Qualitative Research Designs

Aims

Gain subjective experience of each individual

Commonalities + differences between people's experiences

Methods are:

Advantages

Multiple perspectives:

  • Open-minded

Subjective + idiographic:

  • Allows for differences + doesn't 'box'/categorise people
  • Onus is on person's experiences + context
  • Takes language + meaning as their subject matter

Natural settings:

  • Behaviour observed is more natural
  • Ppts more comfortable
  • Researcher + ppts have closer relationship - rapport

Explores previously unanswerable questions

  • Can allow for ambiguity/contradictions
  • Use words (spoken/written), images, events, published interactions, texts, music
  • Analyse their meanings
  • Multifaceted + multiple perspectives
  • Diverse
  • Small sample, purposeful
  • Societal + cultural
  • Based on individual
  • Interviews, observations, focus groups, social network mapping

Experiential Approach:

  • First-hand experience
  • Individual interviews, diaries
  • Focus on meanings of experience - Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA)

Discursive Approach:

  • Social instances (e.g. newspaper, website etc.)
  • Focus on language performance, speech acts
  • Discourse analysis (DA)

Example:

  • 'Did I bring it on myself?' Nick Midgley et al (2017)

    Large sample of individual interviews + thematic analysis


    Found bewilderment about why adolescents depressed


    Found depression resulted from rejection, victimisation, stress


    People thought something inside them is to blame

Example 1:

  • 'Beyond the script' William Day et al (2019)
  • Used Foucauldian discourse analysis
  • Analysed scenes from film 'I, Daniel Blake' to understand construction of people in receipt of Employment + Support Allowance
  • Found a cultured everyman, refined taste, traditionalist

Example 2:

  • Elizabeth Stokoe - Conversation analyst
  • Finely analyses real conversations
  • Conversation Analytic Role-Play Method (CARM) - Used with professionals/organisations to improve communication, relationships, effectiveness using conversation analysis
  • E.g. Police = investigative questioning

Disadvantages

Impractical

  • Leads to using large samples due to time + costs
  • Analysing data is lengthy process

Low reliability

  • Hard for researchers to generate same conversations/contexts with ppts when replicating study

Subjective

  • Researchers may have differing views on meanings of behaviour/contents of ppts' words