QUALITATIVE RESEARCH DESIGN

(Based on Qualitative Research Design. An Interactive Approach, 2nd edition, by

Joseph A. Maxwell, Sage Publications, 2005).

Qualitative research

Inductive approach

Focus on specific situations or people

Emphasis on words rather than numbers

Research design. the arrangement of elements governing the functioning of a

study.

Interactive model of research design:

The underlying structure and interconnection of the components of the study and

the implications of each component for the others.

5 components: (i) purpose; (ii) conceptual context; (iii) research questions; (iv)

methods; and (v) validity.

PURPOSES

What are the ultimate goals of this study? What issues is it intended to illuminate,

and what practices will it influence? Why do you want to conduct it, and why

should we care about the results? Why is the study worth doing?

Find an unanswered, empirically answerable question to which the answer is worth

knowing.

Two functions:

They help you guide your other design decisions to ensure that your study is

worth doing.

They are crucial to justifying your study.

Three kinds of purposes:

 Personal purposes

Practical purposes: accomplishing something.

Research purposes: understanding something, gaining some insight into

what is going on and why this is happening.

o They need to be empirically answerable by your study. You need to

frame your research questions in ways that help your study to advance

your purposes rather than smuggling these purposes into the research

questions themselves.

5 types of research purposes for which qualitative research studies are specifically

suited:

Understanding the meaning of events, situations, actions, and accounts of

lives and experiences.

Understanding the context with which participants act, and the influence

that this context has on their actions.

 Identifying unanticipated phenomena and influences and generating new

grounded theories.

Understanding the process by which events and actions take place.

Developing causal explanations.

CONCEPTUAL CONTEXT (THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK)

What do you think is going on with the phenomena you plan to study? What

theories, findings, and conceptual frameworks relating to these phenomena will

guide or inform your study, and what literature, preliminary research, and personal

experience will you draw on?

The system of concepts, assumptions, beliefs, and theories that supports and

informs your research. It explains the main things to be studies and the presumed

relationships among them.

It is a formulation of what you think is going on with the phenomena you are

studying a tentative theory of what is happening and why.

It helps you develop and select realistic and relevant research questions and

methods, and identify potential validity threats to your conclusions.

This component of the design contains the theory that you already have or are

developing about the setting or issues that you are studying.

There are four main sources to construct the theoretical framework (conceptual

context):

(i) your own experience: experiential data, researchers technical

knowledge, research background and personal experiences.

(ii) existing theory and research

(iii) the results of any pilot studies or preliminary research that you have

done to test your ideas or methods and explore their implications or to

inductively develop grounded theory.

(iv) thought experiments: speculation, what if questions.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

What, specifically, do you want to understand by doing this study? What do you

not know about the phenomena you are studying that you want to learn? What
questions will your research attempt to answer, and how are these questions related

to one another?

You need to do a significant part of the research before it is clear what specific

questions you should try to answer. Specific questions are generally the result of an

interactive design process, rather than being the starting point for that process.

Functions of research questions

In a research proposal: to explain specifically what your study will attempt to learn

or understand.

In research design, two other functions: (i) to help you focus the study (relationship

to purposes and conceptual context); and (ii) to give you guidance on how to

conduct it (relationship to methods and validity).

Hypothesis are generally formulated after the researcher has begun the study, they

are grounded in the data and are developed and tested in interaction with it, rather

than being prior ideas that are simply tested against data as in quantitative research.

Proposition. You may state your ideas about what is going on as part of the

process of theorizing and data analysis.

You need to treat hypothesis critically, continually asking yourself what alternative

ways there are of making sense of your data.

Generalizing question: stated in broad, generalizing terms.

Particularizing questions: stated in narrow, particularizing terms.

Instrumentalist: formulate questions in terms of observable or measurable data,

worrying about potential validity threats.

Realist: They treat data as fallible evidence about the phenomena, to be used

critically to develop or test ideas about the existence and nature of the phenomena.

Variance questions: they focus on difference and correlation, e.g., does, how much,

to what extent, is there.

Process questions: they focus on how things happen, rather than whether there is a

particular relationship or how much it is explained by other variables.

Types of understanding in qualitative research

Description: what happened in terms of observable behaviour or events.

Interpretation: about the meaning of these things for people involved: their

thoughts, feelings, and interpretation.

 Theory: about how these things happen and how they can be explained.

Generalization: focus on the generality or wider prevalence of the

phenomena studied (not appropriate for qualitative research).

Evaluation: how such phenomena should be evaluated (not appropriate for

qualitative research).

METHODS

What will you actually do in conducting this study? What approaches and

techniques will you use to collect and analyze your data, and how do these

constitute an integrated strategy?

