Qualitative Research

A Guide to Design and Implementation

Sharan B. Merriam, Elizabeth J. Tisdell

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119003601
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

The bestselling guide to qualitative research, updated and expanded

Qualitative Research is the essential guide to understanding, designing, conducting, and presenting a qualitative research study. This fourth edition features new material covering mixed methods, action research, arts-based research, online data sources, and the latest in data analysis, including data analysis software packages as well as narrative and poetic analysis strategies. A new section offers multiple ways of presenting qualitative research findings. The reader-friendly, jargon-free style makes this book accessible to both novice and experienced researchers, emphasizing the role of a theoretical framework in designing a study while providing practical guidance.

Qualitative research reaches beyond the what, where, and when of quantitative analysis to investigate the why and how behind human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior, but this presents a number of significant challenges. This guide is an invaluable reference for students and practitioners alike, providing the deep understanding that this sometimes difficult area of research requires to produce accurate results. The book contains a step-by-step guide to analyzing qualitative data and an addendum for graduate students with a template for a thesis, dissertation, or grant application.

• Build a strong foundation in qualitative research theory and application
• Design and implement effective qualitative research studies
• Communicate findings more successfully with clear presentation
• Explore data sources, data analysis tools, and the different types of research

Part One
The Design of Qualitative Research

Education, health, social work, administration, and other arenas of social activity are considered applied social sciences or fields of practice precisely because practitioners in these fields deal with the everyday concerns of people's lives. Having an interest in knowing more about one's practice, and indeed in improving one's practice, leads to asking researchable questions, some of which are best approached through a qualitative research design. In fact, we believe that research focused on discovery, insight, and understanding from the perspectives of those being studied offers the greatest promise of making a difference in people's lives.

Engaging in systematic inquiry about your practice—doing research—involves choosing a study design that corresponds with your question; you should also consider whether the design is a comfortable match with your worldview, personality, and skills. It is thus important to understand the philosophical foundations underlying different types of research so that you can make informed decisions as to the choices available to you in designing and implementing a research study. The four chapters in Part One of this book provide the conceptual foundation for doing qualitative research and lay out some of the choices and decisions you will need to make in conducting a qualitative study.

The qualitative, interpretive, or naturalistic research paradigm defines the methods and techniques most suitable for collecting and analyzing data. Qualitative inquiry, which focuses on meaning in context, requires a data collection instrument that is sensitive to underlying meaning when gathering and interpreting data. Humans are best suited for this task, especially because interviewing, observing, and analyzing are activities central to qualitative research. Chapter One explores the foundations of qualitative research, defines this mode of inquiry, and identifies its essential characteristics.

Although all of qualitative research holds a number of assumptions and characteristics in common, there are variations in the disciplinary base that a qualitative study might draw from, in how a qualitative study might be designed, and in what the intent of the study might be. Thus a qualitative ethnographic study that focuses on culture could be differentiated from a narrative life history study or from a study designed to build a substantive theory. Chapter Two differentiates among six major types of qualitative studies commonly found in applied fields of study.

As the field of qualitative research continues to develop and expand, we thought it useful to include a chapter that reviews designs wherein qualitative methods are combined with other orientations. Chapter Three reviews mixed methods, action research, critical, and arts based research.

Other considerations have to do with identifying the theoretical framework that forms the scaffolding or underlying structure of your study. Reviewing previous thinking and research found in the literature can help illuminate your framework, as well as shape the actual problem statement and purpose of the study. Further, how you select your sample is directly linked to the questions you ask and to how you have constructed the problem of your study. These considerations are discussed in detail, with illustrative examples, in Chapter Four.

The four chapters that make up Part One of this book are thus designed to orient you to the nature of qualitative research and common types of qualitative research, as well as how to frame your question or interest, state your research problem, and select a sample. Part One paves the way for subsequent chapters that focus on data collection and data analysis.

Chapter One
What Is Qualitative Research?

This book is about qualitative research—what it is, and how to do it. But before we get into qualitative research, it's important to define what we mean by research itself. There are many definitions of research, but what they all have in common is the notion of inquiring into, or investigating something in a systematic manner. In everyday life we talk about “doing research” to inform our decisions and to decide on a particular course of action. For example, when it comes time to buy a new car, you might do some “research” by consulting Consumer Reports and a number of Internet sites that rate cars on quality, customer satisfaction, safety, and so on. All of this “research,” in addition to test-driving several cars, will enable you to make your decision.

You as a reader probably found your way to this text because you have a more formal interest in research. Research is typically divided into the categories of basic and applied. Basic research is motivated by intellectual interest in a phenomenon and has as its goal the extension of knowledge. Although basic research may eventually inform practice, its primary purpose is to know more about a phenomenon. Al Gore, in his award-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth, shares quite a bit of basic research (such as the rate at which the polar ice caps have been melting) as evidence of global warming. This basic research of course has implications for what people might do to stem global warming.

