method commonly used in qualitative research

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• What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

Published on June 19, 2020 by Pritha Bhandari . Revised on September 5, 2024.

Qualitative research involves collecting and analyzing non-numerical data (e.g., text, video, or audio) to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. It can be used to gather in-depth insights into a problem or generate new ideas for research.

Qualitative research is the opposite of quantitative research , which involves collecting and analyzing numerical data for statistical analysis.

Qualitative research is commonly used in the humanities and social sciences, in subjects such as anthropology, sociology, education, health sciences, history, etc.

• How does social media shape body image in teenagers?
• How do children and adults interpret healthy eating in the UK?
• What factors influence employee retention in a large organization?
• How is anxiety experienced around the world?
• How can teachers integrate social issues into science curriculums?

Table of contents

Approaches to qualitative research, qualitative research methods, qualitative data analysis, advantages of qualitative research, disadvantages of qualitative research, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about qualitative research.

Qualitative research is used to understand how people experience the world. While there are many approaches to qualitative research, they tend to be flexible and focus on retaining rich meaning when interpreting data.

Common approaches include grounded theory, ethnography , action research , phenomenological research, and narrative research. They share some similarities, but emphasize different aims and perspectives.

Note that qualitative research is at risk for certain research biases including the Hawthorne effect , observer bias , recall bias , and social desirability bias . While not always totally avoidable, awareness of potential biases as you collect and analyze your data can prevent them from impacting your work too much.

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Each of the research approaches involve using one or more data collection methods . These are some of the most common qualitative methods:

• Observations: recording what you have seen, heard, or encountered in detailed field notes.
• Interviews:  personally asking people questions in one-on-one conversations.
• Focus groups: asking questions and generating discussion among a group of people.
• Surveys : distributing questionnaires with open-ended questions.
• Secondary research: collecting existing data in the form of texts, images, audio or video recordings, etc.
• You take field notes with observations and reflect on your own experiences of the company culture.
• You distribute open-ended surveys to employees across all the company’s offices by email to find out if the culture varies across locations.
• You conduct in-depth interviews with employees in your office to learn about their experiences and perspectives in greater detail.

Qualitative researchers often consider themselves “instruments” in research because all observations, interpretations and analyses are filtered through their own personal lens.

For this reason, when writing up your methodology for qualitative research, it’s important to reflect on your approach and to thoroughly explain the choices you made in collecting and analyzing the data.

Qualitative data can take the form of texts, photos, videos and audio. For example, you might be working with interview transcripts, survey responses, fieldnotes, or recordings from natural settings.

Most types of qualitative data analysis share the same five steps:

• Prepare and organize your data. This may mean transcribing interviews or typing up fieldnotes.
• Review and explore your data. Examine the data for patterns or repeated ideas that emerge.
• Develop a data coding system. Based on your initial ideas, establish a set of codes that you can apply to categorize your data.
• Assign codes to the data. For example, in qualitative survey analysis, this may mean going through each participant’s responses and tagging them with codes in a spreadsheet. As you go through your data, you can create new codes to add to your system if necessary.
• Identify recurring themes. Link codes together into cohesive, overarching themes.

There are several specific approaches to analyzing qualitative data. Although these methods share similar processes, they emphasize different concepts.

Qualitative research often tries to preserve the voice and perspective of participants and can be adjusted as new research questions arise. Qualitative research is good for:

• Flexibility

The data collection and analysis process can be adapted as new ideas or patterns emerge. They are not rigidly decided beforehand.

• Natural settings

Data collection occurs in real-world contexts or in naturalistic ways.

• Meaningful insights

Detailed descriptions of people’s experiences, feelings and perceptions can be used in designing, testing or improving systems or products.

• Generation of new ideas

Open-ended responses mean that researchers can uncover novel problems or opportunities that they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

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Researchers must consider practical and theoretical limitations in analyzing and interpreting their data. Qualitative research suffers from:

• Unreliability

The real-world setting often makes qualitative research unreliable because of uncontrolled factors that affect the data.

• Subjectivity

Due to the researcher’s primary role in analyzing and interpreting data, qualitative research cannot be replicated . The researcher decides what is important and what is irrelevant in data analysis, so interpretations of the same data can vary greatly.

• Limited generalizability

Small samples are often used to gather detailed data about specific contexts. Despite rigorous analysis procedures, it is difficult to draw generalizable conclusions because the data may be biased and unrepresentative of the wider population .

• Labor-intensive

Although software can be used to manage and record large amounts of text, data analysis often has to be checked or performed manually.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Chi square goodness of fit test
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative research deals with words and meanings.

Quantitative methods allow you to systematically measure variables and test hypotheses . Qualitative methods allow you to explore concepts and experiences in more detail.

There are five common approaches to qualitative research :

• Grounded theory involves collecting data in order to develop new theories.
• Ethnography involves immersing yourself in a group or organization to understand its culture.
• Narrative research involves interpreting stories to understand how people make sense of their experiences and perceptions.
• Phenomenological research involves investigating phenomena through people’s lived experiences.
• Action research links theory and practice in several cycles to drive innovative changes.

Data collection is the systematic process by which observations or measurements are gathered in research. It is used in many different contexts by academics, governments, businesses, and other organizations.

There are various approaches to qualitative data analysis , but they all share five steps in common:

• Prepare and organize your data.
• Review and explore your data.
• Develop a data coding system.
• Assign codes to the data.
• Identify recurring themes.

The specifics of each step depend on the focus of the analysis. Some common approaches include textual analysis , thematic analysis , and discourse analysis .

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Home » Qualitative Research – Methods, Analysis Types and Guide

Qualitative Research – Methods, Analysis Types and Guide

Table of Contents

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is a type of research methodology that focuses on exploring and understanding people’s beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and experiences through the collection and analysis of non-numerical data. It seeks to answer research questions through the examination of subjective data, such as interviews, focus groups, observations, and textual analysis.

Qualitative research aims to uncover the meaning and significance of social phenomena, and it typically involves a more flexible and iterative approach to data collection and analysis compared to quantitative research. Qualitative research is often used in fields such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and education.

Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative Research Methods are as follows:

One-to-One Interview

This method involves conducting an interview with a single participant to gain a detailed understanding of their experiences, attitudes, and beliefs. One-to-one interviews can be conducted in-person, over the phone, or through video conferencing. The interviewer typically uses open-ended questions to encourage the participant to share their thoughts and feelings. One-to-one interviews are useful for gaining detailed insights into individual experiences.

Focus Groups

This method involves bringing together a group of people to discuss a specific topic in a structured setting. The focus group is led by a moderator who guides the discussion and encourages participants to share their thoughts and opinions. Focus groups are useful for generating ideas and insights, exploring social norms and attitudes, and understanding group dynamics.

Ethnographic Studies

This method involves immersing oneself in a culture or community to gain a deep understanding of its norms, beliefs, and practices. Ethnographic studies typically involve long-term fieldwork and observation, as well as interviews and document analysis. Ethnographic studies are useful for understanding the cultural context of social phenomena and for gaining a holistic understanding of complex social processes.

Text Analysis

This method involves analyzing written or spoken language to identify patterns and themes. Text analysis can be quantitative or qualitative. Qualitative text analysis involves close reading and interpretation of texts to identify recurring themes, concepts, and patterns. Text analysis is useful for understanding media messages, public discourse, and cultural trends.

This method involves an in-depth examination of a single person, group, or event to gain an understanding of complex phenomena. Case studies typically involve a combination of data collection methods, such as interviews, observations, and document analysis, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the case. Case studies are useful for exploring unique or rare cases, and for generating hypotheses for further research.

Process of Observation

This method involves systematically observing and recording behaviors and interactions in natural settings. The observer may take notes, use audio or video recordings, or use other methods to document what they see. Process of observation is useful for understanding social interactions, cultural practices, and the context in which behaviors occur.

Record Keeping

This method involves keeping detailed records of observations, interviews, and other data collected during the research process. Record keeping is essential for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the data, and for providing a basis for analysis and interpretation.

This method involves collecting data from a large sample of participants through a structured questionnaire. Surveys can be conducted in person, over the phone, through mail, or online. Surveys are useful for collecting data on attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and for identifying patterns and trends in a population.

Qualitative data analysis is a process of turning unstructured data into meaningful insights. It involves extracting and organizing information from sources like interviews, focus groups, and surveys. The goal is to understand people’s attitudes, behaviors, and motivations

Qualitative Research Analysis Methods

Qualitative Research analysis methods involve a systematic approach to interpreting and making sense of the data collected in qualitative research. Here are some common qualitative data analysis methods:

Thematic Analysis

This method involves identifying patterns or themes in the data that are relevant to the research question. The researcher reviews the data, identifies keywords or phrases, and groups them into categories or themes. Thematic analysis is useful for identifying patterns across multiple data sources and for generating new insights into the research topic.

Content Analysis

This method involves analyzing the content of written or spoken language to identify key themes or concepts. Content analysis can be quantitative or qualitative. Qualitative content analysis involves close reading and interpretation of texts to identify recurring themes, concepts, and patterns. Content analysis is useful for identifying patterns in media messages, public discourse, and cultural trends.

Discourse Analysis

This method involves analyzing language to understand how it constructs meaning and shapes social interactions. Discourse analysis can involve a variety of methods, such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. Discourse analysis is useful for understanding how language shapes social interactions, cultural norms, and power relationships.

Grounded Theory Analysis

This method involves developing a theory or explanation based on the data collected. Grounded theory analysis starts with the data and uses an iterative process of coding and analysis to identify patterns and themes in the data. The theory or explanation that emerges is grounded in the data, rather than preconceived hypotheses. Grounded theory analysis is useful for understanding complex social phenomena and for generating new theoretical insights.

Narrative Analysis

This method involves analyzing the stories or narratives that participants share to gain insights into their experiences, attitudes, and beliefs. Narrative analysis can involve a variety of methods, such as structural analysis, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis. Narrative analysis is useful for understanding how individuals construct their identities, make sense of their experiences, and communicate their values and beliefs.

Phenomenological Analysis

This method involves analyzing how individuals make sense of their experiences and the meanings they attach to them. Phenomenological analysis typically involves in-depth interviews with participants to explore their experiences in detail. Phenomenological analysis is useful for understanding subjective experiences and for developing a rich understanding of human consciousness.

Comparative Analysis

This method involves comparing and contrasting data across different cases or groups to identify similarities and differences. Comparative analysis can be used to identify patterns or themes that are common across multiple cases, as well as to identify unique or distinctive features of individual cases. Comparative analysis is useful for understanding how social phenomena vary across different contexts and groups.

Applications of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research has many applications across different fields and industries. Here are some examples of how qualitative research is used:

• Market Research: Qualitative research is often used in market research to understand consumer attitudes, behaviors, and preferences. Researchers conduct focus groups and one-on-one interviews with consumers to gather insights into their experiences and perceptions of products and services.
• Health Care: Qualitative research is used in health care to explore patient experiences and perspectives on health and illness. Researchers conduct in-depth interviews with patients and their families to gather information on their experiences with different health care providers and treatments.
• Education: Qualitative research is used in education to understand student experiences and to develop effective teaching strategies. Researchers conduct classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers to gather insights into classroom dynamics and instructional practices.
• Social Work : Qualitative research is used in social work to explore social problems and to develop interventions to address them. Researchers conduct in-depth interviews with individuals and families to understand their experiences with poverty, discrimination, and other social problems.
• Anthropology : Qualitative research is used in anthropology to understand different cultures and societies. Researchers conduct ethnographic studies and observe and interview members of different cultural groups to gain insights into their beliefs, practices, and social structures.
• Psychology : Qualitative research is used in psychology to understand human behavior and mental processes. Researchers conduct in-depth interviews with individuals to explore their thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
• Public Policy : Qualitative research is used in public policy to explore public attitudes and to inform policy decisions. Researchers conduct focus groups and one-on-one interviews with members of the public to gather insights into their perspectives on different policy issues.

How to Conduct Qualitative Research

Here are some general steps for conducting qualitative research:

• Identify your research question: Qualitative research starts with a research question or set of questions that you want to explore. This question should be focused and specific, but also broad enough to allow for exploration and discovery.
• Select your research design: There are different types of qualitative research designs, including ethnography, case study, grounded theory, and phenomenology. You should select a design that aligns with your research question and that will allow you to gather the data you need to answer your research question.
• Recruit participants: Once you have your research question and design, you need to recruit participants. The number of participants you need will depend on your research design and the scope of your research. You can recruit participants through advertisements, social media, or through personal networks.
• Collect data: There are different methods for collecting qualitative data, including interviews, focus groups, observation, and document analysis. You should select the method or methods that align with your research design and that will allow you to gather the data you need to answer your research question.
• Analyze data: Once you have collected your data, you need to analyze it. This involves reviewing your data, identifying patterns and themes, and developing codes to organize your data. You can use different software programs to help you analyze your data, or you can do it manually.
• Interpret data: Once you have analyzed your data, you need to interpret it. This involves making sense of the patterns and themes you have identified, and developing insights and conclusions that answer your research question. You should be guided by your research question and use your data to support your conclusions.
• Communicate results: Once you have interpreted your data, you need to communicate your results. This can be done through academic papers, presentations, or reports. You should be clear and concise in your communication, and use examples and quotes from your data to support your findings.

Examples of Qualitative Research

Here are some real-time examples of qualitative research:

• Customer Feedback: A company may conduct qualitative research to understand the feedback and experiences of its customers. This may involve conducting focus groups or one-on-one interviews with customers to gather insights into their attitudes, behaviors, and preferences.
• Healthcare : A healthcare provider may conduct qualitative research to explore patient experiences and perspectives on health and illness. This may involve conducting in-depth interviews with patients and their families to gather information on their experiences with different health care providers and treatments.
• Education : An educational institution may conduct qualitative research to understand student experiences and to develop effective teaching strategies. This may involve conducting classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers to gather insights into classroom dynamics and instructional practices.
• Social Work: A social worker may conduct qualitative research to explore social problems and to develop interventions to address them. This may involve conducting in-depth interviews with individuals and families to understand their experiences with poverty, discrimination, and other social problems.
• Anthropology : An anthropologist may conduct qualitative research to understand different cultures and societies. This may involve conducting ethnographic studies and observing and interviewing members of different cultural groups to gain insights into their beliefs, practices, and social structures.
• Psychology : A psychologist may conduct qualitative research to understand human behavior and mental processes. This may involve conducting in-depth interviews with individuals to explore their thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
• Public Policy: A government agency or non-profit organization may conduct qualitative research to explore public attitudes and to inform policy decisions. This may involve conducting focus groups and one-on-one interviews with members of the public to gather insights into their perspectives on different policy issues.

Purpose of Qualitative Research

The purpose of qualitative research is to explore and understand the subjective experiences, behaviors, and perspectives of individuals or groups in a particular context. Unlike quantitative research, which focuses on numerical data and statistical analysis, qualitative research aims to provide in-depth, descriptive information that can help researchers develop insights and theories about complex social phenomena.

Qualitative research can serve multiple purposes, including:

• Exploring new or emerging phenomena : Qualitative research can be useful for exploring new or emerging phenomena, such as new technologies or social trends. This type of research can help researchers develop a deeper understanding of these phenomena and identify potential areas for further study.
• Understanding complex social phenomena : Qualitative research can be useful for exploring complex social phenomena, such as cultural beliefs, social norms, or political processes. This type of research can help researchers develop a more nuanced understanding of these phenomena and identify factors that may influence them.
• Generating new theories or hypotheses: Qualitative research can be useful for generating new theories or hypotheses about social phenomena. By gathering rich, detailed data about individuals’ experiences and perspectives, researchers can develop insights that may challenge existing theories or lead to new lines of inquiry.
• Providing context for quantitative data: Qualitative research can be useful for providing context for quantitative data. By gathering qualitative data alongside quantitative data, researchers can develop a more complete understanding of complex social phenomena and identify potential explanations for quantitative findings.

When to use Qualitative Research

Here are some situations where qualitative research may be appropriate:

• Exploring a new area: If little is known about a particular topic, qualitative research can help to identify key issues, generate hypotheses, and develop new theories.
• Understanding complex phenomena: Qualitative research can be used to investigate complex social, cultural, or organizational phenomena that are difficult to measure quantitatively.
• Investigating subjective experiences: Qualitative research is particularly useful for investigating the subjective experiences of individuals or groups, such as their attitudes, beliefs, values, or emotions.
• Conducting formative research: Qualitative research can be used in the early stages of a research project to develop research questions, identify potential research participants, and refine research methods.
• Evaluating interventions or programs: Qualitative research can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions or programs by collecting data on participants’ experiences, attitudes, and behaviors.

Characteristics of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is characterized by several key features, including:

• Focus on subjective experience: Qualitative research is concerned with understanding the subjective experiences, beliefs, and perspectives of individuals or groups in a particular context. Researchers aim to explore the meanings that people attach to their experiences and to understand the social and cultural factors that shape these meanings.
• Use of open-ended questions: Qualitative research relies on open-ended questions that allow participants to provide detailed, in-depth responses. Researchers seek to elicit rich, descriptive data that can provide insights into participants’ experiences and perspectives.
• Sampling-based on purpose and diversity: Qualitative research often involves purposive sampling, in which participants are selected based on specific criteria related to the research question. Researchers may also seek to include participants with diverse experiences and perspectives to capture a range of viewpoints.
• Data collection through multiple methods: Qualitative research typically involves the use of multiple data collection methods, such as in-depth interviews, focus groups, and observation. This allows researchers to gather rich, detailed data from multiple sources, which can provide a more complete picture of participants’ experiences and perspectives.
• Inductive data analysis: Qualitative research relies on inductive data analysis, in which researchers develop theories and insights based on the data rather than testing pre-existing hypotheses. Researchers use coding and thematic analysis to identify patterns and themes in the data and to develop theories and explanations based on these patterns.
• Emphasis on researcher reflexivity: Qualitative research recognizes the importance of the researcher’s role in shaping the research process and outcomes. Researchers are encouraged to reflect on their own biases and assumptions and to be transparent about their role in the research process.

Advantages of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research offers several advantages over other research methods, including:

• Depth and detail: Qualitative research allows researchers to gather rich, detailed data that provides a deeper understanding of complex social phenomena. Through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and observation, researchers can gather detailed information about participants’ experiences and perspectives that may be missed by other research methods.
• Flexibility : Qualitative research is a flexible approach that allows researchers to adapt their methods to the research question and context. Researchers can adjust their research methods in real-time to gather more information or explore unexpected findings.
• Contextual understanding: Qualitative research is well-suited to exploring the social and cultural context in which individuals or groups are situated. Researchers can gather information about cultural norms, social structures, and historical events that may influence participants’ experiences and perspectives.
• Participant perspective : Qualitative research prioritizes the perspective of participants, allowing researchers to explore subjective experiences and understand the meanings that participants attach to their experiences.
• Theory development: Qualitative research can contribute to the development of new theories and insights about complex social phenomena. By gathering rich, detailed data and using inductive data analysis, researchers can develop new theories and explanations that may challenge existing understandings.
• Validity : Qualitative research can offer high validity by using multiple data collection methods, purposive and diverse sampling, and researcher reflexivity. This can help ensure that findings are credible and trustworthy.

Limitations of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research also has some limitations, including:

• Subjectivity : Qualitative research relies on the subjective interpretation of researchers, which can introduce bias into the research process. The researcher’s perspective, beliefs, and experiences can influence the way data is collected, analyzed, and interpreted.
• Limited generalizability: Qualitative research typically involves small, purposive samples that may not be representative of larger populations. This limits the generalizability of findings to other contexts or populations.
• Time-consuming: Qualitative research can be a time-consuming process, requiring significant resources for data collection, analysis, and interpretation.
• Resource-intensive: Qualitative research may require more resources than other research methods, including specialized training for researchers, specialized software for data analysis, and transcription services.
• Limited reliability: Qualitative research may be less reliable than quantitative research, as it relies on the subjective interpretation of researchers. This can make it difficult to replicate findings or compare results across different studies.
• Ethics and confidentiality: Qualitative research involves collecting sensitive information from participants, which raises ethical concerns about confidentiality and informed consent. Researchers must take care to protect the privacy and confidentiality of participants and obtain informed consent.

Also see Research Methods

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Qualitative research: methods and examples

Last updated

13 April 2023

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Qualitative research involves gathering and evaluating non-numerical information to comprehend concepts, perspectives, and experiences. It’s also helpful for obtaining in-depth insights into a certain subject or generating new research ideas. 

As a result, qualitative research is practical if you want to try anything new or produce new ideas.

There are various ways you can conduct qualitative research. In this article, you'll learn more about qualitative research methodologies, including when you should use them.

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• What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research is a broad term describing various research types that rely on asking open-ended questions. Qualitative research investigates “how” or “why” certain phenomena occur. It is about discovering the inherent nature of something.

The primary objective of qualitative research is to understand an individual's ideas, points of view, and feelings. In this way, collecting in-depth knowledge of a specific topic is possible. Knowing your audience's feelings about a particular subject is important for making reasonable research conclusions.

Unlike quantitative research , this approach does not involve collecting numerical, objective data for statistical analysis. Qualitative research is used extensively in education, sociology, health science, history, and anthropology.

• Types of qualitative research methodology

Typically, qualitative research aims at uncovering the attitudes and behavior of the target audience concerning a specific topic. For example,  “How would you describe your experience as a new Dovetail user?”

Some of the methods for conducting qualitative analysis include:

Focus groups

Hosting a focus group is a popular qualitative research method. It involves obtaining qualitative data from a limited sample of participants. In a moderated version of a focus group, the moderator asks participants a series of predefined questions. They aim to interact and build a group discussion that reveals their preferences, candid thoughts, and experiences.

Unmoderated, online focus groups are increasingly popular because they eliminate the need to interact with people face to face.

Focus groups can be more cost-effective than 1:1 interviews or studying a group in a natural setting and reporting one’s observations.

Focus groups make it possible to gather multiple points of view quickly and efficiently, making them an excellent choice for testing new concepts or conducting market research on a new product.

However, there are some potential drawbacks to this method. It may be unsuitable for sensitive or controversial topics. Participants might be reluctant to disclose their true feelings or respond falsely to conform to what they believe is the socially acceptable answer (known as response bias).

Case study research

A case study is an in-depth evaluation of a specific person, incident, organization, or society. This type of qualitative research has evolved into a broadly applied research method in education, law, business, and the social sciences.

Even though case study research may appear challenging to implement, it is one of the most direct research methods. It requires detailed analysis, broad-ranging data collection methodologies, and a degree of existing knowledge about the subject area under investigation.

Historical model

The historical approach is a distinct research method that deeply examines previous events to better understand the present and forecast future occurrences of the same phenomena. Its primary goal is to evaluate the impacts of history on the present and hence discover comparable patterns in the present to predict future outcomes.

Oral history

This qualitative data collection method involves gathering verbal testimonials from individuals about their personal experiences. It is widely used in historical disciplines to offer counterpoints to established historical facts and narratives. The most common methods of gathering oral history are audio recordings, analysis of auto-biographical text, videos, and interviews.

Qualitative observation

One of the most fundamental, oldest research methods, qualitative observation , is the process through which a researcher collects data using their senses of sight, smell, hearing, etc. It is used to observe the properties of the subject being studied. For example, “What does it look like?” As research methods go, it is subjective and depends on researchers’ first-hand experiences to obtain information, so it is prone to bias. However, it is an excellent way to start a broad line of inquiry like, “What is going on here?”

Record keeping and review

Record keeping uses existing documents and relevant data sources that can be employed for future studies. It is equivalent to visiting the library and going through publications or any other reference material to gather important facts that will likely be used in the research.

Grounded theory approach

The grounded theory approach is a commonly used research method employed across a variety of different studies. It offers a unique way to gather, interpret, and analyze. With this approach, data is gathered and analyzed simultaneously.  Existing analysis frames and codes are disregarded, and data is analyzed inductively, with new codes and frames generated from the research.

Ethnographic research

Ethnography  is a descriptive form of a qualitative study of people and their cultures. Its primary goal is to study people's behavior in their natural environment. This method necessitates that the researcher adapts to their target audience's setting. 

Thereby, you will be able to understand their motivation, lifestyle, ambitions, traditions, and culture in situ. But, the researcher must be prepared to deal with geographical constraints while collecting data i.e., audiences can’t be studied in a laboratory or research facility.

This study can last from a couple of days to several years. Thus, it is time-consuming and complicated, requiring you to have both the time to gather the relevant data as well as the expertise in analyzing, observing, and interpreting data to draw meaningful conclusions.

Narrative framework

A narrative framework is a qualitative research approach that relies on people's written text or visual images. It entails people analyzing these events or narratives to determine certain topics or issues. With this approach, you can understand how people represent themselves and their experiences to a larger audience.

Phenomenological approach

The phenomenological study seeks to investigate the experiences of a particular phenomenon within a group of individuals or communities. It analyzes a certain event through interviews with persons who have witnessed it to determine the connections between their views. Even though this method relies heavily on interviews, other data sources (recorded notes), and observations could be employed to enhance the findings.

• Qualitative research methods (tools)

Some of the instruments involved in qualitative research include:

Document research: Also known as document analysis because it involves evaluating written documents. These can include personal and non-personal materials like archives, policy publications, yearly reports, diaries, or letters.

Focus groups:  This is where a researcher poses questions and generates conversation among a group of people. The major goal of focus groups is to examine participants' experiences and knowledge, including research into how and why individuals act in various ways.

Secondary study: Involves acquiring existing information from texts, images, audio, or video recordings.

Observations:   This requires thorough field notes on everything you see, hear, or experience. Compared to reported conduct or opinion, this study method can assist you in getting insights into a specific situation and observable behaviors.

Structured interviews :  In this approach, you will directly engage people one-on-one. Interviews are ideal for learning about a person's subjective beliefs, motivations, and encounters.

Surveys:  This is when you distribute questionnaires containing open-ended questions

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• What are common examples of qualitative research?

Everyday examples of qualitative research include:

Conducting a demographic analysis of a business

For instance, suppose you own a business such as a grocery store (or any store) and believe it caters to a broad customer base, but after conducting a demographic analysis, you discover that most of your customers are men.

You could do 1:1 interviews with female customers to learn why they don't shop at your store.

In this case, interviewing potential female customers should clarify why they don't find your shop appealing. It could be because of the products you sell or a need for greater brand awareness, among other possible reasons.

Launching or testing a new product

Suppose you are the product manager at a SaaS company looking to introduce a new product. Focus groups can be an excellent way to determine whether your product is marketable.

In this instance, you could hold a focus group with a sample group drawn from your intended audience. The group will explore the product based on its new features while you ensure adequate data on how users react to the new features. The data you collect will be key to making sales and marketing decisions.

Conducting studies to explain buyers' behaviors

You can also use qualitative research to understand existing buyer behavior better. Marketers analyze historical information linked to their businesses and industries to see when purchasers buy more.

Qualitative research can help you determine when to target new clients and peak seasons to boost sales by investigating the reason behind these behaviors.

• Qualitative research: data collection

Data collection is gathering information on predetermined variables to gain appropriate answers, test hypotheses, and analyze results. Researchers will collect non-numerical data for qualitative data collection to obtain detailed explanations and draw conclusions.

To get valid findings and achieve a conclusion in qualitative research, researchers must collect comprehensive and multifaceted data.

Qualitative data is usually gathered through interviews or focus groups with videotapes or handwritten notes. If there are recordings, they are transcribed before the data analysis process. Researchers keep separate folders for the recordings acquired from each focus group when collecting qualitative research data to categorize the data.

• Qualitative research: data analysis

Qualitative data analysis is organizing, examining, and interpreting qualitative data. Its main objective is identifying trends and patterns, responding to research questions, and recommending actions based on the findings. Textual analysis is a popular method for analyzing qualitative data.

Textual analysis differs from other qualitative research approaches in that researchers consider the social circumstances of study participants to decode their words, behaviors, and broader meaning. 

Learn more about qualitative research data analysis software

• When to use qualitative research

Qualitative research is helpful in various situations, particularly when a researcher wants to capture accurate, in-depth insights. 

Here are some instances when qualitative research can be valuable:

Examining your product or service to improve your marketing approach

When researching market segments, demographics, and customer service teams

Identifying client language when you want to design a quantitative survey

When attempting to comprehend your or someone else's strengths and weaknesses

Assessing feelings and beliefs about societal and public policy matters

Collecting information about a business or product's perception

Analyzing your target audience's reactions to marketing efforts

When launching a new product or coming up with a new idea

When seeking to evaluate buyers' purchasing patterns

• Qualitative research methods vs. quantitative research methods

Qualitative research examines people's ideas and what influences their perception, whereas quantitative research draws conclusions based on numbers and measurements.

