to analyze the responses of all interviewees because responses to open ended questions have no common format. The authors did the right thing to choose open ended questions because the nature of the research required understanding the concept of vigor as understood by the employees and the potential impact of vigor on work life. Closed-ended questions would have forced interviewees to choose among options that may or may not reflect their real opinions. Qualitative research was also better for this study because it is often hard to put a number on factors such as emotional energy, physical strength, and cognitive liveliness. An interviewee may rememberdifferent emotions he has been through and can describe his experiences but it would be tricky for him to numerically rank different emotions in terms of severity. In many cases, an interviewee may randomly rank different emotions just to answer the questions asked which will reduce the reliability of his responses.

The authors mention that each interview was treated as a distinct unit and related to the multiple interviews as discrete replications which is an employment of unique case orientation. Inductive analysis involved looking for words and terms used by interviewees to describe vigor and then relating those words and terms to one of the three aspects of vigor as defined by the study authors. Then the authors looked for common themes or patterns across all the conducted interviews. When the interviewees were asked how long the feelings of vigor lasted, only 25 or barely two third of the sample group was able to give a response. Even then their responses were estimations such as few hours or days or for the length of a specific event. This shows that the nature of the experience was such that most people could not really remember the exact duration of it. The most reliable response they could give was a non-numerical estimation and if they were asked to give a numerical response, they would have given widely varied estimations.

Here the advantage of the qualitative research was that it took into account the characteristics of the research sample and identified their limitations in terms of reliable responses. The disadvantage of the qualitative research format here is that the interviewees’ responses have little information quality for e.g. the length of certain events vary in lengths for different individuals and different individuals may mean different things when using the term ‘few hours’. Some may mean 2-3 hours while for others few hours may mean 5-6 hours. The choice of a qualitative research format was the right one, nonetheless, because the nature of the question was such that it would have yielded even more unreliable responses if quantitative research format had been chosen.

After the authors went through interview transcripts, they identified 107 references to conditions or events that elicited vigor. The list was finally shortened to manageable seven themes. The finalized seven themes were a reliable indicator of what was usually experienced by the interviewees in relation to vigor. This was made possible because the qualitative research format allowed the interviewees to be themselves and thus, the data collected from the interviewees didn’t have any authors’ bias. The potential problem with this approach is that this approach resulted in too varying responses and the authors had to find ways to bring down the themes identified to a manageable number. In their quest to reach a manageable number, the authors might have been able to eliminate themes that occurred among significant participants but didn’t end up in the top seven or whatever was the authors’ targeted list size. It might also be that the concept of vigor has a number of meanings for different people but the authors reduced it to few common themes in their quest to find support for their theory.

The authors might also have favored themes that reflected their own understanding of the term vigor. It is difficult to speculate how a quantitative research format would have effectively approached this issue. One way might have been to give the interviewees a list of terms and ask them to rank each term according to its relation to vigor. In addition, the interviewees would also have been given the chance to give 0 to a term that they considered to have no relation to vigor. The terms with high rankings would be the ones that are closely identified with vigor by the sample. This technique can also be used by the authors with the seven themes they have identified. They can ask the interviewees to rank these seven themes in terms of their relation to vigor and then compare the results with the results they have already calculated and detailed in Table 2: Summary of themes. If the results of the survey match the calculations reached by the authors, this will show that the authors did a good job in identifying common themes and the final seven themes do not reflect authors’ own bias. When the authors tried to find the relation between vigor and job satisfaction/performance, their findings were quite similar to previous quantitative researches. This means the authors’ conclusion that job performance and satisfaction is positively related to vigor is reliable because the idea is now supported by both quantitative and qualitative research studies.

There are some shortcomings with this qualitative research study which also reflect the overall problem with qualitative research studies. The sample size was not very large and that is because qualitative research studies are usually costly in terms of costs and time, thus, large sample sizes like quantitative research studies are not always feasible. In addition, this topic might have been more suited to quantitative research methods and then qualitative research methods could be applied to understand and explain why certain factors were more closely related to vigor and others were not. Moreover, some of the findings of the research had little informational value such as the length of vigor experienced by the interviewees that were at best vague estimates.

Reference

Shraga, O., & Shirom, A. (2009). The construct validity of vigor and its antecedents: A qualitative study. The Tavistock Institute.