Rajendran Nagappan,
Faculty of Cognitive Sciences and Human Development
Sultan Idris University of Education (UPSI)
Tanjung Malim,
Perak

Date: 25 October 2001
Time: 11.30-12.00
 
 

Qualitative researchers try to acknowledge and take into account their own biases as a method of dealing with them. They attempt to seek out their own subjective states and their effects on data but they never think they are completely successful. Particularly when the data must ‘go through’ the researcher’s mind before it is put on paper, the worry about subjectivity arises. However, this is not peculiar to qualitative research. For that matter, all researchers are affected by observers’ bias. Questions or questionnaires, for example, reflect the interests of those who construct them, as do experimental studies. It is important for researchers to try to transcend some of their own biases with the aid of methods they use in the process. The data must bear the weight of any interpretation. For this, the researcher must constantly confront his or her own opinions and prejudices with the data. Besides, most opinions and prejudices are rather superficial. The data that are collected provides a much more detailed rendering of events rather than even the most creatively prejudiced mind might have imagined prior to the study (Bogdan & Biklen, 1982). This paper will address some of the major concerns related to observer biases in relation to data interpretation and reporting in qualitative research. These include observer’s frame of mind, data gathering process, observer’s reflective processes, and participant-observer continuum. This paper is based on data obtained for a research on teaching higher-order thinking skills in language classrooms.