Qualitative research is descriptive, and its primary goal is to comprehensively understand people's attitudes, behaviors, and ideas.

In contrast, quantitative research is more restrictive because it relies on numerical data and analyzes statistical data to make decisions. This research method assists researchers in gaining an initial grasp of the subject, which deals with numbers. For instance, the number of customers likely to purchase your products or use your services.

What is the most important feature of qualitative research?

A distinguishing feature of qualitative research is that it’s conducted in a real-world setting instead of a simulated environment. The researcher is examining actual phenomena instead of experimenting with different variables to see what outcomes (data) might result.

Can I use qualitative and quantitative approaches together in a study?

Yes, combining qualitative and quantitative research approaches happens all the time and is known as mixed methods research. For example, you could study individuals’ perceived risk in a certain scenario, such as how people rate the safety or riskiness of a given neighborhood. Simultaneously, you could analyze historical data objectively, indicating how safe or dangerous that area has been in the last year. To get the most out of mixed-method research, it’s important to understand the pros and cons of each methodology, so you can create a thoughtfully designed study that will yield compelling results.

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Chapter 1. Introduction

“Science is in danger, and for that reason it is becoming dangerous” -Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity

Why an Open Access Textbook on Qualitative Research Methods?

I have been teaching qualitative research methods to both undergraduates and graduate students for many years.  Although there are some excellent textbooks out there, they are often costly, and none of them, to my mind, properly introduces qualitative research methods to the beginning student (whether undergraduate or graduate student).  In contrast, this open-access textbook is designed as a (free) true introduction to the subject, with helpful, practical pointers on how to conduct research and how to access more advanced instruction.  

Textbooks are typically arranged in one of two ways: (1) by technique (each chapter covers one method used in qualitative research); or (2) by process (chapters advance from research design through publication).  But both of these approaches are necessary for the beginner student.  This textbook will have sections dedicated to the process as well as the techniques of qualitative research.  This is a true “comprehensive” book for the beginning student.  In addition to covering techniques of data collection and data analysis, it provides a road map of how to get started and how to keep going and where to go for advanced instruction.  It covers aspects of research design and research communication as well as methods employed.  Along the way, it includes examples from many different disciplines in the social sciences.

The primary goal has been to create a useful, accessible, engaging textbook for use across many disciplines.  And, let’s face it.  Textbooks can be boring.  I hope readers find this to be a little different.  I have tried to write in a practical and forthright manner, with many lively examples and references to good and intellectually creative qualitative research.  Woven throughout the text are short textual asides (in colored textboxes) by professional (academic) qualitative researchers in various disciplines.  These short accounts by practitioners should help inspire students.  So, let’s begin!

What is Research?

When we use the word research , what exactly do we mean by that?  This is one of those words that everyone thinks they understand, but it is worth beginning this textbook with a short explanation.  We use the term to refer to “empirical research,” which is actually a historically specific approach to understanding the world around us.  Think about how you know things about the world. [1] You might know your mother loves you because she’s told you she does.  Or because that is what “mothers” do by tradition.  Or you might know because you’ve looked for evidence that she does, like taking care of you when you are sick or reading to you in bed or working two jobs so you can have the things you need to do OK in life.  Maybe it seems churlish to look for evidence; you just take it “on faith” that you are loved.

Only one of the above comes close to what we mean by research.  Empirical research is research (investigation) based on evidence.  Conclusions can then be drawn from observable data.  This observable data can also be “tested” or checked.  If the data cannot be tested, that is a good indication that we are not doing research.  Note that we can never “prove” conclusively, through observable data, that our mothers love us.  We might have some “disconfirming evidence” (that time she didn’t show up to your graduation, for example) that could push you to question an original hypothesis , but no amount of “confirming evidence” will ever allow us to say with 100% certainty, “my mother loves me.”  Faith and tradition and authority work differently.  Our knowledge can be 100% certain using each of those alternative methods of knowledge, but our certainty in those cases will not be based on facts or evidence.

For many periods of history, those in power have been nervous about “science” because it uses evidence and facts as the primary source of understanding the world, and facts can be at odds with what power or authority or tradition want you to believe.  That is why I say that scientific empirical research is a historically specific approach to understand the world.  You are in college or university now partly to learn how to engage in this historically specific approach.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, there was a newfound respect for empirical research, some of which was seriously challenging to the established church.  Using observations and testing them, scientists found that the earth was not at the center of the universe, for example, but rather that it was but one planet of many which circled the sun. [2]   For the next two centuries, the science of astronomy, physics, biology, and chemistry emerged and became disciplines taught in universities.  All used the scientific method of observation and testing to advance knowledge.  Knowledge about people , however, and social institutions, however, was still left to faith, tradition, and authority.  Historians and philosophers and poets wrote about the human condition, but none of them used research to do so. [3]

It was not until the nineteenth century that “social science” really emerged, using the scientific method (empirical observation) to understand people and social institutions.  New fields of sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology emerged.  The first sociologists, people like Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, sought specifically to apply the scientific method of research to understand society, Engels famously claiming that Marx had done for the social world what Darwin did for the natural world, tracings its laws of development.  Today we tend to take for granted the naturalness of science here, but it is actually a pretty recent and radical development.

To return to the question, “does your mother love you?”  Well, this is actually not really how a researcher would frame the question, as it is too specific to your case.  It doesn’t tell us much about the world at large, even if it does tell us something about you and your relationship with your mother.  A social science researcher might ask, “do mothers love their children?”  Or maybe they would be more interested in how this loving relationship might change over time (e.g., “do mothers love their children more now than they did in the 18th century when so many children died before reaching adulthood?”) or perhaps they might be interested in measuring quality of love across cultures or time periods, or even establishing “what love looks like” using the mother/child relationship as a site of exploration.  All of these make good research questions because we can use observable data to answer them.

What is Qualitative Research?

“All we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk, how to tell.  If we don’t tell the world, we don’t know the world.  We’re lost in it, we die.” -Ursula LeGuin, The Telling

At its simplest, qualitative research is research about the social world that does not use numbers in its analyses.  All those who fear statistics can breathe a sigh of relief – there are no mathematical formulae or regression models in this book! But this definition is less about what qualitative research can be and more about what it is not.  To be honest, any simple statement will fail to capture the power and depth of qualitative research.  One way of contrasting qualitative research to quantitative research is to note that the focus of qualitative research is less about explaining and predicting relationships between variables and more about understanding the social world.  To use our mother love example, the question about “what love looks like” is a good question for the qualitative researcher while all questions measuring love or comparing incidences of love (both of which require measurement) are good questions for quantitative researchers. Patton writes,

Qualitative data describe.  They take us, as readers, into the time and place of the observation so that we know what it was like to have been there.  They capture and communicate someone else’s experience of the world in his or her own words.  Qualitative data tell a story. ( Patton 2002:47 )

Qualitative researchers are asking different questions about the world than their quantitative colleagues.  Even when researchers are employed in “mixed methods” research ( both quantitative and qualitative), they are using different methods to address different questions of the study.  I do a lot of research about first-generation and working-college college students.  Where a quantitative researcher might ask, how many first-generation college students graduate from college within four years? Or does first-generation college status predict high student debt loads?  A qualitative researcher might ask, how does the college experience differ for first-generation college students?  What is it like to carry a lot of debt, and how does this impact the ability to complete college on time?  Both sets of questions are important, but they can only be answered using specific tools tailored to those questions.  For the former, you need large numbers to make adequate comparisons.  For the latter, you need to talk to people, find out what they are thinking and feeling, and try to inhabit their shoes for a little while so you can make sense of their experiences and beliefs.

Examples of Qualitative Research

You have probably seen examples of qualitative research before, but you might not have paid particular attention to how they were produced or realized that the accounts you were reading were the result of hours, months, even years of research “in the field.”  A good qualitative researcher will present the product of their hours of work in such a way that it seems natural, even obvious, to the reader.  Because we are trying to convey what it is like answers, qualitative research is often presented as stories – stories about how people live their lives, go to work, raise their children, interact with one another.  In some ways, this can seem like reading particularly insightful novels.  But, unlike novels, there are very specific rules and guidelines that qualitative researchers follow to ensure that the “story” they are telling is accurate , a truthful rendition of what life is like for the people being studied.  Most of this textbook will be spent conveying those rules and guidelines.  Let’s take a look, first, however, at three examples of what the end product looks like.  I have chosen these three examples to showcase very different approaches to qualitative research, and I will return to these five examples throughout the book.  They were all published as whole books (not chapters or articles), and they are worth the long read, if you have the time.  I will also provide some information on how these books came to be and the length of time it takes to get them into book version.  It is important you know about this process, and the rest of this textbook will help explain why it takes so long to conduct good qualitative research!

Example 1 : The End Game (ethnography + interviews)

Corey Abramson is a sociologist who teaches at the University of Arizona.   In 2015 he published The End Game: How Inequality Shapes our Final Years ( 2015 ). This book was based on the research he did for his dissertation at the University of California-Berkeley in 2012.  Actually, the dissertation was completed in 2012 but the work that was produced that took several years.  The dissertation was entitled, “This is How We Live, This is How We Die: Social Stratification, Aging, and Health in Urban America” ( 2012 ).  You can see how the book version, which was written for a more general audience, has a more engaging sound to it, but that the dissertation version, which is what academic faculty read and evaluate, has a more descriptive title.  You can read the title and know that this is a study about aging and health and that the focus is going to be inequality and that the context (place) is going to be “urban America.”  It’s a study about “how” people do something – in this case, how they deal with aging and death.  This is the very first sentence of the dissertation, “From our first breath in the hospital to the day we die, we live in a society characterized by unequal opportunities for maintaining health and taking care of ourselves when ill.  These disparities reflect persistent racial, socio-economic, and gender-based inequalities and contribute to their persistence over time” ( 1 ).  What follows is a truthful account of how that is so.

Cory Abramson spent three years conducting his research in four different urban neighborhoods.  We call the type of research he conducted “comparative ethnographic” because he designed his study to compare groups of seniors as they went about their everyday business.  It’s comparative because he is comparing different groups (based on race, class, gender) and ethnographic because he is studying the culture/way of life of a group. [4]   He had an educated guess, rooted in what previous research had shown and what social theory would suggest, that people’s experiences of aging differ by race, class, and gender.  So, he set up a research design that would allow him to observe differences.  He chose two primarily middle-class (one was racially diverse and the other was predominantly White) and two primarily poor neighborhoods (one was racially diverse and the other was predominantly African American).  He hung out in senior centers and other places seniors congregated, watched them as they took the bus to get prescriptions filled, sat in doctor’s offices with them, and listened to their conversations with each other.  He also conducted more formal conversations, what we call in-depth interviews, with sixty seniors from each of the four neighborhoods.  As with a lot of fieldwork , as he got closer to the people involved, he both expanded and deepened his reach –

By the end of the project, I expanded my pool of general observations to include various settings frequented by seniors: apartment building common rooms, doctors’ offices, emergency rooms, pharmacies, senior centers, bars, parks, corner stores, shopping centers, pool halls, hair salons, coffee shops, and discount stores. Over the course of the three years of fieldwork, I observed hundreds of elders, and developed close relationships with a number of them. ( 2012:10 )

When Abramson rewrote the dissertation for a general audience and published his book in 2015, it got a lot of attention.  It is a beautifully written book and it provided insight into a common human experience that we surprisingly know very little about.  It won the Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological Association Section on Aging and the Life Course and was featured in the New York Times .  The book was about aging, and specifically how inequality shapes the aging process, but it was also about much more than that.  It helped show how inequality affects people’s everyday lives.  For example, by observing the difficulties the poor had in setting up appointments and getting to them using public transportation and then being made to wait to see a doctor, sometimes in standing-room-only situations, when they are unwell, and then being treated dismissively by hospital staff, Abramson allowed readers to feel the material reality of being poor in the US.  Comparing these examples with seniors with adequate supplemental insurance who have the resources to hire car services or have others assist them in arranging care when they need it, jolts the reader to understand and appreciate the difference money makes in the lives and circumstances of us all, and in a way that is different than simply reading a statistic (“80% of the poor do not keep regular doctor’s appointments”) does.  Qualitative research can reach into spaces and places that often go unexamined and then reports back to the rest of us what it is like in those spaces and places.

Example 2: Racing for Innocence (Interviews + Content Analysis + Fictional Stories)

Jennifer Pierce is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota.  Trained as a sociologist, she has written a number of books about gender, race, and power.  Her very first book, Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms, published in 1995, is a brilliant look at gender dynamics within two law firms.  Pierce was a participant observer, working as a paralegal, and she observed how female lawyers and female paralegals struggled to obtain parity with their male colleagues.

Fifteen years later, she reexamined the context of the law firm to include an examination of racial dynamics, particularly how elite white men working in these spaces created and maintained a culture that made it difficult for both female attorneys and attorneys of color to thrive. Her book, Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action , published in 2012, is an interesting and creative blending of interviews with attorneys, content analyses of popular films during this period, and fictional accounts of racial discrimination and sexual harassment.  The law firm she chose to study had come under an affirmative action order and was in the process of implementing equitable policies and programs.  She wanted to understand how recipients of white privilege (the elite white male attorneys) come to deny the role they play in reproducing inequality.  Through interviews with attorneys who were present both before and during the affirmative action order, she creates a historical record of the “bad behavior” that necessitated new policies and procedures, but also, and more importantly , probed the participants ’ understanding of this behavior.  It should come as no surprise that most (but not all) of the white male attorneys saw little need for change, and that almost everyone else had accounts that were different if not sometimes downright harrowing.

I’ve used Pierce’s book in my qualitative research methods courses as an example of an interesting blend of techniques and presentation styles.  My students often have a very difficult time with the fictional accounts she includes.  But they serve an important communicative purpose here.  They are her attempts at presenting “both sides” to an objective reality – something happens (Pierce writes this something so it is very clear what it is), and the two participants to the thing that happened have very different understandings of what this means.  By including these stories, Pierce presents one of her key findings – people remember things differently and these different memories tend to support their own ideological positions.  I wonder what Pierce would have written had she studied the murder of George Floyd or the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 or any number of other historic events whose observers and participants record very different happenings.

This is not to say that qualitative researchers write fictional accounts.  In fact, the use of fiction in our work remains controversial.  When used, it must be clearly identified as a presentation device, as Pierce did.  I include Racing for Innocence here as an example of the multiple uses of methods and techniques and the way that these work together to produce better understandings by us, the readers, of what Pierce studied.  We readers come away with a better grasp of how and why advantaged people understate their own involvement in situations and structures that advantage them.  This is normal human behavior , in other words.  This case may have been about elite white men in law firms, but the general insights here can be transposed to other settings.  Indeed, Pierce argues that more research needs to be done about the role elites play in the reproduction of inequality in the workplace in general.

Example 3: Amplified Advantage (Mixed Methods: Survey Interviews + Focus Groups + Archives)

The final example comes from my own work with college students, particularly the ways in which class background affects the experience of college and outcomes for graduates.  I include it here as an example of mixed methods, and for the use of supplementary archival research.  I’ve done a lot of research over the years on first-generation, low-income, and working-class college students.  I am curious (and skeptical) about the possibility of social mobility today, particularly with the rising cost of college and growing inequality in general.  As one of the few people in my family to go to college, I didn’t grow up with a lot of examples of what college was like or how to make the most of it.  And when I entered graduate school, I realized with dismay that there were very few people like me there.  I worried about becoming too different from my family and friends back home.  And I wasn’t at all sure that I would ever be able to pay back the huge load of debt I was taking on.  And so I wrote my dissertation and first two books about working-class college students.  These books focused on experiences in college and the difficulties of navigating between family and school ( Hurst 2010a, 2012 ).  But even after all that research, I kept coming back to wondering if working-class students who made it through college had an equal chance at finding good jobs and happy lives,

What happens to students after college?  Do working-class students fare as well as their peers?  I knew from my own experience that barriers continued through graduate school and beyond, and that my debtload was higher than that of my peers, constraining some of the choices I made when I graduated.  To answer these questions, I designed a study of students attending small liberal arts colleges, the type of college that tried to equalize the experience of students by requiring all students to live on campus and offering small classes with lots of interaction with faculty.  These private colleges tend to have more money and resources so they can provide financial aid to low-income students.  They also attract some very wealthy students.  Because they enroll students across the class spectrum, I would be able to draw comparisons.  I ended up spending about four years collecting data, both a survey of more than 2000 students (which formed the basis for quantitative analyses) and qualitative data collection (interviews, focus groups, archival research, and participant observation).  This is what we call a “mixed methods” approach because we use both quantitative and qualitative data.  The survey gave me a large enough number of students that I could make comparisons of the how many kind, and to be able to say with some authority that there were in fact significant differences in experience and outcome by class (e.g., wealthier students earned more money and had little debt; working-class students often found jobs that were not in their chosen careers and were very affected by debt, upper-middle-class students were more likely to go to graduate school).  But the survey analyses could not explain why these differences existed.  For that, I needed to talk to people and ask them about their motivations and aspirations.  I needed to understand their perceptions of the world, and it is very hard to do this through a survey.

By interviewing students and recent graduates, I was able to discern particular patterns and pathways through college and beyond.  Specifically, I identified three versions of gameplay.  Upper-middle-class students, whose parents were themselves professionals (academics, lawyers, managers of non-profits), saw college as the first stage of their education and took classes and declared majors that would prepare them for graduate school.  They also spent a lot of time building their resumes, taking advantage of opportunities to help professors with their research, or study abroad.  This helped them gain admission to highly-ranked graduate schools and interesting jobs in the public sector.  In contrast, upper-class students, whose parents were wealthy and more likely to be engaged in business (as CEOs or other high-level directors), prioritized building social capital.  They did this by joining fraternities and sororities and playing club sports.  This helped them when they graduated as they called on friends and parents of friends to find them well-paying jobs.  Finally, low-income, first-generation, and working-class students were often adrift.  They took the classes that were recommended to them but without the knowledge of how to connect them to life beyond college.  They spent time working and studying rather than partying or building their resumes.  All three sets of students thought they were “doing college” the right way, the way that one was supposed to do college.   But these three versions of gameplay led to distinct outcomes that advantaged some students over others.  I titled my work “Amplified Advantage” to highlight this process.

These three examples, Cory Abramson’s The End Game , Jennifer Peirce’s Racing for Innocence, and my own Amplified Advantage, demonstrate the range of approaches and tools available to the qualitative researcher.  They also help explain why qualitative research is so important.  Numbers can tell us some things about the world, but they cannot get at the hearts and minds, motivations and beliefs of the people who make up the social worlds we inhabit.  For that, we need tools that allow us to listen and make sense of what people tell us and show us.  That is what good qualitative research offers us.

How Is This Book Organized?

This textbook is organized as a comprehensive introduction to the use of qualitative research methods.  The first half covers general topics (e.g., approaches to qualitative research, ethics) and research design (necessary steps for building a successful qualitative research study).  The second half reviews various data collection and data analysis techniques.  Of course, building a successful qualitative research study requires some knowledge of data collection and data analysis so the chapters in the first half and the chapters in the second half should be read in conversation with each other.  That said, each chapter can be read on its own for assistance with a particular narrow topic.  In addition to the chapters, a helpful glossary can be found in the back of the book.  Rummage around in the text as needed.

Chapter Descriptions

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Research Design Process.  How does one begin a study? What is an appropriate research question?  How is the study to be done – with what methods ?  Involving what people and sites?  Although qualitative research studies can and often do change and develop over the course of data collection, it is important to have a good idea of what the aims and goals of your study are at the outset and a good plan of how to achieve those aims and goals.  Chapter 2 provides a road map of the process.

Chapter 3 describes and explains various ways of knowing the (social) world.  What is it possible for us to know about how other people think or why they behave the way they do?  What does it mean to say something is a “fact” or that it is “well-known” and understood?  Qualitative researchers are particularly interested in these questions because of the types of research questions we are interested in answering (the how questions rather than the how many questions of quantitative research).  Qualitative researchers have adopted various epistemological approaches.  Chapter 3 will explore these approaches, highlighting interpretivist approaches that acknowledge the subjective aspect of reality – in other words, reality and knowledge are not objective but rather influenced by (interpreted through) people.

Chapter 4 focuses on the practical matter of developing a research question and finding the right approach to data collection.  In any given study (think of Cory Abramson’s study of aging, for example), there may be years of collected data, thousands of observations , hundreds of pages of notes to read and review and make sense of.  If all you had was a general interest area (“aging”), it would be very difficult, nearly impossible, to make sense of all of that data.  The research question provides a helpful lens to refine and clarify (and simplify) everything you find and collect.  For that reason, it is important to pull out that lens (articulate the research question) before you get started.  In the case of the aging study, Cory Abramson was interested in how inequalities affected understandings and responses to aging.  It is for this reason he designed a study that would allow him to compare different groups of seniors (some middle-class, some poor).  Inevitably, he saw much more in the three years in the field than what made it into his book (or dissertation), but he was able to narrow down the complexity of the social world to provide us with this rich account linked to the original research question.  Developing a good research question is thus crucial to effective design and a successful outcome.  Chapter 4 will provide pointers on how to do this.  Chapter 4 also provides an overview of general approaches taken to doing qualitative research and various “traditions of inquiry.”

Chapter 5 explores sampling .  After you have developed a research question and have a general idea of how you will collect data (Observations?  Interviews?), how do you go about actually finding people and sites to study?  Although there is no “correct number” of people to interview , the sample should follow the research question and research design.  Unlike quantitative research, qualitative research involves nonprobability sampling.  Chapter 5 explains why this is so and what qualities instead make a good sample for qualitative research.

Chapter 6 addresses the importance of reflexivity in qualitative research.  Related to epistemological issues of how we know anything about the social world, qualitative researchers understand that we the researchers can never be truly neutral or outside the study we are conducting.  As observers, we see things that make sense to us and may entirely miss what is either too obvious to note or too different to comprehend.  As interviewers, as much as we would like to ask questions neutrally and remain in the background, interviews are a form of conversation, and the persons we interview are responding to us .  Therefore, it is important to reflect upon our social positions and the knowledges and expectations we bring to our work and to work through any blind spots that we may have.  Chapter 6 provides some examples of reflexivity in practice and exercises for thinking through one’s own biases.

Chapter 7 is a very important chapter and should not be overlooked.  As a practical matter, it should also be read closely with chapters 6 and 8.  Because qualitative researchers deal with people and the social world, it is imperative they develop and adhere to a strong ethical code for conducting research in a way that does not harm.  There are legal requirements and guidelines for doing so (see chapter 8), but these requirements should not be considered synonymous with the ethical code required of us.   Each researcher must constantly interrogate every aspect of their research, from research question to design to sample through analysis and presentation, to ensure that a minimum of harm (ideally, zero harm) is caused.  Because each research project is unique, the standards of care for each study are unique.  Part of being a professional researcher is carrying this code in one’s heart, being constantly attentive to what is required under particular circumstances.  Chapter 7 provides various research scenarios and asks readers to weigh in on the suitability and appropriateness of the research.  If done in a class setting, it will become obvious fairly quickly that there are often no absolutely correct answers, as different people find different aspects of the scenarios of greatest importance.  Minimizing the harm in one area may require possible harm in another.  Being attentive to all the ethical aspects of one’s research and making the best judgments one can, clearly and consciously, is an integral part of being a good researcher.

Chapter 8 , best to be read in conjunction with chapter 7, explains the role and importance of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) .  Under federal guidelines, an IRB is an appropriately constituted group that has been formally designated to review and monitor research involving human subjects .  Every institution that receives funding from the federal government has an IRB.  IRBs have the authority to approve, require modifications to (to secure approval), or disapprove research.  This group review serves an important role in the protection of the rights and welfare of human research subjects.  Chapter 8 reviews the history of IRBs and the work they do but also argues that IRBs’ review of qualitative research is often both over-inclusive and under-inclusive.  Some aspects of qualitative research are not well understood by IRBs, given that they were developed to prevent abuses in biomedical research.  Thus, it is important not to rely on IRBs to identify all the potential ethical issues that emerge in our research (see chapter 7).

Chapter 9 provides help for getting started on formulating a research question based on gaps in the pre-existing literature.  Research is conducted as part of a community, even if particular studies are done by single individuals (or small teams).  What any of us finds and reports back becomes part of a much larger body of knowledge.  Thus, it is important that we look at the larger body of knowledge before we actually start our bit to see how we can best contribute.  When I first began interviewing working-class college students, there was only one other similar study I could find, and it hadn’t been published (it was a dissertation of students from poor backgrounds).  But there had been a lot published by professors who had grown up working class and made it through college despite the odds.  These accounts by “working-class academics” became an important inspiration for my study and helped me frame the questions I asked the students I interviewed.  Chapter 9 will provide some pointers on how to search for relevant literature and how to use this to refine your research question.

Chapter 10 serves as a bridge between the two parts of the textbook, by introducing techniques of data collection.  Qualitative research is often characterized by the form of data collection – for example, an ethnographic study is one that employs primarily observational data collection for the purpose of documenting and presenting a particular culture or ethnos.  Techniques can be effectively combined, depending on the research question and the aims and goals of the study.   Chapter 10 provides a general overview of all the various techniques and how they can be combined.

The second part of the textbook moves into the doing part of qualitative research once the research question has been articulated and the study designed.  Chapters 11 through 17 cover various data collection techniques and approaches.  Chapters 18 and 19 provide a very simple overview of basic data analysis.  Chapter 20 covers communication of the data to various audiences, and in various formats.

Chapter 11 begins our overview of data collection techniques with a focus on interviewing , the true heart of qualitative research.  This technique can serve as the primary and exclusive form of data collection, or it can be used to supplement other forms (observation, archival).  An interview is distinct from a survey, where questions are asked in a specific order and often with a range of predetermined responses available.  Interviews can be conversational and unstructured or, more conventionally, semistructured , where a general set of interview questions “guides” the conversation.  Chapter 11 covers the basics of interviews: how to create interview guides, how many people to interview, where to conduct the interview, what to watch out for (how to prepare against things going wrong), and how to get the most out of your interviews.

Chapter 12 covers an important variant of interviewing, the focus group.  Focus groups are semistructured interviews with a group of people moderated by a facilitator (the researcher or researcher’s assistant).  Focus groups explicitly use group interaction to assist in the data collection.  They are best used to collect data on a specific topic that is non-personal and shared among the group.  For example, asking a group of college students about a common experience such as taking classes by remote delivery during the pandemic year of 2020.  Chapter 12 covers the basics of focus groups: when to use them, how to create interview guides for them, and how to run them effectively.

Chapter 13 moves away from interviewing to the second major form of data collection unique to qualitative researchers – observation .  Qualitative research that employs observation can best be understood as falling on a continuum of “fly on the wall” observation (e.g., observing how strangers interact in a doctor’s waiting room) to “participant” observation, where the researcher is also an active participant of the activity being observed.  For example, an activist in the Black Lives Matter movement might want to study the movement, using her inside position to gain access to observe key meetings and interactions.  Chapter  13 covers the basics of participant observation studies: advantages and disadvantages, gaining access, ethical concerns related to insider/outsider status and entanglement, and recording techniques.

Chapter 14 takes a closer look at “deep ethnography” – immersion in the field of a particularly long duration for the purpose of gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of a particular culture or social world.  Clifford Geertz called this “deep hanging out.”  Whereas participant observation is often combined with semistructured interview techniques, deep ethnography’s commitment to “living the life” or experiencing the situation as it really is demands more conversational and natural interactions with people.  These interactions and conversations may take place over months or even years.  As can be expected, there are some costs to this technique, as well as some very large rewards when done competently.  Chapter 14 provides some examples of deep ethnographies that will inspire some beginning researchers and intimidate others.

Chapter 15 moves in the opposite direction of deep ethnography, a technique that is the least positivist of all those discussed here, to mixed methods , a set of techniques that is arguably the most positivist .  A mixed methods approach combines both qualitative data collection and quantitative data collection, commonly by combining a survey that is analyzed statistically (e.g., cross-tabs or regression analyses of large number probability samples) with semi-structured interviews.  Although it is somewhat unconventional to discuss mixed methods in textbooks on qualitative research, I think it is important to recognize this often-employed approach here.  There are several advantages and some disadvantages to taking this route.  Chapter 16 will describe those advantages and disadvantages and provide some particular guidance on how to design a mixed methods study for maximum effectiveness.

