Response frameworks for discussion questions

¶ … defend your selection. Include an explanation of which approach would be the next best choice for your research questions, and explain how you decided between the two approaches to find the best fit..

Case study, narrative, phenomenology, grounded theory, and ethnography:

Which is the best approach to study human trafficking?

The 'case study' approach to qualitative research focuses on either a singular example or a representative handful of subjects whose experiences can illuminate a particular phenomenon. Multiple methods may be used to gain a greater understanding of the person or persons, spanning from interviews to observations to primary source documents. In the case of the proposed qualitative approach to studying women who have become the victims of human trafficking, interviews would be one source of information: so would legal cases, government documents (including laws), and other outside sources beyond the women's perspectives themselves (Johnson n.d.). Given that one of the ultimate purposes of the study is preventative, as well as to give voice to women's experiences, such hard data used to support a case study could be useful. However, "a case is a bounded system (e.g., a person, a group, an activity, a process)" and the women's interviews might be viewed through too limited a perspective and be unable to be generalize to the larger whole (Johnson n.d.).

Narrative qualitative research, in contrast, focuses mainly on how people 'make meaning' out of their experiences, in this case, the experience of human trafficking. However, although some of the tools of narrative inquiry such as interviewing and examining primary source documents written by the women might be helpful, the process could be too limiting, given the political dimensions of human trafficking which must be examined. Also, it might be useful to interview people other than the affected women. Interviewing experts in helping victimized women might be helpful.

A more appropriate technique would be a phenomenology, which seeks to describe a particular phenomenon. In general, the stated aim of phenomenology is resonant with the purpose of the study: "Phenomenological researchers often search for commonalities across individuals (rather than only focusing on what is unique to a single individual)" (Johnson n.d.). The only disadvantage is that phenomenological research can be relatively limited in its scope, and would confine the researcher mainly to interviews, not outside sources. Grounded theory, in contrast, is more ambitious and attempts to create a theory with 'coded' data, proceeding in an inductive manner from anecdotal information to create a general principle (Johnson n.d.). Ethnography would not be appropriate, given that it examines the subjects from a culturally-oriented perspective, and while the majority of women involved in human trafficking may share some demographic characteristics, they come from a wide range of countries, speak different languages, and manifest many dissimilarities in terms of their backgrounds.