Applied research is undertaken to improve the quality of practice of a particular discipline. Applied social science researchers generally are interested in speaking to an audience different from that of basic researchers. They hope their work will be used by administrators and policymakers to improve the way things are done. For example, a public health researcher might undertake a study to find out how healthier school lunch programs are affecting childhood obesity. The findings of this study would then inform legislators revising the policy, as well as school dieticians and administrators whose responsibility it is to implement the policy.

There are many forms of applied research. Evaluation studies constitute one form of applied research common to many of us in fields of social practice. The difference between evaluation and research, which are both forms of systematic inquiry, lies in the questions asked, not in the methods used, for the methods in each are essentially the same. Evaluation research collects data or evidence on the worth or value of a program, process, or technique. Its main purpose is to establish a basis for decision making, “to make judgments about the program, improve program effectiveness, and/or inform decisions about future programming” (Patton, 2015, p. 18). Other common forms of applied research are action research and appreciative inquiry, both of which focus on facilitating change. The goal of action research is to address a specific problem in a practice-based setting, such as a classroom, a workplace, a program, or an organization (Herr & Anderson, 2015). By contrast, appreciative inquiry is often used in organizational settings to tell stories of what is positive or appreciated and effective in those organizations, to facilitate innovation (Cooperrider, Whitney, & Stavros, 2008) rather than focusing on problems. Both of these kinds of research typically involve the participants in the research process, thus blurring the distinction between change processes and research. Further, while some training in research is helpful, both action research and appreciative inquiry are often conducted by people who are interested in facilitating change in their work, community, or family. They decide to “experiment” with the situation, while documenting what happens when trying a new strategy or intervention. Typically, many interventions or strategies are implemented by participants over time. The results and the unfolding process are continually documented, making apparent the process of finding either the most effective solutions to practice-based problems (action research) or what innovations arise when organizations focus on sharing positive appreciative stories among its members (appreciative inquiry).

In its broadest sense, research is a systematic process by which we know more about something than we did before engaging in the process. We can engage in this process to contribute to the knowledge base in a field (pure research), improve the practice of a particular discipline (applied research), assess the value of something (evaluation research), or address a particular, localized problem (action research).

The Nature of Qualitative Research

Most people know what an experiment is or what a survey is. We might know someone in a weight loss experiment in which some use diet alone, some use diet and exercise, and others use diet, exercise, and an appetite suppressant. This is an experiment to see which “treatment” results in the most weight loss. Randomly dividing participants into three groups will test which treatment has brought about the most improvement. Surveys are also familiar to us, as when we are stopped in the shopping mall and asked to respond to some survey questions about products we use, movies we've seen, and so on. Survey research describes “what is”; that is, how variables are distributed across a population or phenomenon. For example, we might be interested in who is likely to watch which television shows and their age, race, gender, level of education, and occupation.

There are a number of variations on these designs, but basically experimental approaches try to determine the cause of events and to predict similar events in the future. Survey or descriptive designs are intended to systematically describe the facts and characteristics of a given phenomenon or the relationships between events and phenomena. Sometimes these designs are grouped together and labeled “quantitative” because the focus is on how much or how many, and results are usually presented in numerical form.

Rather than determining cause and effect, predicting, or describing the distribution of some attribute among a population, we might be interested in uncovering the meaning of a phenomenon for those involved. Qualitative researchers are interested in understanding how people interpret their experiences, how they construct their worlds, and what meaning they attribute to their experiences. For example, rather than studying retired adults to find out the percentage and characteristics of those who take on part-time jobs after retirement, which could be done through a survey, we might be more interested in how people adjust to retirement, how they think about this phase of their lives, the process they engaged in when moving from full-time work to retirement, and so on. These questions are about understanding their experiences and would call for a qualitative design. While Braun and Clarke's (2013) distinction between qualitative and quantitative research is somewhat simplified, they write that “the most basic definition of qualitative research is that it uses words as data…collected and analyzed in all sorts of ways. Quantitative research, in contrast, uses numbers as data and analyzes them using statistical techniques” (pp. 3–4, emphasis in original).

Where Does Qualitative Research Come From?

Decades before what we now call “qualitative research” or “qualitative inquiry” became popular, anthropologists and sociologists were asking questions about people's lives, the social and cultural contexts in which they lived, the ways in which they understood their worlds, and so on. Anthropologists and sociologists went into “the field,” whether it was a village in Africa or a city in the United States, observed what was going on, interviewed people in these settings, and collected and analyzed artifacts and personal and public documents relevant to understanding what they were studying. The written accounts of these studies were qualitative in nature. Bogdan and Biklen (2011) point out that Chicago sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s emphasized “the intersection of social context and biography” that lies at “the roots of contemporary descriptions of qualitative research as holistic” (p. 9).

In addition, especially in the life histories Chicago School sociologists produced, the importance of seeing the world from the perspective of those who were seldom listened to—the criminal, the vagrant, the immigrant—was emphasized. While not using the phrase, they knew they were “giving voice” to points of view of people marginalized in the society. (p. 10)

In addition to the work of anthropologists and sociologists, people in professional fields such as education, law, counseling, health, and social work have often been interested in specific cases for understanding a phenomenon. Piaget, for example, derived his theory of cognitive development by studying his own two children. Investig...