Chapter 16 covers data collection that does not involve live human subjects at all – archival and historical research (chapter 17 will also cover data that does not involve interacting with human subjects).  Sometimes people are unavailable to us, either because they do not wish to be interviewed or observed (as is the case with many “elites”) or because they are too far away, in both place and time.  Fortunately, humans leave many traces and we can often answer questions we have by examining those traces.  Special collections and archives can be goldmines for social science research.  This chapter will explain how to access these places, for what purposes, and how to begin to make sense of what you find.

Chapter 17 covers another data collection area that does not involve face-to-face interaction with humans: content analysis .  Although content analysis may be understood more properly as a data analysis technique, the term is often used for the entire approach, which will be the case here.  Content analysis involves interpreting meaning from a body of text.  This body of text might be something found in historical records (see chapter 16) or something collected by the researcher, as in the case of comment posts on a popular blog post.  I once used the stories told by student loan debtors on the website studentloanjustice.org as the content I analyzed.  Content analysis is particularly useful when attempting to define and understand prevalent stories or communication about a topic of interest.  In other words, when we are less interested in what particular people (our defined sample) are doing or believing and more interested in what general narratives exist about a particular topic or issue.  This chapter will explore different approaches to content analysis and provide helpful tips on how to collect data, how to turn that data into codes for analysis, and how to go about presenting what is found through analysis.

Where chapter 17 has pushed us towards data analysis, chapters 18 and 19 are all about what to do with the data collected, whether that data be in the form of interview transcripts or fieldnotes from observations.  Chapter 18 introduces the basics of coding , the iterative process of assigning meaning to the data in order to both simplify and identify patterns.  What is a code and how does it work?  What are the different ways of coding data, and when should you use them?  What is a codebook, and why do you need one?  What does the process of data analysis look like?

Chapter 19 goes further into detail on codes and how to use them, particularly the later stages of coding in which our codes are refined, simplified, combined, and organized.  These later rounds of coding are essential to getting the most out of the data we’ve collected.  As students are often overwhelmed with the amount of data (a corpus of interview transcripts typically runs into the hundreds of pages; fieldnotes can easily top that), this chapter will also address time management and provide suggestions for dealing with chaos and reminders that feeling overwhelmed at the analysis stage is part of the process.  By the end of the chapter, you should understand how “findings” are actually found.

The book concludes with a chapter dedicated to the effective presentation of data results.  Chapter 20 covers the many ways that researchers communicate their studies to various audiences (academic, personal, political), what elements must be included in these various publications, and the hallmarks of excellent qualitative research that various audiences will be expecting.  Because qualitative researchers are motivated by understanding and conveying meaning , effective communication is not only an essential skill but a fundamental facet of the entire research project.  Ethnographers must be able to convey a certain sense of verisimilitude , the appearance of true reality.  Those employing interviews must faithfully depict the key meanings of the people they interviewed in a way that rings true to those people, even if the end result surprises them.  And all researchers must strive for clarity in their publications so that various audiences can understand what was found and why it is important.

The book concludes with a short chapter ( chapter 21 ) discussing the value of qualitative research. At the very end of this book, you will find a glossary of terms. I recommend you make frequent use of the glossary and add to each entry as you find examples. Although the entries are meant to be simple and clear, you may also want to paraphrase the definition—make it “make sense” to you, in other words. In addition to the standard reference list (all works cited here), you will find various recommendations for further reading at the end of many chapters. Some of these recommendations will be examples of excellent qualitative research, indicated with an asterisk (*) at the end of the entry. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. A good example of qualitative research can teach you more about conducting research than any textbook can (this one included). I highly recommend you select one to three examples from these lists and read them along with the textbook.

A final note on the choice of examples – you will note that many of the examples used in the text come from research on college students.  This is for two reasons.  First, as most of my research falls in this area, I am most familiar with this literature and have contacts with those who do research here and can call upon them to share their stories with you.  Second, and more importantly, my hope is that this textbook reaches a wide audience of beginning researchers who study widely and deeply across the range of what can be known about the social world (from marine resources management to public policy to nursing to political science to sexuality studies and beyond).  It is sometimes difficult to find examples that speak to all those research interests, however. A focus on college students is something that all readers can understand and, hopefully, appreciate, as we are all now or have been at some point a college student.

Recommended Reading: Other Qualitative Research Textbooks

I’ve included a brief list of some of my favorite qualitative research textbooks and guidebooks if you need more than what you will find in this introductory text.  For each, I’ve also indicated if these are for “beginning” or “advanced” (graduate-level) readers.  Many of these books have several editions that do not significantly vary; the edition recommended is merely the edition I have used in teaching and to whose page numbers any specific references made in the text agree.

Barbour, Rosaline. 2014. Introducing Qualitative Research: A Student’s Guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.  A good introduction to qualitative research, with abundant examples (often from the discipline of health care) and clear definitions.  Includes quick summaries at the ends of each chapter.  However, some US students might find the British context distracting and can be a bit advanced in some places.  Beginning .

Bloomberg, Linda Dale, and Marie F. Volpe. 2012. Completing Your Qualitative Dissertation . 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.  Specifically designed to guide graduate students through the research process. Advanced .

Creswell, John W., and Cheryl Poth. 2018 Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Traditions .  4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.  This is a classic and one of the go-to books I used myself as a graduate student.  One of the best things about this text is its clear presentation of five distinct traditions in qualitative research.  Despite the title, this reasonably sized book is about more than research design, including both data analysis and how to write about qualitative research.  Advanced .

Lareau, Annette. 2021. Listening to People: A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All Up .  Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A readable and personal account of conducting qualitative research by an eminent sociologist, with a heavy emphasis on the kinds of participant-observation research conducted by the author.  Despite its reader-friendliness, this is really a book targeted to graduate students learning the craft.  Advanced .

Lune, Howard, and Bruce L. Berg. 2018. 9th edition.  Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences.  Pearson . Although a good introduction to qualitative methods, the authors favor symbolic interactionist and dramaturgical approaches, which limits the appeal primarily to sociologists.  Beginning .

Marshall, Catherine, and Gretchen B. Rossman. 2016. 6th edition. Designing Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.  Very readable and accessible guide to research design by two educational scholars.  Although the presentation is sometimes fairly dry, personal vignettes and illustrations enliven the text.  Beginning .

Maxwell, Joseph A. 2013. Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach .  3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. A short and accessible introduction to qualitative research design, particularly helpful for graduate students contemplating theses and dissertations. This has been a standard textbook in my graduate-level courses for years.  Advanced .

Patton, Michael Quinn. 2002. Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.  This is a comprehensive text that served as my “go-to” reference when I was a graduate student.  It is particularly helpful for those involved in program evaluation and other forms of evaluation studies and uses examples from a wide range of disciplines.  Advanced .

Rubin, Ashley T. 2021. Rocking Qualitative Social Science: An Irreverent Guide to Rigorous Research. Stanford : Stanford University Press.  A delightful and personal read.  Rubin uses rock climbing as an extended metaphor for learning how to conduct qualitative research.  A bit slanted toward ethnographic and archival methods of data collection, with frequent examples from her own studies in criminology. Beginning .

Weis, Lois, and Michelle Fine. 2000. Speed Bumps: A Student-Friendly Guide to Qualitative Research . New York: Teachers College Press.  Readable and accessibly written in a quasi-conversational style.  Particularly strong in its discussion of ethical issues throughout the qualitative research process.  Not comprehensive, however, and very much tied to ethnographic research.  Although designed for graduate students, this is a recommended read for students of all levels.  Beginning .

Patton’s Ten Suggestions for Doing Qualitative Research

The following ten suggestions were made by Michael Quinn Patton in his massive textbooks Qualitative Research and Evaluations Methods . This book is highly recommended for those of you who want more than an introduction to qualitative methods. It is the book I relied on heavily when I was a graduate student, although it is much easier to “dip into” when necessary than to read through as a whole. Patton is asked for “just one bit of advice” for a graduate student considering using qualitative research methods for their dissertation.  Here are his top ten responses, in short form, heavily paraphrased, and with additional comments and emphases from me:

• Make sure that a qualitative approach fits the research question. The following are the kinds of questions that call out for qualitative methods or where qualitative methods are particularly appropriate: questions about people’s experiences or how they make sense of those experiences; studying a person in their natural environment; researching a phenomenon so unknown that it would be impossible to study it with standardized instruments or other forms of quantitative data collection.
• Study qualitative research by going to the original sources for the design and analysis appropriate to the particular approach you want to take (e.g., read Glaser and Straus if you are using grounded theory )
• Find a dissertation adviser who understands or at least who will support your use of qualitative research methods. You are asking for trouble if your entire committee is populated by quantitative researchers, even if they are all very knowledgeable about the subject or focus of your study (maybe even more so if they are!)
• Really work on design. Doing qualitative research effectively takes a lot of planning.  Even if things are more flexible than in quantitative research, a good design is absolutely essential when starting out.
• Practice data collection techniques, particularly interviewing and observing. There is definitely a set of learned skills here!  Do not expect your first interview to be perfect.  You will continue to grow as a researcher the more interviews you conduct, and you will probably come to understand yourself a bit more in the process, too.  This is not easy, despite what others who don’t work with qualitative methods may assume (and tell you!)
• Have a plan for analysis before you begin data collection. This is often a requirement in IRB protocols , although you can get away with writing something fairly simple.  And even if you are taking an approach, such as grounded theory, that pushes you to remain fairly open-minded during the data collection process, you still want to know what you will be doing with all the data collected – creating a codebook? Writing analytical memos? Comparing cases?  Having a plan in hand will also help prevent you from collecting too much extraneous data.
• Be prepared to confront controversies both within the qualitative research community and between qualitative research and quantitative research. Don’t be naïve about this – qualitative research, particularly some approaches, will be derided by many more “positivist” researchers and audiences.  For example, is an “n” of 1 really sufficient?  Yes!  But not everyone will agree.
• Do not make the mistake of using qualitative research methods because someone told you it was easier, or because you are intimidated by the math required of statistical analyses. Qualitative research is difficult in its own way (and many would claim much more time-consuming than quantitative research).  Do it because you are convinced it is right for your goals, aims, and research questions.
• Find a good support network. This could be a research mentor, or it could be a group of friends or colleagues who are also using qualitative research, or it could be just someone who will listen to you work through all of the issues you will confront out in the field and during the writing process.  Even though qualitative research often involves human subjects, it can be pretty lonely.  A lot of times you will feel like you are working without a net.  You have to create one for yourself.  Take care of yourself.
• And, finally, in the words of Patton, “Prepare to be changed. Looking deeply at other people’s lives will force you to look deeply at yourself.”
• We will actually spend an entire chapter ( chapter 3 ) looking at this question in much more detail! ↵
• Note that this might have been news to Europeans at the time, but many other societies around the world had also come to this conclusion through observation.  There is often a tendency to equate “the scientific revolution” with the European world in which it took place, but this is somewhat misleading. ↵
• Historians are a special case here.  Historians have scrupulously and rigorously investigated the social world, but not for the purpose of understanding general laws about how things work, which is the point of scientific empirical research.  History is often referred to as an idiographic field of study, meaning that it studies things that happened or are happening in themselves and not for general observations or conclusions. ↵
• Don’t worry, we’ll spend more time later in this book unpacking the meaning of ethnography and other terms that are important here.  Note the available glossary ↵

An approach to research that is “multimethod in focus, involving an interpretative, naturalistic approach to its subject matter.  This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.  Qualitative research involves the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical materials – case study, personal experience, introspective, life story, interview, observational, historical, interactional, and visual texts – that describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in individuals’ lives." ( Denzin and Lincoln 2005:2 ). Contrast with quantitative research .

In contrast to methodology, methods are more simply the practices and tools used to collect and analyze data.  Examples of common methods in qualitative research are interviews , observations , and documentary analysis .  One’s methodology should connect to one’s choice of methods, of course, but they are distinguishable terms.  See also methodology .

A proposed explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation.  The positing of a hypothesis is often the first step in quantitative research but not in qualitative research.  Even when qualitative researchers offer possible explanations in advance of conducting research, they will tend to not use the word “hypothesis” as it conjures up the kind of positivist research they are not conducting.

The foundational question to be addressed by the research study.  This will form the anchor of the research design, collection, and analysis.  Note that in qualitative research, the research question may, and probably will, alter or develop during the course of the research.

An approach to research that collects and analyzes numerical data for the purpose of finding patterns and averages, making predictions, testing causal relationships, and generalizing results to wider populations.  Contrast with qualitative research .

Data collection that takes place in real-world settings, referred to as “the field;” a key component of much Grounded Theory and ethnographic research.  Patton ( 2002 ) calls fieldwork “the central activity of qualitative inquiry” where “‘going into the field’ means having direct and personal contact with people under study in their own environments – getting close to people and situations being studied to personally understand the realities of minutiae of daily life” (48).

The people who are the subjects of a qualitative study.  In interview-based studies, they may be the respondents to the interviewer; for purposes of IRBs, they are often referred to as the human subjects of the research.

The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge.  For researchers, it is important to recognize and adopt one of the many distinguishing epistemological perspectives as part of our understanding of what questions research can address or fully answer.  See, e.g., constructivism , subjectivism, and  objectivism .

An approach that refutes the possibility of neutrality in social science research.  All research is “guided by a set of beliefs and feelings about the world and how it should be understood and studied” (Denzin and Lincoln 2005: 13).  In contrast to positivism , interpretivism recognizes the social constructedness of reality, and researchers adopting this approach focus on capturing interpretations and understandings people have about the world rather than “the world” as it is (which is a chimera).

The cluster of data-collection tools and techniques that involve observing interactions between people, the behaviors, and practices of individuals (sometimes in contrast to what they say about how they act and behave), and cultures in context.  Observational methods are the key tools employed by ethnographers and Grounded Theory .

Research based on data collected and analyzed by the research (in contrast to secondary “library” research).

The process of selecting people or other units of analysis to represent a larger population. In quantitative research, this representation is taken quite literally, as statistically representative.  In qualitative research, in contrast, sample selection is often made based on potential to generate insight about a particular topic or phenomenon.

A method of data collection in which the researcher asks the participant questions; the answers to these questions are often recorded and transcribed verbatim. There are many different kinds of interviews - see also semistructured interview , structured interview , and unstructured interview .

The specific group of individuals that you will collect data from.  Contrast population.

The practice of being conscious of and reflective upon one’s own social location and presence when conducting research.  Because qualitative research often requires interaction with live humans, failing to take into account how one’s presence and prior expectations and social location affect the data collected and how analyzed may limit the reliability of the findings.  This remains true even when dealing with historical archives and other content.  Who we are matters when asking questions about how people experience the world because we, too, are a part of that world.

The science and practice of right conduct; in research, it is also the delineation of moral obligations towards research participants, communities to which we belong, and communities in which we conduct our research.

An administrative body established to protect the rights and welfare of human research subjects recruited to participate in research activities conducted under the auspices of the institution with which it is affiliated. The IRB is charged with the responsibility of reviewing all research involving human participants. The IRB is concerned with protecting the welfare, rights, and privacy of human subjects. The IRB has the authority to approve, disapprove, monitor, and require modifications in all research activities that fall within its jurisdiction as specified by both the federal regulations and institutional policy.

Research, according to US federal guidelines, that involves “a living individual about whom an investigator (whether professional or student) conducting research:  (1) Obtains information or biospecimens through intervention or interaction with the individual, and uses, studies, or analyzes the information or biospecimens; or  (2) Obtains, uses, studies, analyzes, or generates identifiable private information or identifiable biospecimens.”

One of the primary methodological traditions of inquiry in qualitative research, ethnography is the study of a group or group culture, largely through observational fieldwork supplemented by interviews. It is a form of fieldwork that may include participant-observation data collection. See chapter 14 for a discussion of deep ethnography. 

A form of interview that follows a standard guide of questions asked, although the order of the questions may change to match the particular needs of each individual interview subject, and probing “follow-up” questions are often added during the course of the interview.  The semi-structured interview is the primary form of interviewing used by qualitative researchers in the social sciences.  It is sometimes referred to as an “in-depth” interview.  See also interview and  interview guide .

A method of observational data collection taking place in a natural setting; a form of fieldwork .  The term encompasses a continuum of relative participation by the researcher (from full participant to “fly-on-the-wall” observer).  This is also sometimes referred to as ethnography , although the latter is characterized by a greater focus on the culture under observation.

A research design that employs both quantitative and qualitative methods, as in the case of a survey supplemented by interviews.

An epistemological perspective that posits the existence of reality through sensory experience similar to empiricism but goes further in denying any non-sensory basis of thought or consciousness.  In the social sciences, the term has roots in the proto-sociologist August Comte, who believed he could discern “laws” of society similar to the laws of natural science (e.g., gravity).  The term has come to mean the kinds of measurable and verifiable science conducted by quantitative researchers and is thus used pejoratively by some qualitative researchers interested in interpretation, consciousness, and human understanding.  Calling someone a “positivist” is often intended as an insult.  See also empiricism and objectivism.

A place or collection containing records, documents, or other materials of historical interest; most universities have an archive of material related to the university’s history, as well as other “special collections” that may be of interest to members of the community.

A method of both data collection and data analysis in which a given content (textual, visual, graphic) is examined systematically and rigorously to identify meanings, themes, patterns and assumptions.  Qualitative content analysis (QCA) is concerned with gathering and interpreting an existing body of material.    

A word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data (Saldaña 2021:5).

Usually a verbatim written record of an interview or focus group discussion.

The primary form of data for fieldwork , participant observation , and ethnography .  These notes, taken by the researcher either during the course of fieldwork or at day’s end, should include as many details as possible on what was observed and what was said.  They should include clear identifiers of date, time, setting, and names (or identifying characteristics) of participants.

The process of labeling and organizing qualitative data to identify different themes and the relationships between them; a way of simplifying data to allow better management and retrieval of key themes and illustrative passages.  See coding frame and  codebook.

A methodological tradition of inquiry and approach to analyzing qualitative data in which theories emerge from a rigorous and systematic process of induction.  This approach was pioneered by the sociologists Glaser and Strauss (1967).  The elements of theory generated from comparative analysis of data are, first, conceptual categories and their properties and, second, hypotheses or generalized relations among the categories and their properties – “The constant comparing of many groups draws the [researcher’s] attention to their many similarities and differences.  Considering these leads [the researcher] to generate abstract categories and their properties, which, since they emerge from the data, will clearly be important to a theory explaining the kind of behavior under observation.” (36).

A detailed description of any proposed research that involves human subjects for review by IRB.  The protocol serves as the recipe for the conduct of the research activity.  It includes the scientific rationale to justify the conduct of the study, the information necessary to conduct the study, the plan for managing and analyzing the data, and a discussion of the research ethical issues relevant to the research.  Protocols for qualitative research often include interview guides, all documents related to recruitment, informed consent forms, very clear guidelines on the safekeeping of materials collected, and plans for de-identifying transcripts or other data that include personal identifying information.

Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods Copyright © 2023 by Allison Hurst is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

The Ultimate Guide to Qualitative Research - Part 1: The Basics

• Introduction and overview
• What is qualitative research?

What is qualitative data?

• Examples of qualitative data
• Qualitative vs. quantitative research
• Mixed methods
• Qualitative research preparation
• Theoretical perspective
• Theoretical framework
• Literature reviews
• Research question
• Conceptual framework
• Conceptual vs. theoretical framework
• Data collection
• Introduction

When is qualitative research useful?

What are the different approaches to qualitative research, what are the most common qualitative research methods, focus groups.

• Observational research
• Case studies
• Ethnographical research
• Ethical considerations
• Confidentiality and privacy
• Power dynamics
• Reflexivity

Qualitative research methods, types & examples

In the next few sections, we will examine different methods common to qualitative research . Researchers may find the discussion on qualitative research methodologies important to laying the theoretical foundation for common practices in the qualitative research process.

Qualitative research methods often contrast with quantitative research methods , which are usually found in the hard sciences such as biology and chemistry. Both orientations are used in the social sciences and behavioral sciences methodology as they contribute to the empirical understanding of scientific knowledge. Quantitative methods tend to measure trends concerning a phenomenon, while qualitative research methods are well-suited to describing a given phenomenon in depth.

Think of how people might choose a smartphone and how many choices there are. The decision could be based on quantitative data, such as the phone's weight, storage size (e.g., how many photos or songs it can hold), and battery life. Customers can decide by comparing the numbers of different models.

On the other hand, the decision could be made based on qualitative data, such as customers' experiences regarding how easy it is to operate a smartphone or how visually appealing a smartphone is. These determinations are challenging to characterize numerically, requiring more extended descriptions to allow people to make reasonable comparisons.

Researchers conduct qualitative research to gather data on and answer questions about intricate social processes that are difficult to quantify. Qualitative methods can be used to conceptualize these processes and develop new theories that shed light on the complex social phenomena in our world.

Qualitative data refers to rich, in-depth, and nuanced information that captures the complexity and diversity of human experiences and social realities. Rather than focusing on quantities or measurements, qualitative data aims to understand the intricate nature of phenomena, uncovering the 'why' and 'how' rather than 'how much.'

It often includes words, descriptions, visual images, symbols, or personal narratives. This data is typically unstructured or semi-structured, featuring open-ended responses that allow for expressive, detailed, and context-specific responses. It explores subjective experiences, individual perceptions, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors in social and cultural contexts.

Qualitative data can reveal patterns, themes, and categories that reflect the depth of participants' experiences and the structures of their world. It can potentially capture unforeseen phenomena, leading to new insights or theories.

Whether collected directly from participants or indirectly from various artifacts or environmental observations, qualitative data provides an understanding of the complex interplay between individuals and their contexts. It aims to provide rich, holistic insights into people's experiences and societal phenomena.

Ultimately, qualitative data offers a rich canvas for researchers to paint a comprehensive and detailed picture of the subject of their inquiry beyond numerical metrics and predefined categories.

The qualitative data collection methods that researchers choose depend on their qualitative inquiry. Qualitative studies take on many forms, with the most common approaches listed below.

Case study research

The case study research approach provides a rich, detailed analysis of a specific 'case,' which can be a single individual, group, event, or organization. Researchers employing this method gather data using multiple sources, such as interviews , observations , and documents, which offer a more complete picture of the case under study. The inherent flexibility of case study research enables the exploration of complex issues in their real-world settings.

Case study research is particularly beneficial when researchers aim to answer 'how' and 'why' questions. It's about digging deep into the aspects often overlooked by other research methods. However, it's crucial to remember that findings from a single case study may not be generalizable to other cases. Some case study designs purposefully include multiple cases in their study design to allow for cross-case comparisons and the development of insights that are more transferable to different cases. Broadly, though, the method's strength lies not in replication but in its depth of understanding and insight.

Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research is a method deeply rooted in cultural anthropology, where the researcher immerses themselves in the everyday life of the group or community they are studying. It involves long-term engagement and close observation of the group, often through participation in their activities. The primary aim is to gain an insider's perspective of the group's social dynamics, beliefs, rituals, and behaviors.

Ethnographic research can be used in various fields, not limited to anthropology. For example, in user experience research, ethnographic methods can be employed to understand user behavior and needs in the context of their natural environment. Nevertheless, conducting ethnographic research requires extensive data collection time and a deep understanding and respect for the culture being studied.

Grounded theory research

Grounded theory research is a qualitative method that seeks to develop a theory rooted in the data. Rather than beginning with a hypothesis , researchers using grounded theory start with an area of study and collect data related to this area. The key feature of this method is its systematic procedure of data collection and analysis, which is designed to facilitate the development of theory that emerges from the data.

The process of grounded theory involves several stages, including open coding , axial coding , and selective coding, which assist in organizing data into categories, establishing relationships among categories, and forming a theoretical framework, respectively. This method is particularly useful when existing theories fail to explain a phenomenon adequately. Nonetheless, conducting grounded theory research requires significant time and analytical effort to ensure that the emerging theory is robust and grounded in the data.

Narrative research

Researchers who focus on narratives are centered on the stories that individuals tell about their experiences and life events. These narratives offer a window into individuals' perspectives, providing insights into their feelings, motives, and actions. Researchers utilizing this method collect narratives through interviews, autobiographies, oral histories, or diaries and analyze them to understand individuals' experiences and how they make sense of their world.

The second part of the narrative research process is the interpretation of these stories. Researchers analyze these narratives not only for their content but also for how they're structured and told, looking for patterns and themes that reveal more profound meanings. However, it's essential to remember that narratives are subjective and can change over time as people reinterpret their experiences and memories. Thus, narrative research provides a rich, nuanced understanding of individual experiences that are closely tied to the context in which the narrative was produced.

Phenomenological research

Phenomenological research focuses on understanding individuals' lived experiences concerning a particular phenomenon. The aim here is to grasp the essence of the experience or the underlying meanings and interpretations that individuals assign to their experiences. This method involves deep, often philosophically-rooted thinking, requiring the researcher to bracket their preconceptions to truly understand the participants' perspectives.

A phenomenological study involves detailed interviews , observations , or diary entries, allowing the researcher to delve into the intricate details of people's experiences and feelings. Analysis of the data seeks to identify themes or essences that capture the nature of the phenomenon under investigation. While phenomenological research can provide profound insights into human experiences, it is a complex and time-consuming process, requiring rigorous analysis and a high degree of reflexivity from the researcher.

Action research

Action research is a collaborative, participatory approach to research that aims to solve real-world problems. In this approach, researchers work closely with community members or stakeholders, who are actively involved in all stages of the research process, from identifying the problem to implementing and evaluating the solution. This makes action research a highly dynamic and iterative process.

This method is usually employed in educational, organizational, or community settings, where researchers and participants learn from each other and effect change together. Action research not only aims to generate knowledge but also to produce practical outcomes and empower participants. Despite its benefits, it requires a significant commitment of time and resources, and its success is dependent on the effective collaboration and active participation of all members involved.

Which approach to qualitative methods is best?

Choosing the best approach to qualitative research depends on various factors, including the nature of the research question , the context of the study, the researcher's familiarity with the approach, and ethical considerations . Here are some guiding questions:

• What is the main purpose of the study?
• What kind of data is needed to effectively answer the research question?
• What is the context in which the research is being conducted?
• What are the ethical considerations associated with each approach?
• Which approach aligns best with the researcher's skills and interests?

Understanding these aspects will allow the researcher to choose the most suitable approach for their particular study.

For instance, a grounded theory approach can be an appropriate choice for your research design when there is little theory to guide the analysis of a phenomenon and the data collection itself. For research in areas that have more guiding theory to help you, you can consider an approach like ethnography or case study research, depending on the scope of data you wish to collect. Finally, if you are conducting research because you are interested in enacting social change, then action research will most likely be the most appropriate approach for your study.

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Any research method that produces unstructured data can be considered a qualitative research method. However, three types of qualitative methods are commonly used today to conduct data collection.

Observations

The simplest way to study a phenomenon is to look at it. Research conducted through direct observation involves collecting data in field notes , recordings of audio and video, and images for data analysis .

This means that researchers can turn most forms of information into data that can be analyzed with qualitative methods. The illustrative examples qualitative research methods generate can help research audiences understand observed phenomena more clearly. ATLAS.ti can help with this process by allowing qualitative researchers to code major forms of data , including images and audio .

Interviews are a fundamental method in qualitative research, allowing researchers to gather in-depth information about individuals' thoughts, feelings, experiences, and interpretations. Interviews can take various forms, from highly structured with predetermined questions, to semi-structured with some guidance , to unstructured or 'open-ended' where the conversation evolves based on the interviewee's responses.

Conducting interviews offers a direct interaction with participants, enabling the researcher to probe deeper into the topics under discussion, clarify responses, and ask for elaborations. Interviews can yield rich, detailed data that provide a deep understanding of a person's perspective. However, they also require a significant investment of time and resources. Skilled interviewing and good rapport building are essential for collecting meaningful and accurate data.

A focus group consists of a group of participants collectively discussing a topic, speaking among themselves even more than they might speak to the researcher or focus group moderator. The aim is to inquire about people's perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards the topic of study, which could be a feature of social life, such as body art or a specific product, such as market research for a new campaign. Since the researcher can observe and speak with a group of people, focus groups are ideal for understanding the social construction of a phenomenon or how meaning is collectively co-constructed.

Focus groups are especially popular in market research. Still, qualitative researchers who want to observe how people interact with each other could consider conducting a focus group. For example, how people discuss their opinions and perspectives in groups is an essential inquiry in sociology and linguistics that focus groups can help explore.

Surveys in qualitative research often differ from those in quantitative research, because an important part of these surveys is the collection of open-ended responses that allow participants to provide detailed responses in their own words. Surveys can be a cost-effective and efficient method to collect data from a larger number of participants compared to other qualitative methods.

