June 14 - Qualitative Research

At this point, we have been discussing what you all have in common with your research proposals. All of you have a title page. You will each have an Introduction section with an introductory portion, a statement of the problem, a review of related literature, and a hypothesis OR research question. In addition, you will all have a Method section with four subsections. We have discussed two of these. One subsection is your Participants portion where you let the reader/audience know who the participants in your research will be. The second subsection is your Instruments (for quantitative) or Data Collection Methods (for qualitative) portion. In this part, you will talk about what tools you will use to collect your data.

The final two subsections of your Method section are what we will be devoting the rest of our time to investigating. One of these is the Procedures subsection, and the other is the Design and Analysis subsection. These two subsections are highly related to one another. These two subsections are dependent upon the type of research design you choose (qualitative, historical, descriptive, correlational, causal-comparative, or experimental). So, in the next few days, we will be learning more about each of these different types of designs.

As noted on your syllabus, we will begin with the qualitative designs. Although there are a whole host of different qualitative designs, we are only going to focus on three of them. These include:

1. Case Study Design (This is the most common and is what you will be designing in this class if you choose to do a qualitative design.)


2. Phenomenological Design


3. Ethnographic Design

There is an activity in the Content portion of Blackboard in the Qualitative folder (June 14) where you are asked to look at chart with information concerning these three different qualitative designs. You are to examine overall similarities (i.e., what do they have in common?) and differences (How are they each unique?). Keep in mind that the tools for data collection that are mentioned could be used in any of the designs. Some just use them more commonplace than others.

It should become clear to you, as you consider qualitative designs, that they are quite a bit different and come from a different perspective than quantitative designs. We have already mentioned some of these. Another important way in which they differ is in how sampling occurs. In qualitative, the sampling procedures are purposeful instead of quantitatively controlled. You will see types of sampling used such as the following:

• snowball sampling (where you count on one trusted informant to lead you to others)


• deviant case sampling (where you are looking for people with a "deviant" behavior of some sort to sample)


• typical case sampling (where you are looking for people who generally express some behavior you want to study)


• opportunistic sampling (where you are looking for people anywhere you can find them as you go about examining some case, program, situation, etc.)

These are just a small sample of the types of sampling used in qualitative research. There are many others that go beyond the scope of this course. You can see that instead of trying to tightly choose and control a sample (into one group or another many times) like what is done in quantitative you, instead, are letting things occur naturally - including the sample.

As you can see, today's emphasis will be upon how a qualitative case study design works. Please proceed to Blackboard to begin examining qualitative designs to research.