Looking beyond the numbers in research
People often think of science as a business of numbers. Researchers, they think, render experience into data that can be viewed objectively, dispassionately – and sometimes impersonally.
Not Mirka Koro-Ljungberg. As the College of Education’s resident expert on qualitative research, she teaches young scholars how to look beyond the numbers to the human element of science and to investigate social phenomena holistically.
“Science, as usual, deals in generalizable knowledge and aims for predictions,” said Koro-Ljungberg, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology. “I’m much more interested in specifics and locality. Situated knowledge – the sort of knowledge you gain from hearing an in-depth description of someone’s life – can be very revealing and powerful.”
Qualitative research is an investigative technique and research approach often used in the social sciences. Qualitative researchers look closely at narratives and cultural artifacts to gain insights about things that are complex and can’t be easily measured. For instance, a wildlife researcher might study the memoirs of hunters throughout American history, looking for information on how bird populations have changed over time.
In education, the qualitative approach has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the student experience and divining the reasons why some students succeed academically, while others opt out of the educational system.
Koro-Ljungberg got her start as a qualitative researcher in her native Finland, interviewing members of an elite scientific organization to find out what life experiences they had in common. According to Koro-Ljungberg, members of the Academy of Finland shared belief in creativity, a history of international study, lots of support from family members and close mentoring from older researchers.
“Mentoring was really the crucial issue,” she said. “Many of them reported mentoring that was very hands-on. For instance, if the younger researcher was applying for a grant, the mentor might go over the grant application line-by-line to make sure everything was right.”
Now Koro-Ljungberg is doing her own mentoring, serving as the “go-to” person for graduate students in the College of Education and across campus who want to learn qualitative methods. Her enthusiasm and active interactions with students during her lessons no doubt played a role in her selection as the college’s 2006 Graduate Teacher of the Year.
She is also co-principal investigator on a five-year, $2.3 million National Institutes of Mental Health study on the detection and treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.
In that study, Regina Bussing, a UF professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, and Koro-Ljungberg are following a cohort of students at high risk for ADHD and a matched group of low risk peers through their school careers, looking at the ways different students seek help and the ways they are treated when they do seek help. Among other things, they are searching for the reasons why white males are more likely to receive proper medical treatment for ADHD than girls or African American peers.
Koro-Ljungberg and Bussing’s outside-the-box thinking has already allowed the study to overcome major hurdles. Teens are often difficult to observe in long-term studies, because they don’t like to fill out forms or share their feelings in face-to-face interviews. The research team got over that hurdle by adopting a technology that made teens comfortable.
“We gave them cell phones and told them to call and leave a message every time they had a help-seeking event,” she said. “We came up with a really rich data set describing their problems in detail.”
A qualitative approach is vital in areas like ADHD research, Koro-Ljungberg said, because the patients and their families can often go unheard during the treatment process.
“With a more traditional approach, the voice of the individual can get lost,” she said. “The kids and families are the experts on their own experience, and they can provide an insight we can’t get anywhere else.”