However, designing a good survey requires careful thought to ensure questions are clear, unbiased, and able to elicit rich, meaningful responses. Unlike interviews and focus groups, surveys do not provide an opportunity for the researcher to ask for clarifications or probe for more elaborate responses. Additionally, low response rates and self-selection bias can be potential challenges in survey research. Regardless, when designed and implemented effectively, surveys can provide valuable insights into participants' perspectives and experiences.

Document collection

Document collection is a versatile method in qualitative research that involves the analysis of existing texts. These texts can come in a variety of forms, such as official documents, newspapers, letters, diaries, transcripts, literary works, photographs, or even digital content like social media posts , blogs, and websites. The content of these documents can provide valuable insights into the phenomenon under investigation, contextual factors, and historical trends.

The strength of document analysis lies in its ability to provide a behind-the-scenes look at events, settings, or groups, often complementing the data obtained through other methods. For example, it can be useful for triangulating data in a mixed-methods study or providing a historical context in a case study. However, the researcher needs to be cautious about the authenticity, bias, and representativeness of the documents. Despite these challenges, when used effectively, document collection can enrich a study by providing a diverse range of data and a deeper understanding of the research subject.

Other research methods

Ultimately, the potential for qualitative data collection is broad as it encompasses any research method that collects unstructured data that can be systematically organized and analyzed. With that in mind, let's briefly look at other methods that are useful in qualitative research.

Participant observation - This is a method used frequently in ethnographic research. Researchers immerse themselves in the environment or culture they are studying, often participating in the activities of the group. This allows them to observe behaviors, interactions, and events as they naturally occur, leading to a deep understanding of the group's dynamics.

Visual methods - These involve the use of visual materials, such as photographs, drawings, videos, or maps. Participants may be asked to create or interact with these materials as part of the data collection process. Visual methods can offer unique insights and are particularly useful when exploring topics that are difficult to express in words.

Diaries and journals - In this method, participants are asked to keep a record of their experiences, thoughts, and feelings over a certain period. These records can provide rich, detailed, and longitudinal data. For example, diaries and journals are often used in health and social care research to study people's daily lives, experiences of illness, or caring roles.

Life history - Collecting life histories is a type of narrative research where participants are asked to tell their life story or focus on a particular aspect or period of their life. Life history can reveal how people interpret and give meaning to their experiences over time.

How do I choose the best qualitative research method?

Think about what you want to study concerning a particular topic or concept. If your topic is education, for example, are you interested in what happens in education, what people think about it, or how people talk about it? Observations can tap into the experiences within a particular context, while interviews and focus groups can shed light on people's opinions.

Also, keep in mind that the use of multiple qualitative research methods can provide a deeper exploration of a concept than the use of one method alone. A good research design for an in-depth qualitative study can even apply quantitative research methods in what is called mixed methods research to examine a phenomenon from different angles.

Any study first begins with the research question and topic. From there, you can reflect on which qualitative research methods are best suited to answering your research question.

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Research methods--quantitative, qualitative, and more: qualitative research.

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About Qualitative Data

Qualitative data are data representing information and concepts that are not represented by numbers. They are often gathered from interviews and focus groups, personal diaries and lab notebooks, maps, photographs, and other printed materials or observations. Qualitative data are distinguished from  quantitative data , which focus primarily on data that can be represented with numbers. 

Qualitative data can be analyzed in multiple ways. One common method is data coding, which refers to the process of transforming the raw collected data into a set of meaningful categories that describe essential concepts of the data. Qualitative data and methods may be used more frequently in humanities or social science research and may be collected in descriptive studies.

(From the Data Glossary , National Center for Data Services, National Library of Medicine)

Methods Texts

Below are some methods texts recommended by qualitative workshop leaders from the UC Berkeley Library and the D-Lab: 

Workshops and Training

• Introduction to Qualitative Data Analysis (video) In this video you'll start from scratch, learning how to create and analyze qualitative data, also getting an overview of the user-friendly and free qualitative data analysis tool, Taguette.  From the 2024 University of California "Love Data Week" workshops.
• Managing qualitative data 101 Tips on managing qualitative materials from your qualitative research librarian.
• D-Lab workshops Free online workshops on quant and qualitative skills, including coding and using qualitative analysis software.
• Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) Training Ethnographic methods workshop from a campus institute.
• Qualitative Methods classes Filter to upcoming semesters and look for qualitative methods classes; the Graduate School of Education and School of Public Health offer extensive methods training.

Qualitative Data Analysis Software

Unfortunately, Berkeley does not yet have a sitewide license for any qualitative analysis software.

If you are a student, you can find affordable student licenses with a web search.

If you are a faculty member, instructor, lecturer, or visiting scholar without grant funding, unfortunately software is quite expensive.

You can find reviews of many qualitative software packages at this University of Surrey link:

• Choosing an Appropriate CAQDAS package .

You can also check out the websites of several major options below: 

• Taguette Taguette has fewer features than other qualitative analysis software, but is free and open-source.
• Atlas.ti Atlas.ti is a major qualitative analysis software, and has affordable licenses for students.
• MaxQDA MaxQDA is a major qualitative analysis software, with affordable student licenses. The D-Lab often teaches workshops on this software.
• NVIVO NVIVO is an established QDA software, with affordable student licenses.
• Dedoose Dedoose supports qualitaive and mixed methods research, using an online interface. Students pay $11 per month.

Resources for Qualitative Data Management

• Managing and Sharing Qualitative Data 101 This page from Berkeley's research data management website offers several things to consider.
• Tutorials on Ethnographic Data Management This curricula includes eight presentations and accompanying exercises for you to think through your qualitative data project--or coach others to do the same.
• Support Your Data: Evaluation Rubric Download the evaluation rubric on this page to assess where you are with qualitative data management, and consider areas to explore next.
• The Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) QDR is one of the top US-based repositories focused on the challenges of managing, storing, and sharing qualitative research materials.
• Research Data @ Berkeley Email Research Data for a consultation about how to set up your qualitative data management plan; they can help you locate other resources on campus.

Mixed Methods Research

Interpretations related to mixed (sometimes called merged) methods vary; be wary of jargon!  Gery Ryan, of the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, gives these definitions, while arguing that we should be thinking of the purposes of the research rather than the methodological labels:

Mixed methods research : “Combines elements of qualitative and quantitative research approaches (e. g., use of qualitative and quantitative viewpoints, data collection, analysis, inference techniques) for the broad purposes of breadth and depth of understanding and corroboration.”

Multimethod research : “Either solely combine multiple qualitative approaches or solely combine multiple quantitative approaches.”

Data triangulation : “Uses multiple sources of data or multiple approaches to analyzing data to enhance the credibility of a research study.”

(From " Mixed Methods Research Designs and Data Triangulation " by Gery Ryan, Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine)

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What is qualitative research.

Qualitative research methodologies seek to capture information that often can't be expressed numerically. These methodologies often include some level of interpretation from researchers as they collect information via observation, coded survey or interview responses, and so on. Researchers may use multiple qualitative methods in one study, as well as a theoretical or critical framework to help them interpret their data.

Qualitative research methods can be used to study:

• How are political and social attitudes formed? 
• How do people make decisions?
• What teaching or training methods are most effective?  

Qualitative Research Approaches

Action research.

In this type of study, researchers will actively pursue some kind of intervention, resolve a problem, or affect some kind of change. They will not only analyze the results but will also examine the challenges encountered through the process. 

Ethnography

Ethnographies are an in-depth, holistic type of research used to capture cultural practices, beliefs, traditions, and so on. Here, the researcher observes and interviews members of a culture — an ethnic group, a clique, members of a religion, etc. — and then analyzes their findings. 

Grounded Theory

Researchers will create and test a hypothesis using qualitative data. Often, researchers use grounded theory to understand decision-making, problem-solving, and other types of behavior.

Narrative Research

Researchers use this type of framework to understand different aspects of the human experience and how their subjects assign meaning to their experiences. Researchers use interviews to collect data from a small group of subjects, then discuss those results in the form of a narrative or story.

Phenomenology

This type of research attempts to understand the lived experiences of a group and/or how members of that group find meaning in their experiences. Researchers use interviews, observation, and other qualitative methods to collect data. 

Often used to share novel or unique information, case studies consist of a detailed, in-depth description of a single subject, pilot project, specific events, and so on. 

• Hossain, M.S., Runa, F., & Al Mosabbir, A. (2021). Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on rare diseases: A case study on thalassaemia patients in Bangladesh. Public Health in Practice, 2(100150), 1-3.
• Nožina, M. (2021). The Czech Rhino connection: A case study of Vietnamese wildlife trafficking networks’ operations across central Europe. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 27(2), 265-283.

Focus Groups

Researchers will recruit people to answer questions in small group settings. Focus group members may share similar demographics or be diverse, depending on the researchers' needs. Group members will then be asked a series of questions and have their responses recorded. While these responses may be coded and discussed numerically (e.g., 50% of group members responded negatively to a question), researchers will also use responses to provide context, nuance, and other details. 

• Dichabeng, P., Merat, N., & Markkula, G. (2021). Factors that influence the acceptance of future shared automated vehicles – A focus group study with United Kingdom drivers. Transportation Research: Part F, 82, 121–140.
• Maynard, E., Barton, S., Rivett, K., Maynard, O., & Davies, W. (2021). Because ‘grown-ups don’t always get it right’: Allyship with children in research—From research question to authorship. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 18(4), 518–536.

Observational Study

Researchers will arrange to observe (usually in an unobtrusive way) a set of subjects in specific conditions. For example, researchers might visit a school cafeteria to learn about the food choices students make or set up trail cameras to collect information about animal behavior in the area. 

• He, J. Y., Chan, P. W., Li, Q. S., Li, L., Zhang, L., & Yang, H. L. (2022). Observations of wind and turbulence structures of Super Typhoons Hato and Mangkhut over land from a 356 m high meteorological tower. Atmospheric Research, 265(105910), 1-18.
• Zerovnik Spela, Kos Mitja, & Locatelli Igor. (2022). Initiation of insulin therapy in patients with type 2 diabetes: An observational study. Acta Pharmaceutica, 72(1), 147–157.

Open-Ended Surveys

Unlike quantitative surveys, open-ended surveys require respondents to answer the questions in their own words. 

• Mujcic, A., Blankers, M., Yildirim, D., Boon, B., & Engels, R. (2021). Cancer survivors’ views on digital support for smoking cessation and alcohol moderation: a survey and qualitative study. BMC Public Health, 21(1), 1-13.
• Smith, S. D., Hall, J. P., & Kurth, N. K. (2021). Perspectives on health policy from people with disabilities. Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 32(3), 224–232.

Structured or Semi-Structured Interviews

Researchers will recruit a small number of people who fit pre-determined criteria (e.g., people in a certain profession) and ask each the same set of questions, one-on-one. Semi-structured interviews will include opportunities for the interviewee to provide additional information they weren't asked about by the researcher.

• Gibbs, D., Haven-Tang, C., & Ritchie, C. (2021). Harmless flirtations or co-creation? Exploring flirtatious encounters in hospitable experiences. Tourism & Hospitality Research, 21(4), 473–486.
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• What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

Published on 4 April 2022 by Pritha Bhandari . Revised on 30 January 2023.

Qualitative research involves collecting and analysing non-numerical data (e.g., text, video, or audio) to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. It can be used to gather in-depth insights into a problem or generate new ideas for research.

Qualitative research is the opposite of quantitative research , which involves collecting and analysing numerical data for statistical analysis.

Qualitative research is commonly used in the humanities and social sciences, in subjects such as anthropology, sociology, education, health sciences, and history.

• How does social media shape body image in teenagers?
• How do children and adults interpret healthy eating in the UK?
• What factors influence employee retention in a large organisation?
• How is anxiety experienced around the world?
• How can teachers integrate social issues into science curriculums?

Table of contents

Approaches to qualitative research, qualitative research methods, qualitative data analysis, advantages of qualitative research, disadvantages of qualitative research, frequently asked questions about qualitative research.

Qualitative research is used to understand how people experience the world. While there are many approaches to qualitative research, they tend to be flexible and focus on retaining rich meaning when interpreting data.

Common approaches include grounded theory, ethnography, action research, phenomenological research, and narrative research. They share some similarities, but emphasise different aims and perspectives.

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Each of the research approaches involve using one or more data collection methods . These are some of the most common qualitative methods:

• Observations: recording what you have seen, heard, or encountered in detailed field notes.
• Interviews:  personally asking people questions in one-on-one conversations.
• Focus groups: asking questions and generating discussion among a group of people.
• Surveys : distributing questionnaires with open-ended questions.
• Secondary research: collecting existing data in the form of texts, images, audio or video recordings, etc.
• You take field notes with observations and reflect on your own experiences of the company culture.
• You distribute open-ended surveys to employees across all the company’s offices by email to find out if the culture varies across locations.
• You conduct in-depth interviews with employees in your office to learn about their experiences and perspectives in greater detail.

Qualitative researchers often consider themselves ‘instruments’ in research because all observations, interpretations and analyses are filtered through their own personal lens.

For this reason, when writing up your methodology for qualitative research, it’s important to reflect on your approach and to thoroughly explain the choices you made in collecting and analysing the data.

Qualitative data can take the form of texts, photos, videos and audio. For example, you might be working with interview transcripts, survey responses, fieldnotes, or recordings from natural settings.

Most types of qualitative data analysis share the same five steps:

• Prepare and organise your data. This may mean transcribing interviews or typing up fieldnotes.
• Review and explore your data. Examine the data for patterns or repeated ideas that emerge.
• Develop a data coding system. Based on your initial ideas, establish a set of codes that you can apply to categorise your data.
• Assign codes to the data. For example, in qualitative survey analysis, this may mean going through each participant’s responses and tagging them with codes in a spreadsheet. As you go through your data, you can create new codes to add to your system if necessary.
• Identify recurring themes. Link codes together into cohesive, overarching themes.

There are several specific approaches to analysing qualitative data. Although these methods share similar processes, they emphasise different concepts.

Qualitative research often tries to preserve the voice and perspective of participants and can be adjusted as new research questions arise. Qualitative research is good for:

• Flexibility

The data collection and analysis process can be adapted as new ideas or patterns emerge. They are not rigidly decided beforehand.

• Natural settings

Data collection occurs in real-world contexts or in naturalistic ways.

• Meaningful insights

Detailed descriptions of people’s experiences, feelings and perceptions can be used in designing, testing or improving systems or products.

• Generation of new ideas

Open-ended responses mean that researchers can uncover novel problems or opportunities that they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

Researchers must consider practical and theoretical limitations in analysing and interpreting their data. Qualitative research suffers from:

• Unreliability

The real-world setting often makes qualitative research unreliable because of uncontrolled factors that affect the data.

• Subjectivity

Due to the researcher’s primary role in analysing and interpreting data, qualitative research cannot be replicated . The researcher decides what is important and what is irrelevant in data analysis, so interpretations of the same data can vary greatly.

• Limited generalisability

Small samples are often used to gather detailed data about specific contexts. Despite rigorous analysis procedures, it is difficult to draw generalisable conclusions because the data may be biased and unrepresentative of the wider population .

• Labour-intensive

Although software can be used to manage and record large amounts of text, data analysis often has to be checked or performed manually.

Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative research deals with words and meanings.

Quantitative methods allow you to test a hypothesis by systematically collecting and analysing data, while qualitative methods allow you to explore ideas and experiences in depth.

There are five common approaches to qualitative research :

• Grounded theory involves collecting data in order to develop new theories.
• Ethnography involves immersing yourself in a group or organisation to understand its culture.
• Narrative research involves interpreting stories to understand how people make sense of their experiences and perceptions.
• Phenomenological research involves investigating phenomena through people’s lived experiences.
• Action research links theory and practice in several cycles to drive innovative changes.

Data collection is the systematic process by which observations or measurements are gathered in research. It is used in many different contexts by academics, governments, businesses, and other organisations.

There are various approaches to qualitative data analysis , but they all share five steps in common:

• Prepare and organise your data.
• Review and explore your data.
• Develop a data coding system.
• Assign codes to the data.
• Identify recurring themes.

The specifics of each step depend on the focus of the analysis. Some common approaches include textual analysis , thematic analysis , and discourse analysis .

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4.3 Qualitative Research Methodologies

Phenomenology is a research approach that seeks to understand the essence of a particular phenomenon through a detailed exploration of individual experiences. It is especially beneficial for exploring personal experiences such as emotions, perceptions, and awareness. As a budding qualitative researcher, it is imperative that you understand the different qualitative methods to enable you to choose the appropriate methods for your research question. In this chapter, we aim to discuss the most common qualitative methodologies which include descriptive, phenomenology, narrative inquiry, case study, ethnography, action research and grounded theory (Figure 4.2).

Descriptive:  A descriptive qualitative study attempts to systematically describe a situation, problem, phenomenon, service or programme. It focuses on discovering the who, what, and where of events or experiences and gaining insights from informants regarding a poorly understood phenomenon. 12 It is also used when more information is required to aid the development and refinement of questionnaires in research projects aiming to gain firsthand knowledge of patients’, relatives’ or professionals’ experiences with a particular topic. 13 This is a good choice for beginner qualitative researchers doing exploratory studies. It uses purposive or convenience sampling, with in-depth interviews as the most common data collection method. 14 Data analysis for this type of qualitative research focuses on a rich descriptive summary of the characteristics (themes) of the phenomena with some interpretation. 14 An example is the study by Cao et al. 2022 that explored the state of education regarding end-of-life care from the perspectives of undergraduate nurses. The findings showed that the undergraduate curriculum related to end-of-life care was disjointed and cultural attitudes toward disease and death impede the undergraduate nurses’ learning and knowledge translation of end-of-life care. 15

Phenomenology is also commonly used in qualitative research, and it is a research approach that seeks to understand the essence of a particular phenomenon through a detailed exploration of individual experiences. It is especially beneficial for exploring personal experiences such as emotions, perceptions, and awareness.that is especially beneficial for exploring personal experiences such as emotions, perceptions, and awareness. 16 It involves in-depth conversations on a specific topic, captures the relationships between people, things, events and situations and describes and explains phenomena from the perspective of those who have experienced it. 17 It explores the dimensions of participants’ experiences. 18 It seeks to understand problems, ideas, and situations in terms of shared understandings and experiences rather than differences. 19 Phenomenological research often employs in-depth, unstructured or semi-structured interviews as a means of data collection. 20 Data analysis typically involves identifying the essential structure or meaning of the experience being studied and then describing it in a way that is understandable to others. The researcher uses a process called the transcendental-phenomenological reduction to bracket off or set aside any preconceived notions of the phenomenon being studied. 21 In this method, researchers use theme analysis to focus on the attributed meaning of participants’ lived experiences rather than influencing findings with their own beliefs. 21 This process allows the researcher to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon’s essence as it is lived and experienced by participants. 21 For example, Liao et al. 2021 conducted a study exploring what medical learners experience through narrative medicine and the meanings they ascribe to narrative-based learning. The study identified six themes: feeling hesitation, seeking guidance, shifting roles in narratives, questioning relationships, experiencing transformation, and requesting a safe learning environment. 22

Narrative inquiry: Narrative inquiry is qualitative research that seeks to understand how individuals make meaning of their lives and the world around them through studying their stories and experiences. 23 This qualitative research focuses on marginalised populations, usually individuals or small groups and aims to give voice to their perspective. 24 This approach helps people learn more about the participants’ culture, historical experiences, identity, and lifestyle and is often recorded as a biography, life history, artifacts or traditional story. 25 It captures a wealth of story data, including emotions, beliefs, images, and insights about time. It also considers the relationship between personal experience and the wider social and cultural context. 24 Importantly, it also involves joint investigation and joint meaning-building between participants and researchers. 26 A major benefit of narrative inquiry is that it involves storytelling, and because humans are natural storytellers, the approach makes it easy to elicit stories. 24 Additionally, it facilitates the creation and construction of data through narratives of lived experience and fosters meaning formation, thus providing valuable insight into the complexities of human life, culture, and behavior. 11 This makes it possible to gather in-depth meaning as participants usually reveal themselves in their stories. 27 Narrative inquiry entails collecting data in the form of stories or narratives through interviews, written or visual materials, or other kinds of self-expression. 24 Data analysis in narrative inquiry involves identifying the themes, patterns, and meaning of the stories under consideration and understanding how the stories are formed and related to the individual’s experiences and perspective. 24 An example is the study by Gordon et al. 2015 which explored medical trainees’ experiences of leadership and followership in the interprofessional healthcare workplace. 28 The findings showed that participants most often narrated experiences from the position of follower. 28 Their narratives illustrated many factors that facilitate or inhibit the development of leadership identities. 28 Traditional medical and interprofessional hierarchies persist within the healthcare workplace, and wider healthcare systems can act as barriers to distributed leadership practices. 28

Case Study aids holistic exploration of a phenomenon. It provides powerful stories within social contexts through various data sources. It undertakes the exploration through various lenses to capture continuity and change and reveal multiple facets of the phenomenon. 29 It is an explanatory, descriptive or exploratory analysis of a single case example of a phenomenon. Case study aids researchers in giving a holistic, detailed account of a single case (or more) as it occurs in its real-life context. 30 The purpose of a case study is to understand complex phenomena and to explore new research questions in a real-world setting. 29 There are three main types of qualitative case study design: intrinsic case study, instrumental case study and collective case study. 31 An intrinsic case study is often conducted to learn about a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. 31 This type of case study focuses on a single case or a small number of cases and explores a specific phenomenon or issue in depth. 30,31 The researcher needs to define the phenomenon’s distinctiveness, which separates it from all others. In contrast, the instrumental case study employs a specific instance (some of which may be superior to others) to acquire a more extensive understanding of an issue or phenomenon. 30,31 An instrumental case study uses a single case or a small number of cases to explore a broader research question or problem. 31 The collective case study researches numerous instances concurrently or sequentially to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of a specific subject. 30,31 This type of case study analyses multiple cases to understand a phenomenon or issue from different perspectives. 31 The data collection techniques used in a case study include interviews, observations, or written or visual materials. Data can be collected from various sources, including the case, documents or records, and other relevant individuals. In a case study, data analysis is often inductive, which means that the researcher begins with the data and generates themes, patterns, or insights from it. To examine the data, the researcher may employ a range of approaches, such as coding, memoing, or content analysis. An example of a case study is the study by Lemmen et al. 2021 , which aimed to provide insight into how adopting positive health (PH) in a general practice affects primary care professionals’ (PCP) job satisfaction. 32 The findings of the study identified three themes regarding PCPs’ adoption of PH and job satisfaction, namely adopting and adapting Positive Health, giving substance to Positive Health in practice, and changing financial and organisational structures. 32 Thus, the PCPs adopted PH, which supported PCPs to express, legitimise, and promote their distinctive approach to care work and its value. 32 PH also enabled PCPs to change their financial and organisational structures, freeing time to spend on patients and their own well-being. The changes made by the practice increased the job satisfaction of the PCPs. 32

Ethnography is the study of culture and entails the observation of details of everyday life as they naturally unfold in the real world. It is commonly used in anthropological research focusing on the community 33 . It generally involves researchers directly observing a participant’s natural environment over time. 33 A key feature of ethnography is the fact that natural settings, unadapted for the researchers’ interests, are used. In ethnography, the natural setting or environment is as important as the participants, and such methods have the advantage of explicitly acknowledging that, in the real world, environmental constraints and context influence behaviours and outcomes. 34 Ethnography focuses on the lived culture of a group of people, that is, the knowledge they use to generate and interpret social behaviour. 35 Ethnography often involves a small number of cases or a community, ethnic or social groups. The researcher enters the lived experience of participants in the field and spends considerable time with them to understand their way of life. This research approach increases the strength of the data. 35 An example of ethnographic research is the study by Hinder and Greenhalgh, 2012 . The study sought to produce a richer understanding of how people live with diabetes and why self-management is challenging for some. The study revealed that self-management involved both practical and cognitive tasks (e.g. self-monitoring, menu planning, medication adjustment) and socio-emotional ones (e.g. coping with illness, managing relatives’ input, negotiating access to services or resources). 36 Self-management was hard work and was enabled or constrained by economic, material and socio-cultural conditions within the family, workplace and community. 36 Although this study is old, it provides insight into some of the challenges associated with diabetes. 36 While more devices have helped with diabetes in recent years, some of these challenges may still exist.

Action Research involves a cyclical process of planning, action, observation, and reflection to improve practice or address a problem. It attempts to understand and improve the world via change. 37 The goal of action research is to generate new knowledge and understanding about a specific issue while at the same time taking action to improve the situation. 37 Action research is guided by the desire to take action, so it is not a design. A type of action research is participatory action research. 38 At its core, this is a collaborative, self-reflective enquiry undertaken by researchers and participants to understand and improve upon the practices in which they participate and the situations in which they find themselves. 38 The goal is for the participant to be an equal partner with the researcher. 39 The reflective process is inextricably tied to action, impacted by knowledge of history, culture, and the local context, and is rooted in social connections. 38 It is an inquiry process used to understand and improve complex social systems, such as organisations, communities, or classrooms. 40 Participatory action research draws on qualitative methods such as interviews and observation to inquire about ways to improve the quality of practice. 41 The study by Doherty and O’Brien, 2021 explored midwives’ understandings of burnout, professionally and personally, in the context of contemporary maternity care in Ireland. 42 Multiple factors influenced midwives’ views and understandings of burnout. PAR provided a platform for midwives to examine their ideas and views on burnout with the collaborative support of their midwifery colleagues, via cycles of action and reflection, which is necessary to develop and maintain change. Midwives characterised burnout as continuous stress and tiredness, with an accompanying decline in their coping capacities, motivation, empathy, and/or efficacy. Burnout is unique to the person and is primarily induced and irrevocably tied to excessive workload in midwifery. 42

Grounded theory first described by Glaser and Strauss in 1967, is a framework for qualitative research that suggests that theory must derive from data, unlike other forms of research, which suggest that data should be used to test theory. 43 It is a qualitative research process that entails developing theories based on evidence that has been collected from the participants. 43 Grounded theory may be particularly valuable when little or nothing is known or understood about a problem, situation, or context. 44 The main purpose is to develop a theory that explains patterns and correlations in data and may be utilised to understand and predict the phenomenon under investigation. This method often entails gathering data through interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, surveys, transcripts, letters, government reports, papers, grey literature, music, artefacts, videos, blogs and memos, then analysing it to identify patterns and relationships. 45 Data is analysed via inductive analysis; the researcher starts with observations and data and then builds hypotheses and insights based on the data. In addition, a continual comparison technique is employed, which entails comparing data repeatedly to identify patterns and themes. 46 Furthermore, open, axial and selective coding is used. Open coding divides data into smaller chunks and classifies them based on their qualities and relationships. 47 In axial coding, links between categories and their subcategories are examined with respect to data. 47 Through “selective coding,” all categories are brought together around a “core” category, and categories requiring further explanation include descriptive information. This type of coding is more likely to occur in the final stages of study. 47 An example is the study by Malau-Aduli et al., 2020 ; the study had two main aims – (1) to identify the factors that influence an International Medical Graduate’s (IMG) decision to remain working in regional, rural, and remote areas; (2) to develop a theory, grounded in the data, to explain how these factors are prioritised, evaluated and used to inform a decision to remain working in RRR areas. 48   The findings revealed that the IMG decision-making process involved a complex, dynamic, and iterative process of balancing life goals based on life stage. Many factors were considered when assessing the balance of three primary life goals: satisfaction with work, family, and lifestyle. Another example is the study by Akosah-Twumasi et al. 2020 which explored the perceived role of sub-Saharan African migrant parents living in Australia in the career decision-making processes of their adolescent children. 49 The study showed that the majority of SSA immigrant parents continued to parent in the same manner as they did back home. 49 Interestingly, some parents modified their parenting approaches due to their perceptions of the host nation. 49 However, due to their apparent lack of educational capacity to educate their children, other parents who would otherwise be authoritative turned into trustworthy figures. 49

An Introduction to Research Methods for Undergraduate Health Profession Students Copyright © 2023 by Faith Alele and Bunmi Malau-Aduli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

• Open access
• Published: 27 May 2020

How to use and assess qualitative research methods

• Loraine Busetto   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9228-7875 1 ,
• Wolfgang Wick 1 , 2 &
• Christoph Gumbinger 1  

Neurological Research and Practice volume  2 , Article number:  14 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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This paper aims to provide an overview of the use and assessment of qualitative research methods in the health sciences. Qualitative research can be defined as the study of the nature of phenomena and is especially appropriate for answering questions of why something is (not) observed, assessing complex multi-component interventions, and focussing on intervention improvement. The most common methods of data collection are document study, (non-) participant observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups. For data analysis, field-notes and audio-recordings are transcribed into protocols and transcripts, and coded using qualitative data management software. Criteria such as checklists, reflexivity, sampling strategies, piloting, co-coding, member-checking and stakeholder involvement can be used to enhance and assess the quality of the research conducted. Using qualitative in addition to quantitative designs will equip us with better tools to address a greater range of research problems, and to fill in blind spots in current neurological research and practice.

