A Review on Qualitative Research Methods in Studies on Child Art - Focused on Analyzing Children's Drawings -

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국조형교육학회
· 수록지 정보 : 조형교육 / 39호 / 71 ~ 98페이지
· 저자명 : 김미남, 김현수

초록

This study investigates how qualitative research has been undertaken in researching children’s art since the paradigm shift from quantitative research methods to qualitative ones. This review also discusses the limitations and application of current qualitative analyzing methodologies in studying children’s art, and suggests that more active attempts to develop analyzing methods to understand children's visual expressions in qualitative research on child art is needed. Taken together, the findings of this study suggest reconsidering the role of analysis and the importance of images in children’s drawings. When researchers undertake the data-generation and data-analysis process, they obtain information from numeric data (quantitative information) or written texts through the process. Although former researchers established various systematic approaches to data collection and data analysis, a number of important limitations in researching children’s art also need to be considered. Researchers tend to select research methodologies of their own accord, without objective examination. The studies using children’s drawings as one source of data should be shaped up under scrutiny. Considerably more work will need to be undertaken to research children’s art in a systematic way. As discussed early, a word, systematic, is a term used in quantitative research so it may not be appropriate term in qualitative research. However, the reason we use this term was for emphasizing the need to prepare well and carefully developed plans to use children's drawings as one of data and analyzing them to explore in-depth meanings and functions of them instead of just gaining a part of information included in them. One implication of being more systematic when researching children’s art is the possibility that researchers will be able to gain more valuable information from the images children have created, and this will enhance our understanding of children’s art. In the nearly 150 years since children’s art began to be studied, many ways of seeing children’s art have been established. However, what is now needed is to find the many other undiscovered meanings in children’s art, and we should remember that to understand children’s creation of visual art, the role of researchers is to identify these unseen factors.
Finally, one of limitations of this study is a dilemma to use the quantitative research method in looking at the previous child art studies in use of qualitative research methods. However, it was an inevitable choice to display the wide arrange of data and the trends of research methods more visibly. Even though this study has the limitation to analyse previous studies with quantitative research methods, this study would be valuable for researchers who investigate children's art with qualitative research methods, as the data to look at diverse qualitative analyzing methods to understand children's drawing and their strengths and weaknesses. Further research might explore more diverse ways to analyze and understand children's visual expressions qualitatively referring to related studies using visual data even in other academic fields such as visual sociologies, image-based research, visual ethnography, etc. Considerably more work will need to be done to research children's art, as important visual data.

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