More Issues in Design for Qualitative Research
You look first for the encultured informants, who know the culture well and take it as their responsibility to explain what it all means.
To extend what we hear from qualitative interviewing to other arenas, researchers use 2 principles.
- The first principle involves completeness, that is, you keep adding interviewees until you are satisfied that you understand the complex cultural arena or multistep process.
- When each additional interviewee adds little to what you have already learned, you stop adding new interviewees. This is called the saturation point.
- The second principle allows you to extend this complicated information to other sites by testing for similarity and dissimilarity.