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of qualitative research methods, including hands-on information on how they can be used, reported and assessed. This article is intended for beginning qualitative researchers in the health sciences as well as experienced quantitative researchers who wish to broaden their understanding of qualitative research.

What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research is defined as “the study of the nature of phenomena”, including “their quality, different manifestations, the context in which they appear or the perspectives from which they can be perceived” , but excluding “their range, frequency and place in an objectively determined chain of cause and effect” [ 1 ]. This formal definition can be complemented with a more pragmatic rule of thumb: qualitative research generally includes data in form of words rather than numbers [ 2 ].

Why conduct qualitative research?

Because some research questions cannot be answered using (only) quantitative methods. For example, one Australian study addressed the issue of why patients from Aboriginal communities often present late or not at all to specialist services offered by tertiary care hospitals. Using qualitative interviews with patients and staff, it found one of the most significant access barriers to be transportation problems, including some towns and communities simply not having a bus service to the hospital [ 3 ]. A quantitative study could have measured the number of patients over time or even looked at possible explanatory factors – but only those previously known or suspected to be of relevance. To discover reasons for observed patterns, especially the invisible or surprising ones, qualitative designs are needed.

While qualitative research is common in other fields, it is still relatively underrepresented in health services research. The latter field is more traditionally rooted in the evidence-based-medicine paradigm, as seen in " research that involves testing the effectiveness of various strategies to achieve changes in clinical practice, preferably applying randomised controlled trial study designs (...) " [ 4 ]. This focus on quantitative research and specifically randomised controlled trials (RCT) is visible in the idea of a hierarchy of research evidence which assumes that some research designs are objectively better than others, and that choosing a "lesser" design is only acceptable when the better ones are not practically or ethically feasible [ 5 , 6 ]. Others, however, argue that an objective hierarchy does not exist, and that, instead, the research design and methods should be chosen to fit the specific research question at hand – "questions before methods" [ 2 , 7 , 8 , 9 ]. This means that even when an RCT is possible, some research problems require a different design that is better suited to addressing them. Arguing in JAMA, Berwick uses the example of rapid response teams in hospitals, which he describes as " a complex, multicomponent intervention – essentially a process of social change" susceptible to a range of different context factors including leadership or organisation history. According to him, "[in] such complex terrain, the RCT is an impoverished way to learn. Critics who use it as a truth standard in this context are incorrect" [ 8 ] . Instead of limiting oneself to RCTs, Berwick recommends embracing a wider range of methods , including qualitative ones, which for "these specific applications, (...) are not compromises in learning how to improve; they are superior" [ 8 ].

Research problems that can be approached particularly well using qualitative methods include assessing complex multi-component interventions or systems (of change), addressing questions beyond “what works”, towards “what works for whom when, how and why”, and focussing on intervention improvement rather than accreditation [ 7 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ]. Using qualitative methods can also help shed light on the “softer” side of medical treatment. For example, while quantitative trials can measure the costs and benefits of neuro-oncological treatment in terms of survival rates or adverse effects, qualitative research can help provide a better understanding of patient or caregiver stress, visibility of illness or out-of-pocket expenses.

How to conduct qualitative research?

Given that qualitative research is characterised by flexibility, openness and responsivity to context, the steps of data collection and analysis are not as separate and consecutive as they tend to be in quantitative research [ 13 , 14 ]. As Fossey puts it : “sampling, data collection, analysis and interpretation are related to each other in a cyclical (iterative) manner, rather than following one after another in a stepwise approach” [ 15 ]. The researcher can make educated decisions with regard to the choice of method, how they are implemented, and to which and how many units they are applied [ 13 ]. As shown in Fig.  1 , this can involve several back-and-forth steps between data collection and analysis where new insights and experiences can lead to adaption and expansion of the original plan. Some insights may also necessitate a revision of the research question and/or the research design as a whole. The process ends when saturation is achieved, i.e. when no relevant new information can be found (see also below: sampling and saturation). For reasons of transparency, it is essential for all decisions as well as the underlying reasoning to be well-documented.

Iterative research process

While it is not always explicitly addressed, qualitative methods reflect a different underlying research paradigm than quantitative research (e.g. constructivism or interpretivism as opposed to positivism). The choice of methods can be based on the respective underlying substantive theory or theoretical framework used by the researcher [ 2 ].

Data collection

The methods of qualitative data collection most commonly used in health research are document study, observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups [ 1 , 14 , 16 , 17 ].

Document study

Document study (also called document analysis) refers to the review by the researcher of written materials [ 14 ]. These can include personal and non-personal documents such as archives, annual reports, guidelines, policy documents, diaries or letters.

Observations

Observations are particularly useful to gain insights into a certain setting and actual behaviour – as opposed to reported behaviour or opinions [ 13 ]. Qualitative observations can be either participant or non-participant in nature. In participant observations, the observer is part of the observed setting, for example a nurse working in an intensive care unit [ 18 ]. In non-participant observations, the observer is “on the outside looking in”, i.e. present in but not part of the situation, trying not to influence the setting by their presence. Observations can be planned (e.g. for 3 h during the day or night shift) or ad hoc (e.g. as soon as a stroke patient arrives at the emergency room). During the observation, the observer takes notes on everything or certain pre-determined parts of what is happening around them, for example focusing on physician-patient interactions or communication between different professional groups. Written notes can be taken during or after the observations, depending on feasibility (which is usually lower during participant observations) and acceptability (e.g. when the observer is perceived to be judging the observed). Afterwards, these field notes are transcribed into observation protocols. If more than one observer was involved, field notes are taken independently, but notes can be consolidated into one protocol after discussions. Advantages of conducting observations include minimising the distance between the researcher and the researched, the potential discovery of topics that the researcher did not realise were relevant and gaining deeper insights into the real-world dimensions of the research problem at hand [ 18 ].

Semi-structured interviews

Hijmans & Kuyper describe qualitative interviews as “an exchange with an informal character, a conversation with a goal” [ 19 ]. Interviews are used to gain insights into a person’s subjective experiences, opinions and motivations – as opposed to facts or behaviours [ 13 ]. Interviews can be distinguished by the degree to which they are structured (i.e. a questionnaire), open (e.g. free conversation or autobiographical interviews) or semi-structured [ 2 , 13 ]. Semi-structured interviews are characterized by open-ended questions and the use of an interview guide (or topic guide/list) in which the broad areas of interest, sometimes including sub-questions, are defined [ 19 ]. The pre-defined topics in the interview guide can be derived from the literature, previous research or a preliminary method of data collection, e.g. document study or observations. The topic list is usually adapted and improved at the start of the data collection process as the interviewer learns more about the field [ 20 ]. Across interviews the focus on the different (blocks of) questions may differ and some questions may be skipped altogether (e.g. if the interviewee is not able or willing to answer the questions or for concerns about the total length of the interview) [ 20 ]. Qualitative interviews are usually not conducted in written format as it impedes on the interactive component of the method [ 20 ]. In comparison to written surveys, qualitative interviews have the advantage of being interactive and allowing for unexpected topics to emerge and to be taken up by the researcher. This can also help overcome a provider or researcher-centred bias often found in written surveys, which by nature, can only measure what is already known or expected to be of relevance to the researcher. Interviews can be audio- or video-taped; but sometimes it is only feasible or acceptable for the interviewer to take written notes [ 14 , 16 , 20 ].

Focus groups

Focus groups are group interviews to explore participants’ expertise and experiences, including explorations of how and why people behave in certain ways [ 1 ]. Focus groups usually consist of 6–8 people and are led by an experienced moderator following a topic guide or “script” [ 21 ]. They can involve an observer who takes note of the non-verbal aspects of the situation, possibly using an observation guide [ 21 ]. Depending on researchers’ and participants’ preferences, the discussions can be audio- or video-taped and transcribed afterwards [ 21 ]. Focus groups are useful for bringing together homogeneous (to a lesser extent heterogeneous) groups of participants with relevant expertise and experience on a given topic on which they can share detailed information [ 21 ]. Focus groups are a relatively easy, fast and inexpensive method to gain access to information on interactions in a given group, i.e. “the sharing and comparing” among participants [ 21 ]. Disadvantages include less control over the process and a lesser extent to which each individual may participate. Moreover, focus group moderators need experience, as do those tasked with the analysis of the resulting data. Focus groups can be less appropriate for discussing sensitive topics that participants might be reluctant to disclose in a group setting [ 13 ]. Moreover, attention must be paid to the emergence of “groupthink” as well as possible power dynamics within the group, e.g. when patients are awed or intimidated by health professionals.

Choosing the “right” method

As explained above, the school of thought underlying qualitative research assumes no objective hierarchy of evidence and methods. This means that each choice of single or combined methods has to be based on the research question that needs to be answered and a critical assessment with regard to whether or to what extent the chosen method can accomplish this – i.e. the “fit” between question and method [ 14 ]. It is necessary for these decisions to be documented when they are being made, and to be critically discussed when reporting methods and results.

Let us assume that our research aim is to examine the (clinical) processes around acute endovascular treatment (EVT), from the patient’s arrival at the emergency room to recanalization, with the aim to identify possible causes for delay and/or other causes for sub-optimal treatment outcome. As a first step, we could conduct a document study of the relevant standard operating procedures (SOPs) for this phase of care – are they up-to-date and in line with current guidelines? Do they contain any mistakes, irregularities or uncertainties that could cause delays or other problems? Regardless of the answers to these questions, the results have to be interpreted based on what they are: a written outline of what care processes in this hospital should look like. If we want to know what they actually look like in practice, we can conduct observations of the processes described in the SOPs. These results can (and should) be analysed in themselves, but also in comparison to the results of the document analysis, especially as regards relevant discrepancies. Do the SOPs outline specific tests for which no equipment can be observed or tasks to be performed by specialized nurses who are not present during the observation? It might also be possible that the written SOP is outdated, but the actual care provided is in line with current best practice. In order to find out why these discrepancies exist, it can be useful to conduct interviews. Are the physicians simply not aware of the SOPs (because their existence is limited to the hospital’s intranet) or do they actively disagree with them or does the infrastructure make it impossible to provide the care as described? Another rationale for adding interviews is that some situations (or all of their possible variations for different patient groups or the day, night or weekend shift) cannot practically or ethically be observed. In this case, it is possible to ask those involved to report on their actions – being aware that this is not the same as the actual observation. A senior physician’s or hospital manager’s description of certain situations might differ from a nurse’s or junior physician’s one, maybe because they intentionally misrepresent facts or maybe because different aspects of the process are visible or important to them. In some cases, it can also be relevant to consider to whom the interviewee is disclosing this information – someone they trust, someone they are otherwise not connected to, or someone they suspect or are aware of being in a potentially “dangerous” power relationship to them. Lastly, a focus group could be conducted with representatives of the relevant professional groups to explore how and why exactly they provide care around EVT. The discussion might reveal discrepancies (between SOPs and actual care or between different physicians) and motivations to the researchers as well as to the focus group members that they might not have been aware of themselves. For the focus group to deliver relevant information, attention has to be paid to its composition and conduct, for example, to make sure that all participants feel safe to disclose sensitive or potentially problematic information or that the discussion is not dominated by (senior) physicians only. The resulting combination of data collection methods is shown in Fig.  2 .

Possible combination of data collection methods

Attributions for icons: “Book” by Serhii Smirnov, “Interview” by Adrien Coquet, FR, “Magnifying Glass” by anggun, ID, “Business communication” by Vectors Market; all from the Noun Project

The combination of multiple data source as described for this example can be referred to as “triangulation”, in which multiple measurements are carried out from different angles to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon under study [ 22 , 23 ].

Data analysis

To analyse the data collected through observations, interviews and focus groups these need to be transcribed into protocols and transcripts (see Fig.  3 ). Interviews and focus groups can be transcribed verbatim , with or without annotations for behaviour (e.g. laughing, crying, pausing) and with or without phonetic transcription of dialects and filler words, depending on what is expected or known to be relevant for the analysis. In the next step, the protocols and transcripts are coded , that is, marked (or tagged, labelled) with one or more short descriptors of the content of a sentence or paragraph [ 2 , 15 , 23 ]. Jansen describes coding as “connecting the raw data with “theoretical” terms” [ 20 ]. In a more practical sense, coding makes raw data sortable. This makes it possible to extract and examine all segments describing, say, a tele-neurology consultation from multiple data sources (e.g. SOPs, emergency room observations, staff and patient interview). In a process of synthesis and abstraction, the codes are then grouped, summarised and/or categorised [ 15 , 20 ]. The end product of the coding or analysis process is a descriptive theory of the behavioural pattern under investigation [ 20 ]. The coding process is performed using qualitative data management software, the most common ones being InVivo, MaxQDA and Atlas.ti. It should be noted that these are data management tools which support the analysis performed by the researcher(s) [ 14 ].

From data collection to data analysis

Attributions for icons: see Fig. 2 , also “Speech to text” by Trevor Dsouza, “Field Notes” by Mike O’Brien, US, “Voice Record” by ProSymbols, US, “Inspection” by Made, AU, and “Cloud” by Graphic Tigers; all from the Noun Project

How to report qualitative research?

Protocols of qualitative research can be published separately and in advance of the study results. However, the aim is not the same as in RCT protocols, i.e. to pre-define and set in stone the research questions and primary or secondary endpoints. Rather, it is a way to describe the research methods in detail, which might not be possible in the results paper given journals’ word limits. Qualitative research papers are usually longer than their quantitative counterparts to allow for deep understanding and so-called “thick description”. In the methods section, the focus is on transparency of the methods used, including why, how and by whom they were implemented in the specific study setting, so as to enable a discussion of whether and how this may have influenced data collection, analysis and interpretation. The results section usually starts with a paragraph outlining the main findings, followed by more detailed descriptions of, for example, the commonalities, discrepancies or exceptions per category [ 20 ]. Here it is important to support main findings by relevant quotations, which may add information, context, emphasis or real-life examples [ 20 , 23 ]. It is subject to debate in the field whether it is relevant to state the exact number or percentage of respondents supporting a certain statement (e.g. “Five interviewees expressed negative feelings towards XYZ”) [ 21 ].

How to combine qualitative with quantitative research?

Qualitative methods can be combined with other methods in multi- or mixed methods designs, which “[employ] two or more different methods [ …] within the same study or research program rather than confining the research to one single method” [ 24 ]. Reasons for combining methods can be diverse, including triangulation for corroboration of findings, complementarity for illustration and clarification of results, expansion to extend the breadth and range of the study, explanation of (unexpected) results generated with one method with the help of another, or offsetting the weakness of one method with the strength of another [ 1 , 17 , 24 , 25 , 26 ]. The resulting designs can be classified according to when, why and how the different quantitative and/or qualitative data strands are combined. The three most common types of mixed method designs are the convergent parallel design , the explanatory sequential design and the exploratory sequential design. The designs with examples are shown in Fig.  4 .

Three common mixed methods designs

In the convergent parallel design, a qualitative study is conducted in parallel to and independently of a quantitative study, and the results of both studies are compared and combined at the stage of interpretation of results. Using the above example of EVT provision, this could entail setting up a quantitative EVT registry to measure process times and patient outcomes in parallel to conducting the qualitative research outlined above, and then comparing results. Amongst other things, this would make it possible to assess whether interview respondents’ subjective impressions of patients receiving good care match modified Rankin Scores at follow-up, or whether observed delays in care provision are exceptions or the rule when compared to door-to-needle times as documented in the registry. In the explanatory sequential design, a quantitative study is carried out first, followed by a qualitative study to help explain the results from the quantitative study. This would be an appropriate design if the registry alone had revealed relevant delays in door-to-needle times and the qualitative study would be used to understand where and why these occurred, and how they could be improved. In the exploratory design, the qualitative study is carried out first and its results help informing and building the quantitative study in the next step [ 26 ]. If the qualitative study around EVT provision had shown a high level of dissatisfaction among the staff members involved, a quantitative questionnaire investigating staff satisfaction could be set up in the next step, informed by the qualitative study on which topics dissatisfaction had been expressed. Amongst other things, the questionnaire design would make it possible to widen the reach of the research to more respondents from different (types of) hospitals, regions, countries or settings, and to conduct sub-group analyses for different professional groups.

How to assess qualitative research?

A variety of assessment criteria and lists have been developed for qualitative research, ranging in their focus and comprehensiveness [ 14 , 17 , 27 ]. However, none of these has been elevated to the “gold standard” in the field. In the following, we therefore focus on a set of commonly used assessment criteria that, from a practical standpoint, a researcher can look for when assessing a qualitative research report or paper.

Assessors should check the authors’ use of and adherence to the relevant reporting checklists (e.g. Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (SRQR)) to make sure all items that are relevant for this type of research are addressed [ 23 , 28 ]. Discussions of quantitative measures in addition to or instead of these qualitative measures can be a sign of lower quality of the research (paper). Providing and adhering to a checklist for qualitative research contributes to an important quality criterion for qualitative research, namely transparency [ 15 , 17 , 23 ].

Reflexivity

While methodological transparency and complete reporting is relevant for all types of research, some additional criteria must be taken into account for qualitative research. This includes what is called reflexivity, i.e. sensitivity to the relationship between the researcher and the researched, including how contact was established and maintained, or the background and experience of the researcher(s) involved in data collection and analysis. Depending on the research question and population to be researched this can be limited to professional experience, but it may also include gender, age or ethnicity [ 17 , 27 ]. These details are relevant because in qualitative research, as opposed to quantitative research, the researcher as a person cannot be isolated from the research process [ 23 ]. It may influence the conversation when an interviewed patient speaks to an interviewer who is a physician, or when an interviewee is asked to discuss a gynaecological procedure with a male interviewer, and therefore the reader must be made aware of these details [ 19 ].

Sampling and saturation

The aim of qualitative sampling is for all variants of the objects of observation that are deemed relevant for the study to be present in the sample “ to see the issue and its meanings from as many angles as possible” [ 1 , 16 , 19 , 20 , 27 ] , and to ensure “information-richness [ 15 ]. An iterative sampling approach is advised, in which data collection (e.g. five interviews) is followed by data analysis, followed by more data collection to find variants that are lacking in the current sample. This process continues until no new (relevant) information can be found and further sampling becomes redundant – which is called saturation [ 1 , 15 ] . In other words: qualitative data collection finds its end point not a priori , but when the research team determines that saturation has been reached [ 29 , 30 ].

This is also the reason why most qualitative studies use deliberate instead of random sampling strategies. This is generally referred to as “ purposive sampling” , in which researchers pre-define which types of participants or cases they need to include so as to cover all variations that are expected to be of relevance, based on the literature, previous experience or theory (i.e. theoretical sampling) [ 14 , 20 ]. Other types of purposive sampling include (but are not limited to) maximum variation sampling, critical case sampling or extreme or deviant case sampling [ 2 ]. In the above EVT example, a purposive sample could include all relevant professional groups and/or all relevant stakeholders (patients, relatives) and/or all relevant times of observation (day, night and weekend shift).

Assessors of qualitative research should check whether the considerations underlying the sampling strategy were sound and whether or how researchers tried to adapt and improve their strategies in stepwise or cyclical approaches between data collection and analysis to achieve saturation [ 14 ].

Good qualitative research is iterative in nature, i.e. it goes back and forth between data collection and analysis, revising and improving the approach where necessary. One example of this are pilot interviews, where different aspects of the interview (especially the interview guide, but also, for example, the site of the interview or whether the interview can be audio-recorded) are tested with a small number of respondents, evaluated and revised [ 19 ]. In doing so, the interviewer learns which wording or types of questions work best, or which is the best length of an interview with patients who have trouble concentrating for an extended time. Of course, the same reasoning applies to observations or focus groups which can also be piloted.

Ideally, coding should be performed by at least two researchers, especially at the beginning of the coding process when a common approach must be defined, including the establishment of a useful coding list (or tree), and when a common meaning of individual codes must be established [ 23 ]. An initial sub-set or all transcripts can be coded independently by the coders and then compared and consolidated after regular discussions in the research team. This is to make sure that codes are applied consistently to the research data.

Member checking

Member checking, also called respondent validation , refers to the practice of checking back with study respondents to see if the research is in line with their views [ 14 , 27 ]. This can happen after data collection or analysis or when first results are available [ 23 ]. For example, interviewees can be provided with (summaries of) their transcripts and asked whether they believe this to be a complete representation of their views or whether they would like to clarify or elaborate on their responses [ 17 ]. Respondents’ feedback on these issues then becomes part of the data collection and analysis [ 27 ].

Stakeholder involvement

In those niches where qualitative approaches have been able to evolve and grow, a new trend has seen the inclusion of patients and their representatives not only as study participants (i.e. “members”, see above) but as consultants to and active participants in the broader research process [ 31 , 32 , 33 ]. The underlying assumption is that patients and other stakeholders hold unique perspectives and experiences that add value beyond their own single story, making the research more relevant and beneficial to researchers, study participants and (future) patients alike [ 34 , 35 ]. Using the example of patients on or nearing dialysis, a recent scoping review found that 80% of clinical research did not address the top 10 research priorities identified by patients and caregivers [ 32 , 36 ]. In this sense, the involvement of the relevant stakeholders, especially patients and relatives, is increasingly being seen as a quality indicator in and of itself.

How not to assess qualitative research

The above overview does not include certain items that are routine in assessments of quantitative research. What follows is a non-exhaustive, non-representative, experience-based list of the quantitative criteria often applied to the assessment of qualitative research, as well as an explanation of the limited usefulness of these endeavours.

Protocol adherence

Given the openness and flexibility of qualitative research, it should not be assessed by how well it adheres to pre-determined and fixed strategies – in other words: its rigidity. Instead, the assessor should look for signs of adaptation and refinement based on lessons learned from earlier steps in the research process.

Sample size

For the reasons explained above, qualitative research does not require specific sample sizes, nor does it require that the sample size be determined a priori [ 1 , 14 , 27 , 37 , 38 , 39 ]. Sample size can only be a useful quality indicator when related to the research purpose, the chosen methodology and the composition of the sample, i.e. who was included and why.

Randomisation

While some authors argue that randomisation can be used in qualitative research, this is not commonly the case, as neither its feasibility nor its necessity or usefulness has been convincingly established for qualitative research [ 13 , 27 ]. Relevant disadvantages include the negative impact of a too large sample size as well as the possibility (or probability) of selecting “ quiet, uncooperative or inarticulate individuals ” [ 17 ]. Qualitative studies do not use control groups, either.

Interrater reliability, variability and other “objectivity checks”

The concept of “interrater reliability” is sometimes used in qualitative research to assess to which extent the coding approach overlaps between the two co-coders. However, it is not clear what this measure tells us about the quality of the analysis [ 23 ]. This means that these scores can be included in qualitative research reports, preferably with some additional information on what the score means for the analysis, but it is not a requirement. Relatedly, it is not relevant for the quality or “objectivity” of qualitative research to separate those who recruited the study participants and collected and analysed the data. Experiences even show that it might be better to have the same person or team perform all of these tasks [ 20 ]. First, when researchers introduce themselves during recruitment this can enhance trust when the interview takes place days or weeks later with the same researcher. Second, when the audio-recording is transcribed for analysis, the researcher conducting the interviews will usually remember the interviewee and the specific interview situation during data analysis. This might be helpful in providing additional context information for interpretation of data, e.g. on whether something might have been meant as a joke [ 18 ].

Not being quantitative research

Being qualitative research instead of quantitative research should not be used as an assessment criterion if it is used irrespectively of the research problem at hand. Similarly, qualitative research should not be required to be combined with quantitative research per se – unless mixed methods research is judged as inherently better than single-method research. In this case, the same criterion should be applied for quantitative studies without a qualitative component.

The main take-away points of this paper are summarised in Table 1 . We aimed to show that, if conducted well, qualitative research can answer specific research questions that cannot to be adequately answered using (only) quantitative designs. Seeing qualitative and quantitative methods as equal will help us become more aware and critical of the “fit” between the research problem and our chosen methods: I can conduct an RCT to determine the reasons for transportation delays of acute stroke patients – but should I? It also provides us with a greater range of tools to tackle a greater range of research problems more appropriately and successfully, filling in the blind spots on one half of the methodological spectrum to better address the whole complexity of neurological research and practice.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

Abbreviations

Endovascular treatment

Randomised Controlled Trial

Standard Operating Procedure

Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research

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Busetto, L., Wick, W. & Gumbinger, C. How to use and assess qualitative research methods. Neurol. Res. Pract. 2 , 14 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42466-020-00059-z

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6 Types of Qualitative Research Methods and Designs

On this page:

• What is the qualitative research methodology? Definition, characteristics, and importance.
• Different types of qualitative research methods and designs.
• Infographic in PDF for free download .

What is Qualitative Research? Importance and Benefits.

Definition: Qualitative research is in-depth data collection method designed to reveal target customers behavior, feelings, thinks and etc.

You know that our feelings, thoughts, perceptions are the key drivers for making different types of decisions (including purchase decisions).

Qualitative data collection aims to investigate exactly these psychological elements that make us do things.

• Understand your customer’s meanings, interpretations, opinions, underlying reasons, and motivations .
• Catch the language that customers use to describe a product or service.
• Generate numerous ideas for improvements and development of your products.
• Generate ideas for improving the communications with your customers.
• Understand how people perceive your marketing messages.
• Develop hypotheses for further testing with qualitative methods.

Qualitative research is an open-ended methodology that can be adapted while you are doing the research. That is why it increases the quality of the data and improves the understanding that you want to receive.

There are many different types of qualitative research methods and many of these are under constant improvement to meet the researcher needs better.

Key Types of Qualitative Research Methods

1. In-depth interview

The in-depth interview is one of the most common types of qualitative research methods out there. It involves a personal interview with a single respondent .

This method provides a great opportunity to capture rich, descriptive data about people’s behaviors, motivations, beliefs and etc. You can use the in-depth interview as an individual research method or as part of a multi-method design.

Depth interviews are typically performed face to face or by phone. In addition, you can pay attention to the body language of the respondent to understand better his/her answers.

Interviewing takes time to organize it. The interview might take between half an hour to two hours or even more.

2. Focus groups

A focus group is also among the most common types of qualitative research methods used in marketing data collection. A focus group normally includes a limited number of participants (around 6 to 12 from) within your target market.

This research technique collects data through group interaction . A researcher leads a discussion amongst the group where the participants share lifestyle, needs or behavioral characteristics.

Focus groups aim to find an answer of why, what, and how questions. This research design need not be in person. Nowadays, focus groups can be hosted by several platforms.

3. Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research is probably the most in-depth observational method  that studies people in their naturally occurring environment.

This technique requires the researcher to immerse themselves in the target participants’ environment, which may be anywhere from an organization to a geographical location.

This research design aims to understand the cultures, challenges, motivations, and settings that occur. Instead of relying on interviews and discussions, you experience the natural settings first hand.

The purpose is to gain a detailed description of everyday life and to see events from the viewpoints of participants studied. Ethnography can last over a few days to a few years.

4. Action Research

This is an interesting qualitative research method in which the researcher and recipients have the same characteristics.

Action data collection aims to solve a problem and is conducted by individuals working with others as part of a “community of practice”.

It is a method of problem-solving led by people working with others in teams. Action research is known also as collaborative inquiry, emancipatory research, and contextual action research.

Mainly, action research focuses on turning people into researchers. The assumption is that people learn best when they do the research themselves. It also aims to promote improvement or change by stimulating knowledge sharing activities.

A great example of action research is psychotherapists conducting research to improve their therapeutic practice.

This type of research might involve types of field research such as interviews, focus groups, observation, and others.

5. Content analysis

This method includes interpreting words and images from a variety of documents, music, or other types of media.

The researchers aim to find out how the words and images are used, and in what context. This way you can draw and come up with conclusions about the hidden culture and behavior.

Nowadays, content analysis in researching digital and social media users is a common technique within the social sciences.

The main goals of content analysis include identifying important aspects of the content, presenting them in a clear way, support of some argument and others.

6. Case study research

The case study research has developed over the past few years as a valuable method for investigating trends and for explaining an organization, entity, business, or situation.

A case study is in-depth research of a particular situation or event. This approach growing in the recent years because it is based on real-world experiences.

Case study research methodology is used within a number of disciplines including education, social sciences, business, law, health, and many others.

