Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн

187 страница из 242

ssss1 Qualitative and quantitative data and analysis (adapted from Bernard 1996).

The point is that medical anthropologists, like all social scientists, have access to many tools for data collection and analysis, and we ought to use the right ones for a given research question. Dividing the toolkit of social science into qualitative and quantitative methods tends to obscure that point.

A better starting point for thinking about research design is to recognize a continuum of research objectives, ranging from exploratory to confirmatory research questions. Exploratory questions seek to understand how and why things work as they do; confirmatory questions seek to test hypotheses based on new or existing theory. These different types of questions imply different types of methods along a parallel continuum of relatively unstructured to structured methods of data collection and analysis (Figure 4.2). This framework is useful because it helps to ensure that decisions about research design flow from the research questions.