Subjective Research Design in ELT research: Adopting an Ethnographic Perspective

Qualitative research inquiry has often been criticised as non-rigorous, subjectively biased and in general, unscientific. However, in this paper I argue that in order to understand, and report truthfully about what people say and do and to capture the rich textures of real-life experiences, a qualitative based research is essential.

This paper is based on a research project that explored the social practices of learning and using English among university students (Renganathan, S., 2005). In this paper, I focus on the subjective aspects of the research design where the epistemology underpinning the research is the constructivist view and the theoretical perspective informing the methodology is interpretivism. Furthermore, by adopting an ethnographic perspective (Green and Bloome,1997), I describe how quantitative data can be used to supplement this qualitative research. Finally, this paper discusses the methodological and ethical issues encountered when using the qualitative inquiry methods in the research.