Despite this type of research sounds very easy to perform, it involves a deep understanding of a variety of data sources and  types of statistical analysis . In addition, case studies can be qualitative and/or quantitative.

This set of designs also has the advantage of being flexible and easily adaptable to changes in the research requirements and circumstances.

Nevertheless, qualitative research can help you understand the motivations and behaviors of people, generate original insights and ideas, formulate better the research problem (in the first step in marketing research process ) and even tell amazing stories about what your business does.

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Home » Research Methods » Qualitative Methods "How-To" Guides

Qualitative Methods "How-To" Guides Edited by Patricia Leavy

This series provides researchers and students with step-by-step, practical instruction on established and emerging qualitative methods. Authors are leaders in their respective areas of expertise who demystify the research process and share innovative practices and invaluable insider advice. The basics of each method are addressed, including philosophical underpinnings, and guidance is offered on designing studies; generating, analyzing, interpreting, and representing data; and evaluating the quality of research. With accessible writing, robust examples, and ample pedagogical features, books in this series are ideal for use in courses or by individual researchers.

Overview of Qualitative Methods and Analytic Techniques

Chapter 3 common qualitative methods.

In this chapter we describe and compare the most common qualitative methods employed in project evaluations. 3 These include observations, indepth interviews, and focus groups. We also cover briefly some other less frequently used qualitative techniques. Advantages and disadvantages are summarized. For those readers interested in learning more about qualitative data collection methods, a list of recommended readings is provided.

3 Information on common qualitative methods is provided in the earlier User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation (NSF 93-152).

Observations

Observational techniques are methods by which an individual or individuals gather firsthand data on programs, processes, or behaviors being studied. They provide evaluators with an opportunity to collect data on a wide range of behaviors, to capture a great variety of interactions, and to openly explore the evaluation topic. By directly observing operations and activities, the evaluator can develop a holistic perspective, i.e., an understanding of the context within which the project operates. This may be especially important where it is not the event that is of interest, but rather how that event may fit into, or be impacted by, a sequence of events. Observational approaches also allow the evaluator to learn about things the participants or staff may be unaware of or that they are unwilling or unable to discuss in an interview or focus group.

When to use observations . Observations can be useful during both the formative and summative phases of evaluation. For example, during the formative phase, observations can be useful in determining whether or not the project is being delivered and operated as planned. In the hypothetical project, observations could be used to describe the faculty development sessions, examining the extent to which participants understand the concepts, ask the right questions, and are engaged in appropriate interactions. Such formative observations could also provide valuable insights into the teaching styles of the presenters and how they are covering the material.

Observations during the summative phase of evaluation can be used to determine whether or not the project is successful. The technique would be especially useful in directly examining teaching methods employed by the faculty in their own classes after program participation. Exhibits 3 and 4 display the advantages and disadvantages of observations as a data collection tool and some common types of data that are readily collected by observation.

Readers familiar with survey techniques may justifiably point out that surveys can address these same questions and do so in a less costly fashion. Critics of surveys find them suspect because of their reliance on self-report, which may not provide an accurate picture of what is happening because of the tendency, intentional or not, to try to give the "right answer." Surveys also cannot tap into the contextual element. Proponents of surveys counter that properly constructed surveys with built in checks and balances can overcome these problems and provide highly credible data. This frequently debated issue is best decided on a case-by-case basis.

Recording Observational Data

Observations are carried out using a carefully developed set of steps and instruments. The observer is more than just an onlooker, but rather comes to the scene with a set of target concepts, definitions, and criteria for describing events. While in some studies observers may simply record and describe, in the majority of evaluations, their descriptions are, or eventually will be, judged against a continuum of expectations.

Observations usually are guided by a structured protocol. The protocol can take a variety of forms, ranging from the request for a narrative describing events seen to a checklist or a rating scale of specific behaviors/activities that address the evaluation question of interest. The use of a protocol helps assure that all observers are gathering the pertinent information and, with appropriate training, applying the same criteria in the evaluation. For example, if, as described earlier, an observational approach is selected to gather data on the faculty training sessions, the instrument developed would explicitly guide the observer to examine the kinds of activities in which participants were interacting, the role(s) of the trainers and the participants, the types of materials provided and used, the opportunity for hands-on interaction, etc. (See Appendix A to this chapter for an example of observational protocol that could be applied to the hypothetical project.)

The protocol goes beyond a recording of events, i.e., use of identified materials, and provides an overall context for the data. The protocol should prompt the observer to

Field notes are frequently used to provide more indepth background or to help the observer remember salient events if a form is not completed at the time of observation. Field notes contain the description of what has been observed. The descriptions must be factual, accurate, and thorough without being judgmental and cluttered by trivia. The date and time of the observation should be recorded, and everything that the observer believes to be worth noting should be included. No information should be trusted to future recall.

The use of technological tools, such as battery-operated tape recorder or dictaphone, laptop computer, camera, and video camera, can make the collection of field notes more efficient and the notes themselves more comprehensive. Informed consent must be obtained from participants before any observational data are gathered.

The Role of the Observer

There are various methods for gathering observational data, depending on the nature of a given project. The most fundamental distinction between various observational strategies concerns the extent to which the observer will be a participant in the setting being studied. The extent of participation is a continuum that varies from complete involvement in the setting as a full participant to complete separation from the setting as an outside observer or spectator. The participant observer is fully engaged in experiencing the project setting while at the same time trying to understand that setting through personal experience, observations, and interactions and discussions with other participants. The outside observer stands apart from the setting, attempts to be nonintrusive, and assumes the role of a "fly-on-the-wall." The extent to which full participation is possible and desirable will depend on the nature of the project and its participants, the political and social context, the nature of the evaluation questions being asked, and the resources available. "The ideal is to negotiate and adopt that degree of participation that will yield the most meaningful data about the program given the characteristics of the participants, the nature of staff-participant interactions, and the sociopolitical context of the program" (Patton, 1990).

In some cases it may be beneficial to have two people observing at the same time. This can increase the quality of the data by providing a larger volume of data and by decreasing the influence of observer bias. However, in addition to the added cost, the presence of two observers may create an environment threatening to those being observed and cause them to change their behavior. Studies using observation typically employ intensive training experiences to make sure that the observer or observers know what to look for and can, to the extent possible, operate in an unbiased manner. In long or complicated studies, it is useful to check on an observer’s performance periodically to make sure that accuracy is being maintained. The issue of training is a critical one and may make the difference between a defensible study and what can be challenged as "one person’s perspective."

A special issue with regard to observations relates to the amount of observation needed. While in participant observation this may be a moot point (except with regard to data recording), when an outside observer is used, the question of "how much" becomes very important. While most people agree that one observation (a single hour of a training session or one class period of instruction) is not enough, there is no hard and fast rule regarding how many samples need to be drawn. General tips to consider are to avoid atypical situations, carry out observations more than one time, and (where possible and relevant) spread the observations out over time.

Participant observation is often difficult to incorporate in evaluations; therefore, the use of outside observers is far more common. In the hypothetical project, observations might be scheduled for all training sessions and for a sample of classrooms, including some where faculty members who participated in training were teaching and some staffed by teachers who had not participated in the training.

Issues of privacy and access. Observational techniques are perhaps the most privacy-threatening data collection technique for staff and, to a lesser extent, participants. Staff fear that the data may be included in their performance evaluations and may have effects on their careers. Participants may also feel uncomfortable assuming that they are being judged. Evaluators need to assure everyone that evaluations of performance are not the purpose of the effort, and that no such reports will result from the observations. Additionally, because most educational settings are subject to a constant flow of observers from various organizations, there is often great reluctance to grant access to additional observers. Much effort may be needed to assure project staff and participants that they will not be adversely affected by the evaluators’ work and to negotiate observer access to specific sites.

Interviews provide very different data from observations: they allow the evaluation team to capture the perspectives of project participants, staff, and others associated with the project. In the hypothetical example, interviews with project staff can provide information on the early stages of the implementation and problems encountered. The use of interviews as a data collection method begins with the assumption that the participants’ perspectives are meaningful, knowable, and able to be made explicit, and that their perspectives affect the success of the project. An interview, rather than a paper and pencil survey, is selected when interpersonal contact is important and when opportunities for followup of interesting comments are desired.

Two types of interviews are used in evaluation research: structured interviews, in which a carefully worded questionnaire is administered; and indepth interviews, in which the interviewer does not follow a rigid form. In the former, the emphasis is on obtaining answers to carefully phrased questions. Interviewers are trained to deviate only minimally from the question wording to ensure uniformity of interview administration. In the latter, however, the interviewers seek to encourage free and open responses, and there may be a tradeoff between comprehensive coverage of topics and indepth exploration of a more limited set of questions. Indepth interviews also encourage capturing of respondents’ perceptions in their own words, a very desirable strategy in qualitative data collection. This allows the evaluator to present the meaningfulness of the experience from the respondent’s perspective. Indepth interviews are conducted with individuals or with a small group of individuals. 4

4 A special case of the group interview is called a focus group. Although we discuss focus groups separately, several of the exhibits in this section will refer to both forms of data collection because of their similarities.

Indepth interviews. An indepth interview is a dialogue between a skilled interviewer and an interviewee. Its goal is to elicit rich, detailed material that can be used in analysis (Lofland and Lofland, 1995). Such interviews are best conducted face to face, although in some situations telephone interviewing can be successful.

Indepth interviews are characterized by extensive probing and open-ended questions. Typically, the project evaluator prepares an interview guide that includes a list of questions or issues that are to be explored and suggested probes for following up on key topics. The guide helps the interviewer pace the interview and make interviewing more systematic and comprehensive. Lofland and Lofland (1995) provide guidelines for preparing interview guides, doing the interview with the guide, and writing up the interview. Appendix B to this chapter contains an example of the types of interview questions that could be asked during the hypothetical study.

The dynamics of interviewing are similar to a guided conversation. The interviewer becomes an attentive listener who shapes the process into a familiar and comfortable form of social engagement - a conversation - and the quality of the information obtained is largely dependent on the interviewer’s skills and personality (Patton, 1990). In contrast to a good conversation, however, an indepth interview is not intended to be a two-way form of communication and sharing. The key to being a good interviewer is being a good listener and questioner. Tempting as it may be, it is not the role of the interviewer to put forth his or her opinions, perceptions, or feelings. Interviewers should be trained individuals who are sensitive, empathetic, and able to establish a nonthreatening environment in which participants feel comfortable. They should be selected during a process that weighs personal characteristics that will make them acceptable to the individuals being interviewed; clearly, age, sex, profession, race/ethnicity, and appearance may be key characteristics. Thorough training, including familiarization with the project and its goals, is important. Poor interviewing skills, poor phrasing of questions, or inadequate knowledge of the subject’s culture or frame of reference may result in a collection that obtains little useful data.

When to use indepth interviews. Indepth interviews can be used at any stage of the evaluation process. They are especially useful in answering questions such as those suggested by Patton (1990):

Specific circumstances for which indepth interviews are particularly appropriate include

In the hypothetical project, indepth interviews of the project director, staff, department chairs, branch campus deans, and nonparticipant faculty would be useful. These interviews can address both formative and summative questions and be used in conjunction with other data collection methods. The advantages and disadvantages of indepth interviews are outlined in Exhibit 5.

When indepth interviews are being considered as a data collection technique, it is important to keep several potential pitfalls or problems in mind.

Exhibit 6 outlines other considerations in conducting interviews. These considerations are also important in conducting focus groups, the next technique that we will consider.

Recording interview data. Interview data can be recorded on tape (with the permission of the participants) and/or summarized in notes. As with observations, detailed recording is a necessary component of interviews since it forms the basis for analyzing the data. All methods, but especially the second and third, require carefully crafted interview guides with ample space available for recording the interviewee’s responses. Three procedures for recording the data are presented below.

In the first approach, the interviewer (or in some cases the transcriber) listens to the tapes and writes a verbatim account of everything that was said. Transcription of the raw data includes word-for-word quotations of the participant’s responses as well as the interviewer’s descriptions of participant’s characteristics, enthusiasm, body language, and overall mood during the interview. Notes from the interview can be used to identify speakers or to recall comments that are garbled or unclear on the tape. This approach is recommended when the necessary financial and human resources are available, when the transcriptions can be produced in a reasonable amount of time, when the focus of the interview is to make detailed comparisons, or when respondents’ own words and phrasing are needed. The major advantages of this transcription method are its completeness and the opportunity it affords for the interviewer to remain attentive and focused during the interview. The major disadvantages are the amount of time and resources needed to produce complete transcriptions and the inhibitory impact tape recording has on some respondents. If this technique is selected, it is essential that the participants have been informed that their answers are being recorded, that they are assured confidentiality, and that their permission has been obtained.

A second possible procedure for recording interviews draws less on the word-by-word record and more on the notes taken by the interviewer or assigned notetaker. This method is called "note expansion." As soon as possible after the interview, the interviewer listens to the tape to clarify certain issues and to confirm that all the main points have been included in the notes. This approach is recommended when resources are scarce, when the results must be produced in a short period of time, and when the purpose of the interview is to get rapid feedback from members of the target population. The note expansion approach saves time and retains all the essential points of the discussion. In addition to the drawbacks pointed out above, a disadvantage is that the interviewer may be more selective or biased in what he or she writes.

In the third approach, the interviewer uses no tape recording, but instead takes detailed notes during the interview and draws on memory to expand and clarify the notes immediately after the interview. This approach is useful if time is short, the results are needed quickly, and the evaluation questions are simple. Where more complex questions are involved, effective note-taking can be achieved, but only after much practice. Further, the interviewer must frequently talk and write at the same time, a skill that is hard for some to achieve.

Focus Groups

Focus groups combine elements of both interviewing and participant observation. The focus group session is, indeed, an interview (Patton, 1990) not a discussion group, problem-solving session, or decision-making group. At the same time, focus groups capitalize on group dynamics. The hallmark of focus groups is the explicit use of the group interaction to generate data and insights that would be unlikely to emerge without the interaction found in a group. The technique inherently allows observation of group dynamics, discussion, and firsthand insights into the respondents’ behaviors, attitudes, language, etc.

Focus groups are a gathering of 8 to 12 people who share some characteristics relevant to the evaluation. Originally used as a market research tool to investigate the appeal of various products, the focus group technique has been adopted by other fields, such as education, as a tool for data gathering on a given topic. Focus groups conducted by experts take place in a focus group facility that includes recording apparatus (audio and/or visual) and an attached room with a one-way mirror for observation. There is an official recorder who may or may not be in the room. Participants are paid for attendance and provided with refreshments. As the focus group technique has been adopted by fields outside of marketing, some of these features, such as payment or refreshment, have been eliminated.

When to use focus groups . When conducting evaluations, focus groups are useful in answering the same type of questions as indepth interviews, except in a social context. Specific applications of the focus group method in evaluations include

In the hypothetical project, focus groups could be conducted with project participants to collect perceptions of project implementation and operation (e.g., Were the workshops staffed appropriately? Were the presentations suitable for all participants?), as well as progress toward objectives during the formative phase of evaluation (Did participants exchange information by e-mail and other means?). Focus groups could also be used to collect data on project outcomes and impact during the summative phase of evaluation (e.g., Were changes made in the curriculum? Did students taught by participants appear to become more interested in class work? What barriers did the participants face in applying what they had been taught?).

Although focus groups and indepth interviews share many characteristics, they should not be used interchangeably. Factors to consider when choosing between focus groups and indepth interviews are included in Exhibit 7.

5 Survey developers also frequently use focus groups to pretest topics or ideas that later will be used for quantitative data collection. In such cases, the data obtained are considered part of instrument development rather than findings. Qualitative evaluators feel that this is too limited an application and that the technique has broader utility.

Developing a Focus Group

An important aspect of conducting focus groups is the topic guide. (See Appendix C to this chapter for a sample guide applied to the hypothetical project.) The topic guide, a list of topics or question areas, serves as a summary statement of the issues and objectives to be covered by the focus group. The topic guide also serves as a road map and as a memory aid for the focus group leader, called a "moderator." The topic guide also provides the initial outline for the report of findings.

Focus group participants are typically asked to reflect on the questions asked by the moderator. Participants are permitted to hear each other’s responses and to make additional comments beyond their own original responses as they hear what other people have to say. It is not necessary for the group to reach any kind of consensus, nor it is necessary for people to disagree. The moderator must keep the discussion flowing and make sure that one or two persons do not dominate the discussion. As a rule, the focus group session should not last longer than 1 1/2 to 2 hours. When very specific information is required, the session may be as short as 40 minutes. The objective is to get high-quality data in a social context where people can consider their own views in the context of the views of others, and where new ideas and perspectives can be introduced.

The participants are usually a relatively homogeneous group of people. Answering the question, "Which respondent variables represent relevant similarities among the target population?" requires some thoughtful consideration when planning the evaluation. Respondents’ social class, level of expertise, age, cultural background, and sex should always be considered. There is a sharp division among focus group moderators regarding the effectiveness of mixing sexes within a group, although most moderators agree that it is acceptable to mix the sexes when the discussion topic is not related to or affected by sex stereotypes.

Determining how many groups are needed requires balancing cost and information needs. A focus group can be fairly expensive, costing $10,000 to $20,000 depending on the type of physical facilities needed, the effort it takes to recruit participants, and the complexity of the reports required. A good rule of thumb is to conduct at least two groups for every variable considered to be relevant to the outcome (sex, age, educational level, etc.). However, even when several groups are sampled, conclusions typically are limited to the specific individuals participating in the focus group. Unless the study population is extremely small, it is not possible to generalize from focus group data.

Recording focus group data . The procedures for recording a focus group session are basically the same as those used for indepth interviews. However, the focus group approach lends itself to more creative and efficient procedures. If the evaluation team does use a focus group room with a one-way mirror, a colleague can take notes and record observations. An advantage of this approach is that the extra individual is not in the view of participants and, therefore, not interfering with the group process. If a one-way mirror is not a possibility, the moderator may have a colleague present in the room to take notes and to record observations. A major advantage of these approaches is that the recorder focuses on observing and taking notes, while the moderator concentrates on asking questions, facilitating the group interaction, following up on ideas, and making smooth transitions from issue to issue. Furthermore, like observations, focus groups can be videotaped. These approaches allow for confirmation of what was seen and heard. Whatever the approach to gathering detailed data, informed consent is necessary and confidentiality should be assured.

Having highlighted the similarities between interviews and focus groups, it is important to also point out one critical difference. In focus groups, group dynamics are especially important. The notes, and resultant report, should include comments on group interaction and dynamics as they inform the questions under study.

Other Qualitative Methods

The last section of this chapter outlines less common but, nonetheless, potentially useful qualitative methods for project evaluation. These methods include document studies, key informants, alternative (authentic) assessment, and case studies.

Document Studies

Existing records often provide insights into a setting and/or group of people that cannot be observed or noted in another way. This information can be found in document form. Lincoln and Guba (1985) defined a document as "any written or recorded material" not prepared for the purposes of the evaluation or at the request of the inquirer. Documents can be divided into two major categories: public records, and personal documents (Guba and Lincoln, 1981).

Public records are materials created and kept for the purpose of "attesting to an event or providing an accounting" (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Public records can be collected from outside ( external ) or within ( internal ) the setting in which the evaluation is taking place. Examples of external records are census and vital statistics reports, county office records, newspaper archives, and local business records that can assist an evaluator in gathering information about the larger community and relevant trends. Such materials can be helpful in better understanding the project participants and making comparisons between groups/communities.

For the evaluation of educational innovations, internal records include documents such as student transcripts and records, historical accounts, institutional mission statements, annual reports, budgets, grade and standardized test reports, minutes of meetings, internal memoranda, policy manuals, institutional histories, college/university catalogs, faculty and student handbooks, official correspondence, demographic material, mass media reports and presentations, and descriptions of program development and evaluation. They are particularly useful in describing institutional characteristics, such as backgrounds and academic performance of students, and in identifying institutional strengths and weaknesses. They can help the evaluator understand the institution’s resources, values, processes, priorities, and concerns. Furthermore, they provide a record or history not subject to recall bias.

Personal documents are first-person accounts of events and experiences. These "documents of life" include diaries, portfolios, photographs, artwork, schedules, scrapbooks, poetry, letters to the paper, etc. Personal documents can help the evaluator understand how the participant sees the world and what she or he wants to communicate to an audience. And unlike other sources of qualitative data, collecting data from documents is relatively invisible to, and requires minimal cooperation from, persons within the setting being studied (Fetterman, 1989).

The usefulness of existing sources varies depending on whether they are accessible and accurate. In the hypothetical project, documents can provide the evaluator with useful information about the culture of the institution and participants involved in the project, which in turn can assist in the development of evaluation questions. Information from documents also can be used to generate interview questions or to identify events to be observed. Furthermore, existing records can be useful for making comparisons (e.g., comparing project participants to project applicants, project proposal to implementation records, or documentation of institutional policies and program descriptions prior to and following implementation of project interventions and activities).

The advantages and disadvantages of document studies are outlined in Exhibit 8.

Key Informant

A key informant is a person (or group of persons) who has unique skills or professional background related to the issue/intervention being evaluated, is knowledgeable about the project participants, or has access to other information of interest to the evaluator. A key informant can also be someone who has a way of communicating that represents or captures the essence of what the participants say and do. Key informants can help the evaluation team better understand the issue being evaluated, as well as the project participants, their backgrounds, behaviors, and attitudes, and any language or ethnic considerations. They can offer expertise beyond the evaluation team. They are also very useful for assisting with the evaluation of curricula and other educational materials. Key informants can be surveyed or interviewed individually or through focus groups.

In the hypothetical project, key informants (i.e., expert faculty on main campus, deans, and department chairs) can assist with (1) developing evaluation questions, and (2) answering formative and summative evaluation questions.

The use of advisory committees is another way of gathering information from key informants. Advisory groups are called together for a variety of purposes:

Members of such a group may be specifically selected or invited to participate because of their unique skills or professional background; they may volunteer; they may be nominated or elected; or they may come together through a combination of these processes.

The advantages and disadvantages of using key informants are outlined in Exhibit 9.

Performance Assessment

The performance assessment movement is impacting education from preschools to professional schools. At the heart of this upheaval is the belief that for all of their virtues - particularly efficiency and economy - traditional objective, norm-referenced tests may fail to tell us what we most want to know about student achievement. In addition, these same tests exert a powerful and, in the eyes of many educators, detrimental influence on curriculum and instruction. Critics of traditional testing procedures are exploring alternatives to multiple-choice, norm-referenced tests. It is hoped that these alternative means of assessment, ranging from observations to exhibitions, will provide a more authentic picture of achievement.

Critics raise three main points against objective, norm-referenced tests.

The search for alternatives to traditional tests has generated a number of new approaches to assessment under such names as alternative assessment, performance assessment, holistic assessment, and authentic assessment. While each label suggests slightly different emphases, they all imply a movement toward assessment that supports exemplary teaching. Performance assessment appears to be the most popular term because it emphasizes the development of assessment tools that involve students in tasks that are worthwhile, significant, and meaningful. Such tasks involve higher order thinking skills and the coordination of a broad range of knowledge.

Performance assessment may involve "qualitative" activities such as oral interviews, group problem-solving tasks, portfolios, or personal documents/creations (poetry, artwork, stories). A performance assessment approach that could be used in the hypothetical project is work sample methodology (Schalock, Schalock, and Girad, in press ). Briefly, work sample methodology challenges teachers to create unit plans and assessment techniques for students at several points during a training experience. The quality of this product is assessed (at least before and after training) in light of the goal of the professional development program. The actual performance of students on the assessment measures provides additional information on impact.

Case Studies

Classical case studies depend on ethnographic and participant observer methods. They are largely descriptive examinations, usually of a small number of sites (small towns, hospitals, schools) where the principal investigator is immersed in the life of the community or institution and combs available documents, holds formal and informal conversations with informants, observes ongoing activities, and develops an analysis of both individual and "cross-case" findings.

In the hypothetical study, for example, case studies of the experiences of participants from different campuses could be carried out. These might involve indepth interviews with the facility participants, observations of their classes over time, surveys of students, interviews with peers and department chairs, and analyses of student work samples at several points in the program. Selection of participants might be made based on factors such as their experience and training, type of students taught, or differences in institutional climate/supports.

Case studies can provide very engaging, rich explorations of a project or application as it develops in a real-world setting. Project evaluators must be aware, however, that doing even relatively modest, illustrative case studies is a complex task that cannot be accomplished through occasional, brief site visits. Demands with regard to design, data collection, and reporting can be substantial.

For those wanting to become thoroughly familiar with this topic, a number of relevant texts are referenced here.

Fetterman, D.M. (1989). Ethnography: Step by Step. Applied Social Research Methods Series, Vol. 17. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Guba, E.G., and Lincoln, Y.S. (1981). Effective Evaluation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Lincoln, Y.S., and Guba, E.G. (1985). Naturalistic Inquiry . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Lofland, J., and Lofland, L.H. (1995). Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis, 3rd Ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Patton, M.Q. (1990). Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods, 2nd Ed . Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Schalock, H.D., Schalock, M.D., and Girad, G.R. (In press). Teacher work sample methodology, as used at Western Oregon State College. In J. Millman, Ed., Assuring Accountability? Using Gains in Student Learning to Evaluate Teachers and Schools . Newbury Park, CA: Corwin.

Other Recommended Reading

Debus, M. (1995). Methodological Review: A Handbook for Excellence in Focus Group Research . Washington, DC: Academy for Educational Development.

Denzin, N.K., and Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds.). (1994). Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Erlandson, D.A., Harris, E.L., Skipper, B.L., and Allen, D. (1993). Doing Naturalist Inquiry: A Guide to Methods . Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Greenbaum, T.L. (1993). The Handbook of Focus Group Research . New York: Lexington Books.

Hart, D. (1994). Authentic Assessment: A Handbook for Educators . Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley.

Herman, J.L., and Winters, L. (1992). Tracking Your School’s Success: A Guide to Sensible Evaluation . Newbury Park, CA: Corwin Press.

Hymes, D.L., Chafin, A.E., and Gondor, R. (1991). The Changing Face of Testing and Assessment: Problems and Solutions. Arlington, VA: American Association of School Administrators.

Krueger, R.A. (1988). Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research . Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

LeCompte, M.D., Millroy, W.L., and Preissle, J. (Eds.). (1992). The Handbook of Qualitative Research in Education . San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Merton, R.K., Fiske, M., and Kendall, P.L. (1990). The Focused Interview: A Manual of Problems and Procedures , 2nd Ed. New York: The Free Press.

Miles, M.B., and Huberman, A.M. (1994). Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Morgan, D.L. (Ed.). (1993). Successful Focus Groups: Advancing the State of the Art. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Morse, J.M. (Ed.). (1994). Critical Issues in Qualitative Research Methods . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Perrone, V. (Ed.). (1991). Expanding Student Assessment . Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Reich, R.B. (1991). The Work of Nations . New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Schatzman, L., and Strauss, A.L. (1973). Field Research . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Seidman, I.E. (1991). Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and Social Sciences. New York: Teachers College Press.

Stewart, D.W., and Shamdasani, P.N. (1990). Focus Groups: Theory and Practice . Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

United States General Accounting Office (GAO). (1990). Case Study Evaluations , Paper 10.1.9. Washington, DC: GAO.

Weiss, R.S. (1994). Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies . New York: Free Press.

Wiggins, G. (1989). A True Test: Toward More Authentic and Equitable Assessment. Phi Delta Kappan , May, 703-704.

Wiggins, G. (1989). Teaching to the (Authentic) Test. Educational Leadership , 46, 45.

Yin, R.K. (1989). Case Study Research: Design and Method . Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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College students with adhd: a selective review of qualitative studies.

1. Introduction

1.1. qualitative research methods, 1.2. the present study, 2. materials and methods, 2.1. search strategy, 2.2. study selection, 2.3. variable identification, 3.1. quantitative results, 3.2. qualitative results, 3.2.1. the college experience of students with adhd, 3.2.2. interventions, 3.2.3. cognitive and academic functioning, 3.2.4. self-functioning, 4. discussion, 5. conclusions, author contributions, conflicts of interest, appendix a. summaries of included studies, appendix a.1. the college experience of students with adhd, appendix a.1.1. college transitions, appendix a.1.2. adhd as an identity, appendix a.1.3. race, appendix a.1.4. community college, appendix a.2. interventions, appendix a.2.1. coaching, appendix a.2.2. strategies, appendix a.2.3. medication, appendix a.3. cognitive and academic functioning, appendix a.4. self-functioning.

