QUALITATIVE RESEARCH DESIGN
(Based on Qualitative Research Design. An
Interactive Approach, 2nd edition, by Joseph A. Maxwell, Sage
Publications, 2005).
·
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.
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
can’t 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.
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: participant’s 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. Don’t
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.