Qualitative research study is interpretive research, (Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018)). The study is used to help understand and interpret the true thoughts and feelings of an individual based on their past and present experiences. A qualitative approach is also used to study many different topics. It can also help researchers and readers understand how and why certain behaviors happen in order to obtain a clear picture on the issue at hand. Although there are different study methods and approaches, a qualitative research study can provide a more personal effect in understanding certain social behavior.

When conducting a qualitative study, an audience’s context and understanding to a social problem comes from the researcher’s reflection on the study. However, a researcher reflection can be uncertain, because a researcher’s role in a qualitative research study is to gain access to the thoughts and feelings of the participants, which can include asking the participant in the study to discuss things that may be personal and hard to talk about. For instance, sometimes the experience being studied can be fresh in the study participant mind, which can make it easier to discuss versus other situations in which reliving experiences may be difficult to talk or think about.

Another responsibility a researcher has in a qualitative study is to safeguard the participants, and their collected data. This safeguarding involves making sure that the participants understand the study and that permission is granted by the ethics review board. Without the understating from the participant and the approval from the review board, safeguarding can be hard to conduct as there is no trust between the researcher and the participants. In the text, it describes an ethnography as a detailed portrait of a culture-sharing group (Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018)) and just like in qualitative research, an ethnography approach requires a researcher to play a few important roles as well.

An ethnography