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Cohen, S.L.; Shavel, K.; Lovett, B.J. College Students with ADHD: A Selective Review of Qualitative Studies. Disabilities 2024 , 4 , 658-677. https://doi.org/10.3390/disabilities4030041

Cohen SL, Shavel K, Lovett BJ. College Students with ADHD: A Selective Review of Qualitative Studies. Disabilities . 2024; 4(3):658-677. https://doi.org/10.3390/disabilities4030041

Cohen, Shira L., Katie Shavel, and Benjamin J. Lovett. 2024. "College Students with ADHD: A Selective Review of Qualitative Studies" Disabilities 4, no. 3: 658-677. https://doi.org/10.3390/disabilities4030041

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Qualitative Research: Data Collection, Analysis, and Management

Introduction.

In an earlier paper, 1 we presented an introduction to using qualitative research methods in pharmacy practice. In this article, we review some principles of the collection, analysis, and management of qualitative data to help pharmacists interested in doing research in their practice to continue their learning in this area. Qualitative research can help researchers to access the thoughts and feelings of research participants, which can enable development of an understanding of the meaning that people ascribe to their experiences. Whereas quantitative research methods can be used to determine how many people undertake particular behaviours, qualitative methods can help researchers to understand how and why such behaviours take place. Within the context of pharmacy practice research, qualitative approaches have been used to examine a diverse array of topics, including the perceptions of key stakeholders regarding prescribing by pharmacists and the postgraduation employment experiences of young pharmacists (see “Further Reading” section at the end of this article).

In the previous paper, 1 we outlined 3 commonly used methodologies: ethnography 2 , grounded theory 3 , and phenomenology. 4 Briefly, ethnography involves researchers using direct observation to study participants in their “real life” environment, sometimes over extended periods. Grounded theory and its later modified versions (e.g., Strauss and Corbin 5 ) use face-to-face interviews and interactions such as focus groups to explore a particular research phenomenon and may help in clarifying a less-well-understood problem, situation, or context. Phenomenology shares some features with grounded theory (such as an exploration of participants’ behaviour) and uses similar techniques to collect data, but it focuses on understanding how human beings experience their world. It gives researchers the opportunity to put themselves in another person’s shoes and to understand the subjective experiences of participants. 6 Some researchers use qualitative methodologies but adopt a different standpoint, and an example of this appears in the work of Thurston and others, 7 discussed later in this paper.

Qualitative work requires reflection on the part of researchers, both before and during the research process, as a way of providing context and understanding for readers. When being reflexive, researchers should not try to simply ignore or avoid their own biases (as this would likely be impossible); instead, reflexivity requires researchers to reflect upon and clearly articulate their position and subjectivities (world view, perspectives, biases), so that readers can better understand the filters through which questions were asked, data were gathered and analyzed, and findings were reported. From this perspective, bias and subjectivity are not inherently negative but they are unavoidable; as a result, it is best that they be articulated up-front in a manner that is clear and coherent for readers.

THE PARTICIPANT’S VIEWPOINT

What qualitative study seeks to convey is why people have thoughts and feelings that might affect the way they behave. Such study may occur in any number of contexts, but here, we focus on pharmacy practice and the way people behave with regard to medicines use (e.g., to understand patients’ reasons for nonadherence with medication therapy or to explore physicians’ resistance to pharmacists’ clinical suggestions). As we suggested in our earlier article, 1 an important point about qualitative research is that there is no attempt to generalize the findings to a wider population. Qualitative research is used to gain insights into people’s feelings and thoughts, which may provide the basis for a future stand-alone qualitative study or may help researchers to map out survey instruments for use in a quantitative study. It is also possible to use different types of research in the same study, an approach known as “mixed methods” research, and further reading on this topic may be found at the end of this paper.

The role of the researcher in qualitative research is to attempt to access the thoughts and feelings of study participants. This is not an easy task, as it involves asking people to talk about things that may be very personal to them. Sometimes the experiences being explored are fresh in the participant’s mind, whereas on other occasions reliving past experiences may be difficult. However the data are being collected, a primary responsibility of the researcher is to safeguard participants and their data. Mechanisms for such safeguarding must be clearly articulated to participants and must be approved by a relevant research ethics review board before the research begins. Researchers and practitioners new to qualitative research should seek advice from an experienced qualitative researcher before embarking on their project.

DATA COLLECTION

Whatever philosophical standpoint the researcher is taking and whatever the data collection method (e.g., focus group, one-to-one interviews), the process will involve the generation of large amounts of data. In addition to the variety of study methodologies available, there are also different ways of making a record of what is said and done during an interview or focus group, such as taking handwritten notes or video-recording. If the researcher is audio- or video-recording data collection, then the recordings must be transcribed verbatim before data analysis can begin. As a rough guide, it can take an experienced researcher/transcriber 8 hours to transcribe one 45-minute audio-recorded interview, a process than will generate 20–30 pages of written dialogue.

Many researchers will also maintain a folder of “field notes” to complement audio-taped interviews. Field notes allow the researcher to maintain and comment upon impressions, environmental contexts, behaviours, and nonverbal cues that may not be adequately captured through the audio-recording; they are typically handwritten in a small notebook at the same time the interview takes place. Field notes can provide important context to the interpretation of audio-taped data and can help remind the researcher of situational factors that may be important during data analysis. Such notes need not be formal, but they should be maintained and secured in a similar manner to audio tapes and transcripts, as they contain sensitive information and are relevant to the research. For more information about collecting qualitative data, please see the “Further Reading” section at the end of this paper.

DATA ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT

If, as suggested earlier, doing qualitative research is about putting oneself in another person’s shoes and seeing the world from that person’s perspective, the most important part of data analysis and management is to be true to the participants. It is their voices that the researcher is trying to hear, so that they can be interpreted and reported on for others to read and learn from. To illustrate this point, consider the anonymized transcript excerpt presented in Appendix 1 , which is taken from a research interview conducted by one of the authors (J.S.). We refer to this excerpt throughout the remainder of this paper to illustrate how data can be managed, analyzed, and presented.

Interpretation of Data

Interpretation of the data will depend on the theoretical standpoint taken by researchers. For example, the title of the research report by Thurston and others, 7 “Discordant indigenous and provider frames explain challenges in improving access to arthritis care: a qualitative study using constructivist grounded theory,” indicates at least 2 theoretical standpoints. The first is the culture of the indigenous population of Canada and the place of this population in society, and the second is the social constructivist theory used in the constructivist grounded theory method. With regard to the first standpoint, it can be surmised that, to have decided to conduct the research, the researchers must have felt that there was anecdotal evidence of differences in access to arthritis care for patients from indigenous and non-indigenous backgrounds. With regard to the second standpoint, it can be surmised that the researchers used social constructivist theory because it assumes that behaviour is socially constructed; in other words, people do things because of the expectations of those in their personal world or in the wider society in which they live. (Please see the “Further Reading” section for resources providing more information about social constructivist theory and reflexivity.) Thus, these 2 standpoints (and there may have been others relevant to the research of Thurston and others 7 ) will have affected the way in which these researchers interpreted the experiences of the indigenous population participants and those providing their care. Another standpoint is feminist standpoint theory which, among other things, focuses on marginalized groups in society. Such theories are helpful to researchers, as they enable us to think about things from a different perspective. Being aware of the standpoints you are taking in your own research is one of the foundations of qualitative work. Without such awareness, it is easy to slip into interpreting other people’s narratives from your own viewpoint, rather than that of the participants.

To analyze the example in Appendix 1 , we will adopt a phenomenological approach because we want to understand how the participant experienced the illness and we want to try to see the experience from that person’s perspective. It is important for the researcher to reflect upon and articulate his or her starting point for such analysis; for example, in the example, the coder could reflect upon her own experience as a female of a majority ethnocultural group who has lived within middle class and upper middle class settings. This personal history therefore forms the filter through which the data will be examined. This filter does not diminish the quality or significance of the analysis, since every researcher has his or her own filters; however, by explicitly stating and acknowledging what these filters are, the researcher makes it easer for readers to contextualize the work.

Transcribing and Checking

For the purposes of this paper it is assumed that interviews or focus groups have been audio-recorded. As mentioned above, transcribing is an arduous process, even for the most experienced transcribers, but it must be done to convert the spoken word to the written word to facilitate analysis. For anyone new to conducting qualitative research, it is beneficial to transcribe at least one interview and one focus group. It is only by doing this that researchers realize how difficult the task is, and this realization affects their expectations when asking others to transcribe. If the research project has sufficient funding, then a professional transcriber can be hired to do the work. If this is the case, then it is a good idea to sit down with the transcriber, if possible, and talk through the research and what the participants were talking about. This background knowledge for the transcriber is especially important in research in which people are using jargon or medical terms (as in pharmacy practice). Involving your transcriber in this way makes the work both easier and more rewarding, as he or she will feel part of the team. Transcription editing software is also available, but it is expensive. For example, ELAN (more formally known as EUDICO Linguistic Annotator, developed at the Technical University of Berlin) 8 is a tool that can help keep data organized by linking media and data files (particularly valuable if, for example, video-taping of interviews is complemented by transcriptions). It can also be helpful in searching complex data sets. Products such as ELAN do not actually automatically transcribe interviews or complete analyses, and they do require some time and effort to learn; nonetheless, for some research applications, it may be a valuable to consider such software tools.

All audio recordings should be transcribed verbatim, regardless of how intelligible the transcript may be when it is read back. Lines of text should be numbered. Once the transcription is complete, the researcher should read it while listening to the recording and do the following: correct any spelling or other errors; anonymize the transcript so that the participant cannot be identified from anything that is said (e.g., names, places, significant events); insert notations for pauses, laughter, looks of discomfort; insert any punctuation, such as commas and full stops (periods) (see Appendix 1 for examples of inserted punctuation), and include any other contextual information that might have affected the participant (e.g., temperature or comfort of the room).

Dealing with the transcription of a focus group is slightly more difficult, as multiple voices are involved. One way of transcribing such data is to “tag” each voice (e.g., Voice A, Voice B). In addition, the focus group will usually have 2 facilitators, whose respective roles will help in making sense of the data. While one facilitator guides participants through the topic, the other can make notes about context and group dynamics. More information about group dynamics and focus groups can be found in resources listed in the “Further Reading” section.

Reading between the Lines

During the process outlined above, the researcher can begin to get a feel for the participant’s experience of the phenomenon in question and can start to think about things that could be pursued in subsequent interviews or focus groups (if appropriate). In this way, one participant’s narrative informs the next, and the researcher can continue to interview until nothing new is being heard or, as it says in the text books, “saturation is reached”. While continuing with the processes of coding and theming (described in the next 2 sections), it is important to consider not just what the person is saying but also what they are not saying. For example, is a lengthy pause an indication that the participant is finding the subject difficult, or is the person simply deciding what to say? The aim of the whole process from data collection to presentation is to tell the participants’ stories using exemplars from their own narratives, thus grounding the research findings in the participants’ lived experiences.

Smith 9 suggested a qualitative research method known as interpretative phenomenological analysis, which has 2 basic tenets: first, that it is rooted in phenomenology, attempting to understand the meaning that individuals ascribe to their lived experiences, and second, that the researcher must attempt to interpret this meaning in the context of the research. That the researcher has some knowledge and expertise in the subject of the research means that he or she can have considerable scope in interpreting the participant’s experiences. Larkin and others 10 discussed the importance of not just providing a description of what participants say. Rather, interpretative phenomenological analysis is about getting underneath what a person is saying to try to truly understand the world from his or her perspective.

Once all of the research interviews have been transcribed and checked, it is time to begin coding. Field notes compiled during an interview can be a useful complementary source of information to facilitate this process, as the gap in time between an interview, transcribing, and coding can result in memory bias regarding nonverbal or environmental context issues that may affect interpretation of data.

Coding refers to the identification of topics, issues, similarities, and differences that are revealed through the participants’ narratives and interpreted by the researcher. This process enables the researcher to begin to understand the world from each participant’s perspective. Coding can be done by hand on a hard copy of the transcript, by making notes in the margin or by highlighting and naming sections of text. More commonly, researchers use qualitative research software (e.g., NVivo, QSR International Pty Ltd; www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo.aspx ) to help manage their transcriptions. It is advised that researchers undertake a formal course in the use of such software or seek supervision from a researcher experienced in these tools.

Returning to Appendix 1 and reading from lines 8–11, a code for this section might be “diagnosis of mental health condition”, but this would just be a description of what the participant is talking about at that point. If we read a little more deeply, we can ask ourselves how the participant might have come to feel that the doctor assumed he or she was aware of the diagnosis or indeed that they had only just been told the diagnosis. There are a number of pauses in the narrative that might suggest the participant is finding it difficult to recall that experience. Later in the text, the participant says “nobody asked me any questions about my life” (line 19). This could be coded simply as “health care professionals’ consultation skills”, but that would not reflect how the participant must have felt never to be asked anything about his or her personal life, about the participant as a human being. At the end of this excerpt, the participant just trails off, recalling that no-one showed any interest, which makes for very moving reading. For practitioners in pharmacy, it might also be pertinent to explore the participant’s experience of akathisia and why this was left untreated for 20 years.

One of the questions that arises about qualitative research relates to the reliability of the interpretation and representation of the participants’ narratives. There are no statistical tests that can be used to check reliability and validity as there are in quantitative research. However, work by Lincoln and Guba 11 suggests that there are other ways to “establish confidence in the ‘truth’ of the findings” (p. 218). They call this confidence “trustworthiness” and suggest that there are 4 criteria of trustworthiness: credibility (confidence in the “truth” of the findings), transferability (showing that the findings have applicability in other contexts), dependability (showing that the findings are consistent and could be repeated), and confirmability (the extent to which the findings of a study are shaped by the respondents and not researcher bias, motivation, or interest).

One way of establishing the “credibility” of the coding is to ask another researcher to code the same transcript and then to discuss any similarities and differences in the 2 resulting sets of codes. This simple act can result in revisions to the codes and can help to clarify and confirm the research findings.

Theming refers to the drawing together of codes from one or more transcripts to present the findings of qualitative research in a coherent and meaningful way. For example, there may be examples across participants’ narratives of the way in which they were treated in hospital, such as “not being listened to” or “lack of interest in personal experiences” (see Appendix 1 ). These may be drawn together as a theme running through the narratives that could be named “the patient’s experience of hospital care”. The importance of going through this process is that at its conclusion, it will be possible to present the data from the interviews using quotations from the individual transcripts to illustrate the source of the researchers’ interpretations. Thus, when the findings are organized for presentation, each theme can become the heading of a section in the report or presentation. Underneath each theme will be the codes, examples from the transcripts, and the researcher’s own interpretation of what the themes mean. Implications for real life (e.g., the treatment of people with chronic mental health problems) should also be given.

DATA SYNTHESIS

In this final section of this paper, we describe some ways of drawing together or “synthesizing” research findings to represent, as faithfully as possible, the meaning that participants ascribe to their life experiences. This synthesis is the aim of the final stage of qualitative research. For most readers, the synthesis of data presented by the researcher is of crucial significance—this is usually where “the story” of the participants can be distilled, summarized, and told in a manner that is both respectful to those participants and meaningful to readers. There are a number of ways in which researchers can synthesize and present their findings, but any conclusions drawn by the researchers must be supported by direct quotations from the participants. In this way, it is made clear to the reader that the themes under discussion have emerged from the participants’ interviews and not the mind of the researcher. The work of Latif and others 12 gives an example of how qualitative research findings might be presented.

Planning and Writing the Report

As has been suggested above, if researchers code and theme their material appropriately, they will naturally find the headings for sections of their report. Qualitative researchers tend to report “findings” rather than “results”, as the latter term typically implies that the data have come from a quantitative source. The final presentation of the research will usually be in the form of a report or a paper and so should follow accepted academic guidelines. In particular, the article should begin with an introduction, including a literature review and rationale for the research. There should be a section on the chosen methodology and a brief discussion about why qualitative methodology was most appropriate for the study question and why one particular methodology (e.g., interpretative phenomenological analysis rather than grounded theory) was selected to guide the research. The method itself should then be described, including ethics approval, choice of participants, mode of recruitment, and method of data collection (e.g., semistructured interviews or focus groups), followed by the research findings, which will be the main body of the report or paper. The findings should be written as if a story is being told; as such, it is not necessary to have a lengthy discussion section at the end. This is because much of the discussion will take place around the participants’ quotes, such that all that is needed to close the report or paper is a summary, limitations of the research, and the implications that the research has for practice. As stated earlier, it is not the intention of qualitative research to allow the findings to be generalized, and therefore this is not, in itself, a limitation.

Planning out the way that findings are to be presented is helpful. It is useful to insert the headings of the sections (the themes) and then make a note of the codes that exemplify the thoughts and feelings of your participants. It is generally advisable to put in the quotations that you want to use for each theme, using each quotation only once. After all this is done, the telling of the story can begin as you give your voice to the experiences of the participants, writing around their quotations. Do not be afraid to draw assumptions from the participants’ narratives, as this is necessary to give an in-depth account of the phenomena in question. Discuss these assumptions, drawing on your participants’ words to support you as you move from one code to another and from one theme to the next. Finally, as appropriate, it is possible to include examples from literature or policy documents that add support for your findings. As an exercise, you may wish to code and theme the sample excerpt in Appendix 1 and tell the participant’s story in your own way. Further reading about “doing” qualitative research can be found at the end of this paper.

CONCLUSIONS

Qualitative research can help researchers to access the thoughts and feelings of research participants, which can enable development of an understanding of the meaning that people ascribe to their experiences. It can be used in pharmacy practice research to explore how patients feel about their health and their treatment. Qualitative research has been used by pharmacists to explore a variety of questions and problems (see the “Further Reading” section for examples). An understanding of these issues can help pharmacists and other health care professionals to tailor health care to match the individual needs of patients and to develop a concordant relationship. Doing qualitative research is not easy and may require a complete rethink of how research is conducted, particularly for researchers who are more familiar with quantitative approaches. There are many ways of conducting qualitative research, and this paper has covered some of the practical issues regarding data collection, analysis, and management. Further reading around the subject will be essential to truly understand this method of accessing peoples’ thoughts and feelings to enable researchers to tell participants’ stories.

Appendix 1. Excerpt from a sample transcript

The participant (age late 50s) had suffered from a chronic mental health illness for 30 years. The participant had become a “revolving door patient,” someone who is frequently in and out of hospital. As the participant talked about past experiences, the researcher asked:

• What was treatment like 30 years ago?
• Umm—well it was pretty much they could do what they wanted with you because I was put into the er, the er kind of system er, I was just on
• endless section threes.
• Really…
• But what I didn’t realize until later was that if you haven’t actually posed a threat to someone or yourself they can’t really do that but I didn’t know
• that. So wh-when I first went into hospital they put me on the forensic ward ’cause they said, “We don’t think you’ll stay here we think you’ll just
• run-run away.” So they put me then onto the acute admissions ward and – er – I can remember one of the first things I recall when I got onto that
• ward was sitting down with a er a Dr XXX. He had a book this thick [gestures] and on each page it was like three questions and he went through
• all these questions and I answered all these questions. So we’re there for I don’t maybe two hours doing all that and he asked me he said “well
• when did somebody tell you then that you have schizophrenia” I said “well nobody’s told me that” so he seemed very surprised but nobody had
• actually [pause] whe-when I first went up there under police escort erm the senior kind of consultants people I’d been to where I was staying and
• ermm so er [pause] I . . . the, I can remember the very first night that I was there and given this injection in this muscle here [gestures] and just
• having dreadful side effects the next day I woke up [pause]
• . . . and I suffered that akathesia I swear to you, every minute of every day for about 20 years.
• Oh how awful.
• And that side of it just makes life impossible so the care on the wards [pause] umm I don’t know it’s kind of, it’s kind of hard to put into words
• [pause]. Because I’m not saying they were sort of like not friendly or interested but then nobody ever seemed to want to talk about your life [pause]
• nobody asked me any questions about my life. The only questions that came into was they asked me if I’d be a volunteer for these student exams
• and things and I said “yeah” so all the questions were like “oh what jobs have you done,” er about your relationships and things and er but
• nobody actually sat down and had a talk and showed some interest in you as a person you were just there basically [pause] um labelled and you
• know there was there was [pause] but umm [pause] yeah . . .

This article is the 10th in the CJHP Research Primer Series, an initiative of the CJHP Editorial Board and the CSHP Research Committee. The planned 2-year series is intended to appeal to relatively inexperienced researchers, with the goal of building research capacity among practising pharmacists. The articles, presenting simple but rigorous guidance to encourage and support novice researchers, are being solicited from authors with appropriate expertise.

Previous articles in this series:

Bond CM. The research jigsaw: how to get started. Can J Hosp Pharm . 2014;67(1):28–30.

Tully MP. Research: articulating questions, generating hypotheses, and choosing study designs. Can J Hosp Pharm . 2014;67(1):31–4.

Loewen P. Ethical issues in pharmacy practice research: an introductory guide. Can J Hosp Pharm. 2014;67(2):133–7.

Tsuyuki RT. Designing pharmacy practice research trials. Can J Hosp Pharm . 2014;67(3):226–9.

Bresee LC. An introduction to developing surveys for pharmacy practice research. Can J Hosp Pharm . 2014;67(4):286–91.

Gamble JM. An introduction to the fundamentals of cohort and case–control studies. Can J Hosp Pharm . 2014;67(5):366–72.

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Competing interests: None declared.

Further Reading

Examples of qualitative research in pharmacy practice.

• Farrell B, Pottie K, Woodend K, Yao V, Dolovich L, Kennie N, et al. Shifts in expectations: evaluating physicians’ perceptions as pharmacists integrated into family practice. J Interprof Care. 2010; 24 (1):80–9. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
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• Marks PZ, Jennnings B, Farrell B, Kennie-Kaulbach N, Jorgenson D, Pearson-Sharpe J, et al. “I gained a skill and a change in attitude”: a case study describing how an online continuing professional education course for pharmacists supported achievement of its transfer to practice outcomes. Can J Univ Contin Educ. 2014; 40 (2):1–18. [ Google Scholar ]
• Nair KM, Dolovich L, Brazil K, Raina P. It’s all about relationships: a qualitative study of health researchers’ perspectives on interdisciplinary research. BMC Health Serv Res. 2008; 8 :110. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pojskic N, MacKeigan L, Boon H, Austin Z. Initial perceptions of key stakeholders in Ontario regarding independent prescriptive authority for pharmacists. Res Soc Adm Pharm. 2014; 10 (2):341–54. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

Qualitative Research in General

• Breakwell GM, Hammond S, Fife-Schaw C. Research methods in psychology. Thousand Oaks (CA): Sage Publications; 1995. [ Google Scholar ]
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• Patton M. Qualitative research and evaluation methods. Thousand Oaks (CA): Sage Publications; 2002. [ Google Scholar ]
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Group Dynamics in Focus Groups

• Farnsworth J, Boon B. Analysing group dynamics within the focus group. Qual Res. 2010; 10 (5):605–24. [ Google Scholar ]

Social Constructivism

• Social constructivism. Berkeley (CA): University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley Graduate Division, Graduate Student Instruction Teaching & Resource Center; [cited 2015 June 4]. Available from: http://gsi.berkeley.edu/gsi-guide-contents/learning-theory-research/social-constructivism/ [ Google Scholar ]

Mixed Methods

• Creswell J. Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Thousand Oaks (CA): Sage Publications; 2009. [ Google Scholar ]

Collecting Qualitative Data

• Arksey H, Knight P. Interviewing for social scientists: an introductory resource with examples. Thousand Oaks (CA): Sage Publications; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
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Constructivist Grounded Theory

• Charmaz K. Grounded theory: objectivist and constructivist methods. In: Denzin N, Lincoln Y, editors. Handbook of qualitative research. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks (CA): Sage Publications; 2000. pp. 509–35. [ Google Scholar ]

• Open access
• Published: 13 September 2024

A mixed-methods, theory-driven assessment of the sustainability of a multi-sectoral preventive intervention for South Asian Americans at risk for cardiovascular disease

• Milkie Vu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0230-473X 1 ,
• Saihariharan Nedunchezhian 2 ,
• Nicola Lancki 1 ,
• Bonnie Spring 1 ,
• C. Hendricks Brown 1 , 3 , 4 &
• Namratha R. Kandula 1 , 5  

Implementation Science Communications volume  5 , Article number:  89 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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South Asian Americans bear a high burden of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), but little is known about the sustainability of evidence-based interventions (EBI) to prevent ASCVD in this population. Using community-based participatory research, we previously developed and implemented the South Asian Healthy Lifestyle Intervention (SAHELI), a culturally-adapted EBI targeting diet, physical activity, and stress management. In this study, we use the Integrated Sustainability Framework to investigate multisectoral partners’ perceptions of organizational factors influencing SAHELI sustainability and strategies for ensuring sustainability.

From 2022 to 2023, we conducted a mixed-methods study (quant- > QUAL) with 17 SAHELI partners in the Chicago area. Partners’ settings included: community organization, school district, public health department, and healthcare system. Descriptive statistics summarized quantitative results. Two coders used a hybrid thematic analysis approach to identify qualitative themes. Qualitative and quantitative data were integrated and analyzed using mixed methods.

Surveys (score range 1–5: higher scores indicate facilitators; lower scores indicate barriers) indicated SAHELI sustainability facilitators to be its “responsiveness to community values and needs” (mean = 4.9). Barriers were “financial support” (mean = 3.5), “infrastructure/capacity to support sustainment” (mean = 4.2), and “implementation leadership” (mean = 4.3). Qualitative findings confirmed quantitative findings that SAHELI provided culturally-tailored cardiovascular health education responsive to the needs of the South Asian American community, increased attention to health issues, and transformed perceptions of research among community members. Qualitative findings expanded upon quantitative findings, showing that the organizational fit of SAHELI was a facilitator to sustainability while competing priorities were barriers for partners from the public health department and health system. Partners from the public health department and health system discussed challenges in offering culturally-tailored programming exclusively for one targeted population. Sustainability strategies envisioned by partners included: transitioning SAHELI to a program delivered by community members; integrating components of SAHELI into other programs; and expanding SAHELI to other populations. Modifications made to SAHELI (i.e., virtual instead of in-person delivery) had both positive and negative implications for sustainability.

This study identifies common sustainability barriers and facilitators across different sectors, as well as those specific to certain settings. Aligning health equity interventions with community needs and values, organizational activities, and local context and resources is critical for sustainability. Challenges also arise from balancing the needs of specific populations against providing programming for broader audiences.

Peer Review reports

Contributions to the literature

We contribute to the emerging literature on sustainability and health equity by exploring multisectoral factors influencing the sustainability of a culturally-adapted lifestyle intervention for South Asian Americans at risk for cardiovascular disease.

We identified barriers and facilitators that were commonly observed across different sectors, as well as those specific to certain settings.

Results underscore the need to align health equity interventions with community needs and organizational activities, adapt to local context, and plan for funding diversification and program modification.

Resolving the tension between specific population needs and broader population programming is central to supporting health equity.

People of South Asian background (i.e., those with historical or ancestral connections to Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives) represent a fast-growing population in the U.S., numbering more than 5.7 million as of 2020 [ 1 ]. South Asian Americans also carry an elevated burden of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), evidenced by higher ASCVD hospitalization and mortality rates as well as higher burden of ASCVD risk factors (e.g., type 2 diabetes mellitus, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and truncal obesity) when compared to non-Hispanic White and/or other Asian American populations [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends intensive lifestyle (e.g., diet and physical activity) evidence-based interventions (EBIs) for ASCVD prevention in at-risk populations [ 8 ]. However, our prior research shows that existing EBIs fail to reach South Asian Americans due to a lack of alignment with their sociocultural patterns and values [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ]. Growing evidence continues to demonstrate the pressing need for culturally-adapted diet and/or physical activity interventions for South Asian Americans that are rooted in community engagement and incorporate migration context, cultural norms, beliefs, and language [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. While emerging literature has focused on developing, implementing, and testing such culturally-adapted EBIs [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ], important gaps remain regarding the determinants of or strategies to sustain the EBIs beyond their original implementation.

