Qualitative research
Inductive approach
study.
The underlying structure and interconnection of the components of the study and
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?
knowing.
Two functions:
They help you guide your other design decisions to ensure that your study is
worth doing.
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 context with which participants act, and the influence
grounded theories.
What do you think is going on with the phenomena you plan to study? What
guide or inform your study, and what literature, preliminary research, and personal
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
It is a formulation of what you think is going on with the phenomena you are
This component of the design contains the theory that you already have or are
There are four main sources to construct the theoretical framework (conceptual
context):
(iii) the results of any pilot studies or preliminary research that you have
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.
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
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
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,
Process questions: they focus on how things happen, rather than whether there is a
Interpretation: about the meaning of these things for people involved: their
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
It includes:
Your site selection and sampling decisions: you cant study everyone
what you want to understand; your interview questions are what you
The data analysis techniques. Data analysis is part of the design. The initial
and documents : (i) memos; (ii) categorizing strategies, such as coding and
Coding the most important strategy, is to fracture the data and to rearrange
them into categories that facilitate comparison between things in the same
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?
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
Validity checklist
Comparison
RESEARCH PROPOSALS
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.