Qualitative Research in Indigenous Business Enterprises: A Personal ReflectionGido Mapunda, Phd Student, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, James Cook University. AbstractConventional academic enquiries in business management tend to be biased towards quantitative research methods. I suspect that many conventional inquirers (researchers) would feel uncomfortable replacing a quantitative method with a qualitative one. There is more or less an expectation that statistical elements will feature fairly strongly in the study and the lack of quantitative analysis undermines the credibility of the study. Anyway, I am not here to defend or discredit any research method except to say that I prefer qualitative research methods. My research is about real people with real problems and the latter are more appropriate. The purpose of this work-in-progress paper is to reflect on my initial qualitative research experience with indigenous business enterprises in South Australia. I will examine the broad scope of business enterprises (eg caring for children in the home, farming etc). I will reflect on the questions I used during the in-depth interviews and look at whether or not the questions worked out; did I get the type of data that I was looking for? I will walk through the experience. I treat it as a trial run encounter. Finally, I will try to reflect on how this initial experience might affect my hypothesis and my methodology. |
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