Sustainability of EBIs for populations experiencing health disparities is a critical issue. Unsustainable or discontinued EBIs can further widen disparities in health outcomes across settings and subgroups, bring disillusionment and reinforce mistrust in underserved communities, and threaten the mission of health equity [ 19 ]. We acknowledge that there is no unanimous agreement on a single definition of EBI sustainability [ 20 ]. Rather, evolving literature provides conceptual guidance on this multidimensional concept [ 21 ]. Scheirer and Dearing outlined six aspects of EBI sustainability: 1) continuing benefits for clients; 2) continuing original program activities; 3) maintaining community-level partnerships developed during implementation; 4) maintaining new organizational practices started during implementation; 5) sustaining attention to the issue; and 6) diffusing the EBI to other sites [ 22 ]. Some researchers differentiate between sustainability and sustainment [ 23 , 24 , 25 ], though their definitions also vary. Chambers and colleagues described sustainability as the extent to which an EBI can deliver its intended benefits over an extended period of time after external support is terminated, while sustainment is continued use of an EBI within practice [ 24 ]. In contrast, Birken and colleagues conceptualized sustainment as continuous use of EBIs as intended, over time, in ongoing operations with dynamic adaptation, while sustainability centers characteristics that enhance sustainment [ 25 ]. Following Shelton and colleagues, in this study, we use the term sustainability to refer to both several desired aspects identified by Scheirer and Dearing [ 22 ] (e.g., continuation of benefits and activities, maintenance of partnerships and organizational practices, sustained attention, and EBI diffusion) as well as the characteristics that increase the likelihood of maintaining these aspects [ 26 ].

Sustaining EBIs requires meaningful engagement of key partners with a direct interest or involvement in EBI implementation [ 19 , 27 , 28 ]. Furthermore, key partner engagement should not be confined to a single sector but instead extended to multiple different sectors [ 29 , 30 ]. This recognition aligns with recent research agendas in implementation science that call for investigating determinants of sustainability with a focus on different settings and contexts [ 31 , 32 ]. For example, the Integrated Sustainability Framework outlines the emerging multilevel factors that may influence sustainability depending on the setting (e.g., community, school, clinical, or public health sectors) [ 31 , 33 ]. These understandings are important because what constitutes barriers and facilitators in one setting may not necessarily apply in other settings.

Our study, the South Asian Healthy Lifestyle Intervention (SAHELI), provides an ideal opportunity to contribute to the emerging literature on EBI sustainability in multisectoral settings to promote health equity. SAHELI was a culturally-adapted EBI targeting diet, physical activity, and stress management for South Asian Americans at risk for ASCVD. SAHELI was conducted with a community-based participatory research framework, where the study partners used a collaborative structure to plan and implement SAHELI, engage and retain South Asian American research participants, increase awareness about ASCVD disparities in South Asian Americans, and disseminate results to partners and community members. Partnering organizations included a community organization, a school district, a public health department, and a health system. The purpose of this study is to explore multisectoral partners’ perceptions of organizational factors influencing SAHELI sustainability and strategies for ensuring SAHELI sustainability.

Study design and setting

Details about the design of the SAHELI intervention have been published elsewhere [ 13 ]. A manuscript with primary outcome results has been recently published [ 34 ]. To briefly summarize, the study was a type 1 effectiveness-implementation hybrid randomized control trial [ 35 ] aimed at reducing ASCVD risk in South Asian Americans. In the trial, 549 participants in the Chicago metropolitan area were randomized to receive either printed healthy lifestyle education materials or SAHELI, a group-based lifestyle change program that includes weekly classes for 16 weeks and 4 booster classes through month 11. The trial adapted content and materials from the U.S. Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) [ 36 ], the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute [ 37 ], and the PREMIER trial [ 38 ]. The core curriculum (months 1–4) included 16 intervention contacts (1 individual counseling session and 15 weekly group meetings). The trial began in March 2018 and the last follow-up assessment was completed in February 2023. Weekly classes were delivered at community partner sites prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the onset of the pandemic, treatment and assessment procedures were modified for telephone and video administration. Remote intervention delivery began on March 14, 2020.

Our present study is an explanatory sequential mixed-methods study (quant- > QUAL; capitalization depicts the primary component that is dominant) [ 39 , 40 ] conducted with a sample of 17 survey participants and 9 interview participants who were key organizational partners, study implementers, and university research team members of the SAHELI intervention. In January 2022, 17 participants (29% from the community organization, 18% school district, 6% public health department, 12% health system, 18% project implementers, and 18% university research team members) completed a web-based survey, hosted by REDCap [ 41 , 42 ] to quantitatively assess domains related to SAHELI sustainability. Between August 2022 and March 2023, 9 participants (purposively selected as a subset of the 17 survey participants) who were deeply involved in project implementation and/or were organizational leaders further completed semi-structured interviews to elaborate on their perspectives on SAHELI sustainability. Appendices A and B provide 1) a description of partner organizations and 2) the experience and involvement in SAHELI of survey and interview participants. The Northwestern University Institutional Review Board approved this study (STU00204939).

Data collection and measures

Quantitative survey.

We adapted two previously-developed instruments: the Sustainment Measurement System Scale (SMSS) [ 23 ] and the Program Assessment Sustainability Tool (PSAT) [ 20 ]. The original SMSS [ 23 ] has a total of 35 items and 8 subscales; it focuses on the determinants and outcomes of sustainment of prevention programs. In a previous study, the measure demonstrated good reliability and convergent and discriminant validity in assessing likelihood of program sustainment [ 23 ]. In addition to the 8 subscales from the SMSS, our survey included 2 subscales (Program Adaptation and Communications) from the PSAT [ 20 ]. The original PSAT has 40 items and 8 subscales; it was designed to measure capacity for program sustainability of various public health and other programs. The PSAT has demonstrated high reliability when tested with a large and diverse sample over time [ 43 ]. The two domains (Program Adaptation and Communications) were added because the SMSS did not capture these constructs. Based on our review of existing literature, we believe these two domains have important implications for sustainability.

Our final survey included 36 items and 10 domains (Appendix C). Examples of items include: “The SAHELI project has sustained funding”; “The SAHELI project is well integrated into the operations of your organization”; “Your organization has a process in place to sustain the project in the event the champion at your organization leaves”; and “The SAHELI project provides strong evidence to the public that the healthy lifestyle program works.” For each statement, participants were instructed to respond using a scale ranging from 1 = little to no extent to 5 = a great extent. Responses of “Not applicable” or “I do not know” were recoded as missing data.

Interview guide

Interview questions (Appendix D) explored organizational barriers to and facilitators of SAHELI sustainability, what sustainability means in the context of routinely-delivered programs, and planning and strategies for sustainability. The interview guide was developed based on past qualitative research on program sustainability [ 44 ] as well as the Integrated Sustainability Framework [ 31 ]. Examples of questions included: “For your organization, what are the barriers to sustaining the SAHELI programs once the funding ends?”; “What would your organization need to be able to sustain SAHELI?”; and “What organizational and community assets can be leveraged to keep SAHELI going into the future?”.

Data analysis

All statistical analyses were conducted in R version 4.1 [ 45 ]. For each domain, a summed score for all statements was calculated and then divided by the number of non-missing statements to obtain a domain score. Means, standard deviations, medians, and ranges of scores were reported.

All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. MAXQDA 2022 was used for all data analysis and management. We used a hybrid approach of qualitative thematic analysis, which incorporated both 1) a deductive a priori template of codes and themes from the survey items and the Integrated Sustainability Framework [ 31 ] and 2) a data-driven inductive approach [ 46 ]. We established qualitative data trustworthiness by: 1) familiarizing ourselves with the data; 2) generating initial inductive codes; 3) searching for themes; 4) reviewing themes; 5) defining and naming themes; and 6) producing the report [ 47 ]. First, two analysts (MV and SN) independently reviewed three transcripts [ 48 ], generated qualitative codes [ 49 , 50 , 51 ], and created a codebook [ 49 ]. Then, using the codebook, one analyst (MV) coded all nine transcripts. The second analyst (SN) reviewed MV’s coding of all nine transcripts. The two analysts held several meetings to discuss results and resolve any discrepancies. The study team then organized codes into larger thematic categories based on conceptual similarities and a priori research questions. We summarized findings and identified illustrative quotes for each theme.

Mixed methods integration occurred through the design [ 52 ] that connected the survey and interview samples. We analyzed the quantitative and qualitative data to identify areas of confirmation (i.e., findings from both types of data reinforced the results of each other) or expansion (i.e., findings from each dataset expanded insights or addressed complementary aspects) [ 40 ]. While we also analyzed data for areas of discordance (i.e., findings from each dataset contradicted each other) [ 40 ], we did not identify such instances. Further integration occurred through a weaving narrative (e.g., explaining both qualitative and quantitative findings together on a concept-by-concept basis) and the use of a joint display [ 40 ]. In particular, qualitative and quantitative findings are presented together in a joint display with meta-inferences [ 40 , 53 ] guided by the Integrated Sustainability Framework [ 31 ].

Quantitative findings

Table 1 displays the description and summary score for each of the 10 survey domains, with a higher mean score indicating greater perceived positive impact of this domain on SAHELI sustainability. The domains with the highest mean scores are global sustainment indicators, responsiveness to community needs, and responsiveness to community values (M = 4.9 for all 3). Following these, in order of mean scores, are program adaptation (M = 4.8), monitoring, evaluation, and program outcomes (M = 4.7), coalitions, partnerships, and networks (M = 4.6), and communications with partners and the publics (M = 4.6). The domains with the lowest mean scores are funding and financial support (M = 3.6), infrastructure and capacity to support sustainment (M = 4.3), and implementation leadership (M = 4.3). There was also greater variability in responses in these 3 domains (evidenced by higher SD).

Qualitative findings

Figure  1 summarizes SAHELI sustainability facilitators and barriers by setting. Emergent themes are also described below.

Qualitative themes on facilitators of and barriers to SAHELI sustainability by setting

Program characteristics

Facilitators: perceived benefit, need, and fit with the south asian american population.

Participants underscored how SAHELI responded to a critical gap by offering culturally-adapted ASCVD education in the South Asian American community and, relatedly, was a strong fit with target populations. These factors were highlighted as sustainability facilitators. A participant spoke about their motivation to adopt SAHELI because of the high burden of ASCVD among their South Asian American clients and the perceived benefits of SAHELI to promote healthy lifestyle changes and reduce diseases: “[SAHELI provides] really powerful data around medical research and South Asian representation… The higher incidence of heart disease in South Asians that, with proper and early intervention, could be changed also resonated with us… We have a significant South Asian [client] population. Thinking about their wellbeing was compelling to partner with SAHELI” (#08, school district).

Participants highlighted how SAHELI aligned with the South Asian American community’s sociocultural and language needs and preferences (e.g., relevant cooking techniques and physical activity). One participant said: “The South Asian cultural way… we fry food and eat foods with high saturated and trans fats… SAHELI offered cooking techniques, including steam and pressure cooking, with minimal oil that helped with diet. We also had an education session on eating heart-healthy diets…This curriculum was just perfect… All components of SAHELI were culturally tailored” (#05, project implementer). Another described: “[SAHELI] exercises were conducted by South Asian fitness instructors, and the music that was used was Bollywood songs so that people could relate to the music… I feel SAHELI was a very integrated and tailored South Asian program” (#12, project implementer).

Participants described how SAHELI increased attention to ASCVD and enhanced positive perceptions of research in the South Asian community, which were integral to its sustainability. A participant said: “SAHELI has become a movement… it's brought about an empowerment where you take ownership of your health, and you realize that this is important for me… It has brought about understanding of research. In our community, research used to be very intimidating. People wouldn't understand research. They would think it's something that's done with numbers in your ivory tower where intellectual people sit and do research. But community-based research where you can be a part of it, this sort of understanding… I think is a big achievement” (#04, CBO). Another participant shared a similar perspective: “[The value of SAHELI was] to raise awareness, to also teach that community the value of a study because they did not understand that” (#14, public health department).

Inner contextual factors

Facilitator: fit with organizational mission, goal, and activities.

Across settings, participants discussed the fact that SAHELI was well-aligned with their organizational missions, goals, or current activities and structure. This alignment was a sustainability facilitator as it increased the motivation of partners, made it easier to incorporate SAHELI into the operation of the organization, or facilitated resource mobilization. For example, a participant commented on the fit between SAHELI and the mission and goals of their CBO: “[As] one of the oldest South Asian organizations which has a wide network of clients with health issues, [our organization] was the right fit to become a partner and do the whole project on a great scale… Apart from improving the health of the community, the SAHELI program has also brought awareness about community research in our population, and that is a goal of [our organization]: to educate our people on different aspects of health and research. So that way it was also a good fit” (#04, CBO). Another participant echoed similar sentiments: “[SAHELI] was similar to our overall mission within our health and wellness in empowering our community… There was natural alignment to the work that we are doing related to health, with the specific focus of the South Asian community” (#07, school district).

Moreover, a participant highlighted how SAHELI supplemented their organizational activities by bridging a gap in behavioral change promotion in the health system: “We want to be the most trusted health partner for our communities… One-on-one patient-physician interaction is limited. It is hard for a patient to pick up on all the things they need to do, and it's not the ideal setting for behavioral change… SAHELI is the right type of program for that type of behavioral change that allows for nutrition, exercise, and activity” (#10, health system).

Another participant described how SAHELI fit with the program activities and structure of their school district as well as the district’s emphasis on family and community engagement: “With SAHELI, the capacity of the organization to support and devote resources to it came from [our] community schools’ structure. We already had a neighborhood network. We had a South Asian lead and liaison, and this project matched our goals, which is extremely important. If you just approach any schools that are traditionally staffed, and they don’t have the community structure like we do, it would not have worked. The key is to have a very strong commitment to family and community engagement” (#08, school district).

Barriers: Lack of funding or staff and competing priorities

Across settings, participants acknowledged potential existing resources at their organizations to sustain SAHELI. However, a need for funding and dedicated staff members was identified as a sustainability barrier. Given that partnering organizations provide different programs and services, participants found it difficult to redirect funding and personnel to SAHELI. For example, a participant reported: “We have the physical space, and we have the clients. But what about the equipment?… We need to hire at least one or two specifically for this purpose as well. Funding definitely, is one of the barriers as well” (#04, CBO). Another participant said: “As far as the SAHELI intervention components… there may be some sources to support certain components, but the question always becomes if there is enough funding” (#08, school district). Further emphasizing the issue with staffing, a participant discussed: “There would have to be a dedicated staff member to [SAHELI]. There is no room within our existing staff for someone to take that on to be doing weekly sessions” (#14, public health department).

In addition, participants from the public health department and health system also talked about competing organizational priorities as a sustainability barrier. A participant mentioned: “With workforce shortages in health care, it gets even more tricky… [SAHELI sustainability] may not bubble up to the top” (#10, health system). Another participant said: “We're not out of pandemic mode yet… Going back to the staff that would be involved that we have pre-pandemic, while still operating in pandemic mode, and adding on additional programs is difficult” (#14, public health department).

Outer contextual factors

Facilitator: networks within the south asian american population and interorganizational linkages.

Participants from the CBO and public health department identified their networks within the South Asian American community as well as interorganizational linkages as sustainability facilitators. A participant discussed their extensive reach with South Asian American community members: “We are very strong in marketing and our networking. We have a huge network of clients. We have adult daycare and home care programs, and we have about 3,000 clients in both programs. We also have 2,500 homecare workers… We also have a strong network of about 10,000 donors in the community, and we reached out in an exhaustive way to all of them with the SAHELI program over the five years” (#04, CBO).

Interorganizational linkages allowed program partners to broaden the resources that could support SAHELI sustainability. A participant described how partnerships were an effective platform to further amplify SAHELI and reach a larger population: “We partnered with [the village] family services, public libraries, and parks to organize and promote SAHELI. We partnered with some restaurants and grocery stores. We also partnered with [the public health department] and [the health system]. We also worked with [another organization] and promoted SAHELI at the huge picnic they had. In the summer, we promoted it at festivals” (#05, project implementer). A participant from the public health department discussed the value of their interorganizational linkages for SAHELI sustainability: “We helped partner with our local legislator… to promote [SAHELI]… That’s because of… the Health Department name, and being an integral part of the community… Our name helped open doors where they may not have been able to get in as easily” (#14, health department).

Barrier: Challenge of programming selectively for the South Asian American community without including other populations

Participants from the public health department and health system acknowledged that a sustainability barrier would be to continue offering SAHELI exclusively for the South Asian American community. A participant mentioned the challenge of balancing programs for a specific population that experiences health disparities and demonstrating generalizability of the program to broader populations: “If you offer this for the South Asian American population, people are going to ask why not offer that to other populations that also have high degrees of cardiovascular disease. When setting up a program specific to one high-risk patient population… In terms of sustainability, does the finding generalize to all populations or just to one population? The cultural tailoring is really good if you're trying to target specific audiences. But it's harder to maintain funding for something like that because it's focused on a super narrow population… I understand the need to tailor it, and it's focused to produce better outcomes. But the lack of generalizability makes it tricky” (#10, health system). Another participant echoed similar challenges: “The health department serves the entire community… we can't single out one group over another” (#14, public health department).

Planning and strategies for program sustainability

Saheli as a program delivered by community members.

To sustain SAHELI once NIH funding ends, some participants envisioned transitioning the intervention from being a research-centric, researcher-delivered program to a program managed and delivered by community members. Such a transition would require training community members in implementing SAHELI. A participant shared: “Right now the SAHELI intervention is delivered with the research team. But if it is to be sustainable, it has to be taken over by the community members. One way can be it can be done is by training the community members, so that they can take it forward and keep it sustainable… The research team’s work is done after the study ends. The best way to continue would be to train community members and train interested participants…There are many participants, [for whom SAHELI] was very empowering… They were very empowered to take up more responsibility and become better individuals. They were also interested in learning [to teach SAHELI]… That would be a better way of sustaining the program” (#12, project implementer). Another project implementer was enthusiastic about their role in this transition, saying: “I can help train the members and supervise them. For me, it would be even more meaningful to have a multigenerational impact for the community and I think that would eventually sustain the health education we are providing for them” (#05, project implementer).

Integrating SAHELI within the operations of partner organizations

Some participants from the school district and CBO proposed integrating components of SAHELI into other programs offered by their organizations. A participant from the school district described: “We have a structure of neighborhood networks and affinity groups, there are ways to [integrate SAHELI in] some of the activities of those affinity groups… There is a need to connect and maybe have experts at times [for these activities] … having some of those experts come in who are also aware of the [South Asian] cultural connections… It could be a few classes focused on activities to initiate at home and modeling those activities. Community members can collaborate and provide ideas on how to make it sustainable and fun” (#08, school district). A participant from the CBO proposed leveraging their networks of professionals to sustain health education sessions using SAHELI curriculum: “We have access to a good network of professionals and doctors who work or partner with us on a regular basis… We can get the professional speakers on board even without [the research team’s] help to keep SAHELI going. Regular educational sessions about diabetes and cardiovascular through these resources is not a problem… we can do on our own” (#04, CBO).

Expanding SAHELI to other populations

Some participants discussed expanding SAHELI to include other populations and communities as a sustainability strategy. A participant said: “A SAHELI 2.0… To grow your own and empowering our South Asian community, but then also be able to expand the SAHELI model to other communities within our school district, while culturally tailoring the curriculum and the prevention initiatives. We definitely have sought additional grants to continue funding the program itself, the materials, and the people needed to do it” (#07, school district). A project implementer affiliated with the school district said: “To continue SAHELI… we would want to include more families generally and to the community, with health education or exercise classes” (#09, project implementer).

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic

Project implementers reported the adaptation made to SAHELI delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for sustainability. One participant mentioned how virtual delivery increased access for intervention recipients: “Most of the time, participants didn’t want to come because of transportation and time constraints. With Zoom classes, they can save time, stay at home, and continue the group sessions virtually” (#05, project implementer). Meanwhile, another participant acknowledged that virtual delivery did not impact the motivation from the study team but did negatively affect the social connectedness of intervention recipients: “From the team members… everyone seemed highly motivated the entire time. However, patient motivation goes down. If you're just doing it over Zoom and you're not connecting with people, it is the same thing with meetings over Zoom: it's focused on the actual meeting, the small side conversations never occur prior to or after the meeting, so those types of connections were not happening” (#12, project implementers).

Mixed-methods integration of quantitative and qualitative data

Through Table  2 , we provide a joint display that integrates mixed-methods results, identifies meta-inferences, and examines implications of findings. Domains are organized based on the Integrated Sustainability Framework [ 31 ]. Qualitative findings confirmed quantitative findings regarding program characteristics. In addition, qualitative findings provided expansion of understanding for quantitative results regarding outer factors, inner factors, and planning and strategies for sustainability.

Our study queries multisectoral partners’ perspectives on the sustainability of a culturally-adapted lifestyle EBI for South Asian American adults at risk for ASCVD. Using a mixed-methods research design, we identified sustainability barriers and facilitators that were similar across different sectors, as well as those specific to certain settings. Results have important implications for research and practice on sustaining EBIs adapted for populations experiencing health disparities.

Across multisectoral settings and in both qualitative and quantitative findings, SAHELI was seen as highly responsive to the social and cultural factors that impact the South Asian American community’s access to EBIs for ASCVD prevention. Not only did SAHELI focus on health outcomes and behaviors relevant to the community, but it also increased community members’ attention to health issues and positive perceptions of health research. As seen by partners, the sustainability of SAHELI is closely linked with its strong fit and delivery of benefits for South Asians. These results can be attributed to the long history of community engagement embedded in the trial design and implementation. SAHELI was developed based on extensive formative research on South Asian Americans’ explanatory models of coronary heart disease and was adapted from evidence-based cardiovascular and diabetes prevention curricula [ 54 , 55 ] to incorporate the sociocultural context that influences health behaviors [ 13 , 56 , 57 ]. Moreover, it was implemented through longstanding relationships between the research team and multisectoral partners. Community members actively shaped its curriculum and format [ 11 ]. Our findings contribute to the literature on implementation research for populations experiencing health disparities. Implementation science is increasingly prioritizing equity dimensions by calling for designing with implementation in mind, particularly through intervention development with, for, and among underserved communities [ 26 , 58 ]. Culturally-adapted EBIs that confer benefits are likely to be perceived as valuable and have buy-ins, which can enhance program sustainability [ 59 ].

Across sectors, SAHELI was seen as well-aligned with organizational goals or current programs, particularly those with a focus on immigrants, community, family, and health equity. The fit of an innovation within existing organizational mission or procedures, or the ease of the innovation to be embedded within existing services and policies, has been noted as key sustainability facilitators [ 60 , 61 ]. Organizations are more likely to support continued use and allocate time, staff, and internal resources to projects that they deem suitable and significant [ 60 , 62 ]. Alignment is also central to integrating program components into established tasks, thereby maintaining program activities to a certain extent even after the original funding period ends [ 60 ]. For example, in our study, partners from the school district and CBO described their planned incorporation of SAHELI components into their pre-existing health education programs when research funding ended.

Reported key barriers included a lack of funding and staff and low infrastructure and capacity to support sustainment. This finding likely stems from the complex nature of SAHELI as an NIH-funded research study to evaluate intervention effects on clinical and behavioral outcomes. SAHELI protocols required the use of clinical screening equipment and accelerometers to track physical activity [ 13 ], which is resource-intensive and neither feasible nor necessary for all partner organizations to sustain. Furthermore, the current healthcare reimbursement policy landscape does not prioritize prevention programs, and thus the cost of community implementation of lifestyle EBIs for cardiovascular health is often not sustainably covered [ 63 , 64 ].

Funding and resources have been well-studied as important factors impacting intervention sustainability and scalability [ 65 , 66 , 67 ]. Long-term program operations can be enhanced by diversifying funding sources [ 68 , 69 ], including funding from philanthropic foundations, county and state governments, revenue generations, Medicare reimbursement, and individual donors [ 70 , 71 ]. Early strategic planning is critical as it takes considerable time to identify appropriate funding sources and apply for them [ 71 ].

Partners proposed several strategies to enhance SAHELI sustainability, including transitioning SAHELI from being an intensive, researcher-delivered program to a program managed and delivered by community members [ 64 ] or integrating elements of SAHELI (e.g., health education classes) into pre-existing programs offered by their organizations [ 72 ]. Drawing on the experience of implementing SAHELI, partners also discussed offering lifestyle or cardiovascular health programs for other populations. Moreover, partners described adaptations made due to COVID-19 and their impacts on program delivery. Recent literature has advocated for a dynamic conceptualization of sustainability, suggesting that changes are inevitable and can lead to better EBI fit and impact, instead of the traditional “static” view that resists EBI modifications [ 24 ]. Our findings resonate with this perspective. Studies on real-world implementation of DPP have also noted that while the DPP itself is labor- and time-intensive, making changes to the implementation protocol to cater to local context and resources can help bolster its sustainability [ 73 , 74 , 75 ].

To facilitate adapting complex, resource-intensive interventions to a specific community and context (as opposed to attempting to keep the EBI “as is”), it may be useful to separate the core functions of an EBI (i.e., the basic purposes of the EBI) from the forms (i.e., what may be the strategies to achieve each function) [ 76 , 77 ]. Additionally, Movsisyan and colleagues have published literature reviews on guidance and practices for adapting population health EBIs to new contexts [ 78 , 79 ]. Emergent literature also provides tools such as the Framework for Reporting Adaptations and Modifications-Expanded (FRAME), which can be useful in documenting how, when, and why EBIs may be modified [ 80 ].

Similar to funding acquisition, program modification can benefit from planning at an early stage [ 24 , 58 , 81 ]. Strategic planning for modification can be done through ongoing monitoring of context and outcomes and fostering effective dialogues with partners [ 20 , 23 ]. These strategies are also key to program sustainability [ 20 , 23 , 61 ]. In this study, partners gave high quantitative scores for the domains of monitoring, evaluation, and program outcomes, and communications with partners and the public [ 20 , 23 ]. Throughout project implementation, the research team actively presented interim progress, identified challenges (e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic), and sought partners’ feedback through regular meetings, which likely contributed to observed outcomes.

Partners from the public health department and health system discussed the challenges associated with offering SAHELI exclusively for South Asian Americans. These partners recognized the benefits of culturally-adapted EBIs to create meaningful impacts and reach a specific population. However, they also faced pressures to ensure their programs appeal to a broader constituency. Partners from these two settings also discussed competing priorities (e.g., health issues or programs that are perceived as more urgent) that are sustainability barriers. These obstacles can undermine culturally-adapted programs to address health disparities in populations from minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds. Resolving the tension between meeting the needs and experiences of a specific population with health disparities while also offering programming for broader populations [ 82 ] is central to advancing health equity. It is critical to recognize that certain populations experience specific challenges or obstacles to participation or uptake of EBIs, and thus culture-specific or adapted programs are warranted [ 58 ].

Strengths and limitations

Strengths of our study include the use of theory-driven framework (Integrated Sustainability Framework) [ 31 ] and survey measurements (PSAT [ 20 ] and SMSS [ 23 ]) to assess sustainability. We included partners from diverse settings: CBO, health system, public health department, and school district. We also integrated mixed-methods data at multiple levels [ 40 ] by using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, merging quantitative and qualitative data for analysis, weaving narrative, and providing a joint display to explain how one data source confirmed or expanded the other [ 40 ], which enriches the interpretation and validity of findings. Nevertheless, given the small sample size of organizations and partners, our study may have limitations in terms of the transferability of results to different contexts. While we assessed sustainability perspectives at one point in time, future studies could consider multiple assessments at different points in the implementation process.

Through a mixed-methods design, we analyzed multisectoral barriers and facilitators to the sustainability of a culturally-adapted lifestyle EBI for South Asian American adults at risk for ASCVD. Findings highlight the importance of aligning the design and implementation of health equity interventions with community needs and values as well as organizational activities and goals to ensure sustainability. Successful long-term operation necessitates sufficient funding, capable infrastructure, and adequate staff, which can be challenging for grant-funded prevention interventions. Context-specific program modification through communication across sectors can also ensure sustainability.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request and with the approval of the Northwestern University Institutional Review Board.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the participants and study teams at Metropolitan Asian Family Services, Endeavor HealthSystem, Village of Skokie Health and Human Services, Skokie-Morton Grove District 69, and Northwestern University who contributed to the SAHELI trial. The authors are solely responsible for the design and conduct of this study, all study analyses, the drafting and editing of the paper and its final contents.

This study was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (1R01HL132978, K24HL155897). Dr. Milkie Vu was supported by the National Institutes of Health (National Cancer Institute, T32CA193193 and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, KL2TR001424).

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MV was responsible for study conception, design of the work, acquisition, analysis and interpretation of data, and drafting and revision of the manuscript. SN and NL were responsible for the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data as well as the revision of the manuscript. BS and CHB were responsible for the interpretation of data and revision of the manuscript. NK was responsible for study conception, design of the work, interpretation of data, and revision of the manuscript.

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Vu, M., Nedunchezhian, S., Lancki, N. et al. A mixed-methods, theory-driven assessment of the sustainability of a multi-sectoral preventive intervention for South Asian Americans at risk for cardiovascular disease. Implement Sci Commun 5 , 89 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43058-024-00626-4

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