Qualitative designs and analysis

Reflexivity is common to most qualitative studies. It is clearly one of the major advantages of qualitative designs for examining the messy and constantly changing contexts of early childhood. Validity is often a vexed issue in qualitative research approaches. Indeed, qualitative researchers argue that the field-sensitive evidence gathered in qualitative investigations offers more valid representations of social worlds than those found in studies which reduce the lives of others to statistically significant generalisations. The case study is the most broadly used form of qualitative research design. Cases that are selected as exemplary cases have the potential to tell us more about a wider population than might be gleaned in a survey. Exemplary cases can be selected to represent a particular category from a wider population. Qualitative analysis usually involves content analysis that is a process of combing the evidence. Qualitative data can be transformed into quantitative data through fine-grained content analysis and findings can be statistically tested.