It includes:

Your research relationship with the people you study.

Your site selection and sampling decisions: you cant study everyone

everywhere doing everything, even in single cases. Purposeful sampling:

strategy in which particular settings, persons, or events are selected

deliberately in order to provide important information that cannot be

obtained as well from other choices.

 Your data collection methods:

o The relationship between research questions and data collection

methods. There is no way to logically or mechanically convert

research questions into methods. The methods are the means to

answering the research questions. Your research questions formulate

what you want to understand; your interview questions are what you

ask people in order to gain that understanding.

o Triangulation of data collection methods. Collecting data using a

variety of sources and methods.

The data analysis techniques. Data analysis is part of the design. The initial

step is reading the interview transcripts, observational notes,

and documents : (i) memos; (ii) categorizing strategies, such as coding and

thematic analysis; (iii) connecting strategies, such as narrative analysis.

Coding the most important strategy, is to fracture the data and to rearrange

them into categories that facilitate comparison between things in the same

category and that aid in the development of theoretical concepts or to

categorize the data into broader themes and issues.

 VALIDITY

How might you be wrong? What are the plausible alternative explanations and

validity threats to the potential conclusions of your study, and how will you deal

with these? How do the data that you have, or that you could collect, support or

challenge your ideas about what is going on? Why should we believe your results?

It depends on the relationship of the conclusions to reality. No method can

guarantee validity. What is needed is the possibility of testing the conclusions,

giving the phenomenon that we are studying the possibility to be wrong.

Validity is a component of the research design and consists of the strategies you

use to identify and try to rule out alternative explanations, i.e., validity threats. So,

you need to think of specific validity threats and try to think of what strategies are

best to deal with these.

Validity checklist

Intensive, long-term involvement.

Rich data: data that are detailed and vaired

Respondent validation: participants feedback

Intervention: informal manipulations

 Search for discrepant evidence and negative cases

Triangulation: collecting information from a diverse range of individuals

and settings, and using a variety of methods.

Quasi-statistics

Comparison

RESEARCH PROPOSALS

The purpose of a proposal is to explain and justify your proposed study to an

audience of nonexperts on your topic.

A proposal is an argument for your study. It needs to explain the logic behind the

proposed research, rather than simply describe or summarize the study, and to do

so in a way that nonspecialists will understand.

A model for proposal structure

Abstract: an overview and roadmap of the study itself and the argument of

your proposal.
Introduction: explain what you want to do and why. It should clearly

present the goals of your study and the problems it addresses, and give an
 overview of your main research questions and of the kind of study you are

proposing. It should also explain the structure of the proposal itself.

Conceptual framework: (literature review) (i) how your proposed research

fits into what is already known its relationship to existing theory and

research-; (ii) explain the theoretical framework that informs your study.

Dont summarize prior theory and research. Ground your proposed study in

the relevant previous work, and give the reader a clear sense of your

theoretical approach to the phenomena that you propose to study. Pilot

studies that you have done must be discussed in the proposal, explaining

their implications for your research. It can be done either at the end of the

conceptual framework, in a separate section after the conceptual framework,

or after the presentation of your research questions.

Research questions: (i) state your questions, (ii) clarify how your questions

relate to prior research and theory, to your own experience and exploratory

research, and to your goals; and (iii) how these questions form a coherent

whole, rather than being a random collection of queries about your topic.
Research methods: Include a description of the setting or social context of

your study. (i) research design in the typological sense; (ii) the research

relationship you establish with those you are studying; (iii) site and

participant selection; (iv) data collection, i.e., how you will get the

information you need to answer your research questions; and (v) data

analysis. Also ethics need to be discussed here or in a separate section.

 Validity: how you will use different methods to address a single validity

thereat or how a particular validity issue will be dealt with through selection,

data collection, and analysis decisions. You must allow for the examination

of competing explanations and discrepant data, i.e., that your research is not

a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Preliminary results: discuss what you have learned so far about the

practicality of your methods or tentative answers to your research questions.

This discussion is valuable in justifying the feasibility of your study and

clarifying your methods.

Conclusion: You need to pull together what you have said in the previous

sections, remind your readers of the goals of your study and what it will

contribute, and discuss its potential relevance and implications for the

broader field/s that it is situated in. This section should answer any so what

question.
References: only the references actually cited.

Appendixes: (i) a timetable for the research; (ii) letters of introduction or

permission; (iii) questionnaires, interview guides, or other instruments; (iv) a

list of possible interviewees; (v) a schedule of observations; (vi) descriptions

of analysis techniques or software; (vii) a table of relationships among

questions, methods, data, and analysis strategies; and (viii) examples of

observation notes or interview transcripts from pilot studies or completed

parts of the study.