Activity 1

Glossary

Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is mostly concerned with the individual and their perception of the world. It aims to gain insights into the thoughts and feelings of the participants. Its purpose is to try and specify the quality of the relationship between two or more things.

Semi- structured interview
A semi-structured interview involves set questions and themes but with enough flexibility that any interesting or useful emerging issues can be followed and discussed.

More words of interest:

Annotate/Annotation - adding explanatory notes

Critique – a critical assessment

Document – a piece of work that provides information or evidence. It can be in written, printed or electronic form.

Ethics - research ethics is about being clear about the nature of the agreement that you enter into with the participants/ organisations of your research

Fieldwork - is the process of going out to collect data

Leading questions – these are questions that are not concise or easily understandable that may lead the participant into giving a desired answer

Observation – is analysing events of interest by watching and recording them

Primary Data – is material collected directly from a source by the researcher

Rationale – a reason or set of reasons for a specific belief or course of action

Reflexivity - work that includes self criticism and alerts the individual to the human subjective processes involved in undertaking research.

Research proposal – a proposal for a work based research whose findings/results will alter a situation/ action in the workplace.

Validity – measuring and investigating what you set out to research.
e.g by asking questions and using legitimate methods to obtain information which is analyzed and leads to logical conclusions and recommendations