Pragmatic Tools or Creative Handling? Qualitative Methods in Applied Higher Education Research

Abstract

In this article, we use the example of higher education research to investigate the effects of an applied research context on qualitative methods. In doing so, we follow two strands of discussion and ask whether qualitative methods in applied research are used as pragmatic tools or whether, on the contrary, the implications of this research context promote the creative use of methods. Our coding analysis of 67 articles from five German-language journals shows that higher education researchers in applied journals primarily used methods as pragmatic tools and rarely as reconstructive procedures.

However, there is much to suggest that it needs to be the understanding of the method that adjusts the practice of the method and the goal of the analysis. Application-oriented researchers are interested in descriptive information gain, whereas fundamental research reconstructs structures of meaning. Our analyses also show that the goal impacts the choice and the presentation of the methods: shortness and labeling are opposed to an explicative presentation style found among authors from disciplines such as sociology and educational science. Accordingly, the applied research perspective and the use of qualitative methods interact. In conclusion, these findings can be attributed to field-specific conditions and a fragile relationship of qualitative social researchers to pragmatic application-oriented research.