Perceptions of the food marketing environment among African American teen girls and adults review and analysis - Essay Example

The critique is done from a qualitative perspective, making use of a standardized framework for critiquing qualitative research articles. Basically, the framework is applied in such a way that it posses qualitative questions about the article and attempts to answer these from the researcher’s view point. The questions used in the framework are provided at the appendix section of this paper. It would be noted that as far as the positioning of the researchers epistemologically is concerned, they tried though the creation of hypotheses to find knowledge with which data was collected to identify its limits and validity. This was done in a very broad and open ended manner so as to ensure that the nature and grounds of knowledge that was being tested was based on the broader scope of the research problem that they were working with. Because qualitative studies have often been criticized as being more subjective rather than objective, the researchers attempted through their sampling method to ensure that there was much objectivity with the data collection process as possible. Generally, the researchers positioned themselves as facilitators who only ensured the free flow of the data collection process, rather than becoming active participants or influencing the actual content of data that was included in the study. To this end, the photographic technique and discussion methods used were largely executed among the respondents themselves. Theoretically, the researchers set their work on the stage of the influence of food advertisement on people. The aims or rationale for this theoretical perspective was identified as the direct relationship that food advertisement and for that matter food marketing environment has on the health of people, especially the African American female population. The theoretical perspective that was selected gave the researchers a multi-diverse area of research, which included health implications of the food marketing environment among African American teen girls and adults. Even though the researchers attempt to make the purpose and problem of the study clearly known in their introduction, they make no attempt to do this by clearly and explicitly stating this as research objectives or research questions. Meanwhile in qualitative research of this nature, the use of specific objectives and research questions have been found to be very useful setting a scope for the researcher in terms of areas to limit themselves to in the data collection process. It also makes the assessment of the achievability of the research problem easier (Kwate and Loh, 2010). For a qualitative research, the method used by the researchers, which was the photographic technique and discussion method, can be identified as highly suitable for the context of the study. This is because these two methods ensured that much focus was given to the respondents and their socio-cultural behavioral attitudes when it comes to food marketing environment. The methods were also highly interactive, making participation very proactive and ensuring that better rapport was created between respondents and researchers. There was no audit trail used in the study. Somehow, this could be said to have affected the data collecti ...Show more