Special Education Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

Special Education - Essay Example Qualitative research can â€Å"see precisely which events led to which consequences and derive fruitful explanations† (Miles and Huberman, 1994, p. 1). Moreover, it has a higher chance of being able to arrive at unanticipated findings and new combinations and relationships. These reasons are why the qualitative research design had been chosen for this study as it can give a clear view of why students with disabilities drop out of high school. It must be clarified that although quantitative data, such as statistics and percentages, were used in the study, it only acted as supportive numbers that laid the groundwork for this study. Furthermore, it is intended for this qualitative research to act as a recursive study for more accurate and extensive quantitative study on the same topic. The study employed a qualitative research design that was based on active observation. The qualitative research design has been criticized by many for its supposed inexactness due to its â€Å"interpretative, subjective, impressionistic and diagnostic† nature as it has been claimed that there is no unbiased observer (Thomson, 2007). However, when contending with abstract data, like â€Å"the often contradictory behaviors, beliefs, opinions, emotions, and relationships of individuals† and in this case, the reasons why certain people act a particular way, active observation is best employed as its strength lies in its capability to be able to provide a textual characterization of complex events such as human experience (Mack, et al., 2005).