Critiques on Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA)

The worldview on most qualitative researches is that it is not “scientific” enough proof or too soft to be considered a contribution to the society. Elo et al. (2014) highlighted several criticisms on qualitative analysis methods which are a compilation of biased findings based on one’s personal impression; secondly, it is difficult to be reproduced by other researchers; and finally, qualitative inquiries lack generalisability, as studies done, are mostly on a small setting or scale. One of the many pitfalls of qualitative research especially in content analysis is the ability to mask sloppy presentation or weak

University

of Malaya

methodologies using good writing skills. Scholars have put forth on qualitative inquiry the ability to produce rigour and validity through the clear and well justified processes of their data collection and analyses. Creswell (1998) further recommended eight verifications (or what they refer to as validity) a) prolonged engagement and persistent observation b) triangulation c) peer review or debriefing d)negative case analysis e) clarifying researcher bias f) member checks g) thick description h) external audit suggested to use at least two of them.

Divergent to the traditionalist quantitative content analysis that relies of the description of statistics, researchers in qualitative content analysis (QCA) takes on the role on examining the themes, rather than to enumerate them, which eliminates prejudice and bias led by scientific hypothesis. In this light , QCA re-orientates theories to explain the phenomena at hand, yielding results in interrelationship studies to analysis the additional volumes of causes and factors to a current phenomenon. The study of QCA is an interpretive and subjective analysis, therefore, researcher’s preconceptions and personal beliefs vary from the various researchers’ procedures. (Schegloff, 1997; Wetherell et.al, 2001).

Qualitative content analysis (QCA) tends to focus more on the diversity of material and points of discourse. However, QCA does not focus on picking out grammatical features or organising discussions into a plateau of power ideologies (Barkho, 2008).

Instead, QCA organises the data into predetermined key themes to suit the suggested theoretical framework. Pennycook (2001) argued that there is a need to deliberate textual analysis with the practice of production and consumption to uncover the latency of meanings manifest in the data collected. Several scholars are concerned with how the knowledge is acquired. In this regard, QCA approach combines inductive and deductive processes in the attempt to derive a conclusion; inductive reasoning is applied where

University

of Malaya

evidence is both used as genesis to arrive at the construct, whilst the deduction supports it. Ritchie & Lewis (2003) alluded that qualitative and quantitative analyses are not competing but are complementary tactics to resolve different issues as well as research questions in the development of transdisciplinary research and overcome concerns of positivism and interpretivism philosophies. Although the need for multi-method

researches is slowly increasing, Ritchie & Lewis further contended that several scholars debate on analytical clarity on mixing methods of a different paradigm due to the dissimilar types of data that would be difficult to reconcile. In the case of QCA, the various forms of data should reconcile efficiently as it can be organised into textual forms for the purpose of analyses during the abstraction process.

3.5.1 Comparisons with Critical Discourse Analysis

The integrated approaches of studying a wealth of materials in this study is closely related to the van Dijk (1993) approach of critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA).

Although most critical works on CDA are concerned with social distress such as inequality and racism, it means to understand and expose these issues (1993). Similarly, the thematic and textual analyses used in this section attempt to uncover the structuration of social status through the reproduction of messages in text and talk in a social and political context as discussed in the Theoretical Framework of Chapter 1. According to van Dijk (1988), CDA analyses global topics or themes and schemata; and relevance structures or rhetorical orientation at all structural levels of a text. However, the CDA approach is broad, loose and described as a whole, similar to grounded theory. The remedy to this shortcoming is through the trustworthiness of qualitative content analysis that creates categories, concepts, a model, conceptual system, or conceptual map, which can be, discovered from the research questions itself (Elo &Kyngäs, 2008; Schreier, 2012). The concepts are created during the process of abstraction or directly obtained

University

of Malaya

from the preliminary collection of literature or data dependent on the insights already obtained prior to starting the study (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008; Graneheim & Lundman, 2004).

This present study examined how hijab is portrayed in the Hijabista magazine with focus on the common use of language in the hijabster communities or hijab-wearing stylish Malay-Muslim women in the featured articles. Both positive and negative discourses on the topic of hijabis were analyzed to reveal how the print media frame the phenomenon and subsequently, seek to find how use of language influenced the readers to change their perception the renewed structuration of Malay-Muslim women’s social positions or increases their desire upon the commodification of the hijab to become a more active and participative consumer. Nevertheless, due to the nature of the articles, which are largely in the Malay language, this study did not evaluate the grammatical analysis of the words, rather, the analysis will look into the connotations behind them.

Most importantly, the results reported after the analysis are based on carefully planned stimuli, harvested from an organised system of concepts and themes ready for replication by other researches. Therefore, the efficiency of the QCA research method becomes ideal in a multi-platform analysis on this research project.