qualitative research methods survey

Qualitative study design: Surveys & questionnaires

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Surveys & questionnaires

Qualitative surveys use open-ended questions to produce long-form written/typed answers. Questions will aim to reveal opinions, experiences, narratives or accounts. Often a useful precursor to interviews or focus groups as they help identify initial themes or issues to then explore further in the research. Surveys can be used iteratively, being changed and modified over the course of the research to elicit new information. 

Structured Interviews may follow a similar form of open questioning.  

Qualitative surveys frequently include quantitative questions to establish elements such as age, nationality etc. 

Qualitative surveys aim to elicit a detailed response to an open-ended topic question in the participant’s own words.  Like quantitative surveys, there are three main methods for using qualitative surveys including face to face surveys, phone surveys, and online surveys. Each method of surveying has strengths and limitations.

Face to face surveys  

• Researcher asks participants one or more open-ended questions about a topic, typically while in view of the participant’s facial expressions and other behaviours while answering. Being able to view the respondent’s reactions enables the researcher to ask follow-up questions to elicit a more detailed response, and to follow up on any facial or behavioural cues that seem at odds with what the participants is explicitly saying.
• Face to face qualitative survey responses are likely to be audio recorded and transcribed into text to ensure all detail is captured; however, some surveys may include both quantitative and qualitative questions using a structured or semi-structured format of questioning, and in this case the researcher may simply write down key points from the participant’s response.

Telephone surveys

• Similar to the face to face method, but without researcher being able to see participant’s facial or behavioural responses to questions asked. This means the researcher may miss key cues that would help them ask further questions to clarify or extend participant responses to their questions, and instead relies on vocal cues.

Online surveys

• Open-ended questions are presented to participants in written format via email or within an online survey tool, often alongside quantitative survey questions on the same topic.
• Researchers may provide some contextualising information or key definitions to help ‘frame’ how participants view the qualitative survey questions, since they can’t directly ask the researcher about it in real time. 
• Participants are requested to responses to questions in text ‘in some detail’ to explain their perspective or experience to researchers; this can result in diversity of responses (brief to detailed).
• Researchers can not always probe or clarify participant responses to online qualitative survey questions which can result in data from these responses being cryptic or vague to the researcher.
• Online surveys can collect a greater number of responses in a set period of time compared to face to face and phone survey approaches, so while data may be less detailed, there is more of it overall to compensate.

Qualitative surveys can help a study early on, in finding out the issues/needs/experiences to be explored further in an interview or focus group. 

Surveys can be amended and re-run based on responses providing an evolving and responsive method of research. 

Online surveys will receive typed responses reducing translation by the researcher 

Online surveys can be delivered broadly across a wide population with asynchronous delivery/response. 

Limitations

Hand-written notes will need to be transcribed (time-consuming) for digital study and kept physically for reference. 

Distance (or online) communication can be open to misinterpretations that cannot be corrected at the time. 

Questions can be leading/misleading, eliciting answers that are not core to the research subject. Researchers must aim to write a neutral question which does not give away the researchers expectations. 

Even with transcribed/digital responses analysis can be long and detailed, though not as much as in an interview. 

Surveys may be left incomplete if performed online or taken by research assistants not well trained in giving the survey/structured interview. 

Narrow sampling may skew the results of the survey. 

Example questions

Here are some example survey questions which are open ended and require a long form written response:

• Tell us why you became a doctor? 
• What do you expect from this health service? 
• How do you explain the low levels of financial investment in mental health services? (WHO, 2007) 

Example studies

• Davey, L. , Clarke, V. and Jenkinson, E. (2019), Living with alopecia areata: an online qualitative survey study. British Journal of Dermatology, 180 1377-1389. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/doi/10.1111%2Fbjd.17463    
• Richardson, J. (2004). What Patients Expect From Complementary Therapy: A Qualitative Study. American Journal of Public Health, 94(6), 1049–1053. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.deakin.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=s3h&AN=13270563&site=eds-live&scope=site  
• Saraceno, B., van Ommeren, M., Batniji, R., Cohen, A., Gureje, O., Mahoney, J., ... & Underhill, C. (2007). Barriers to improvement of mental health services in low-income and middle-income countries. The Lancet, 370(9593), 1164-1174. Retrieved from https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/science/article/pii/S014067360761263X?via%3Dihub  

Below has more detail of the Lancet article including actual survey questions at: 

• World Health Organization. (2007.) Expert opinion on barriers and facilitating factors for the implementation of existing mental health knowledge in mental health services. Geneva: World Health Organization. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/44808
• Green, J. 1961-author., & Thorogood, N. (2018). Qualitative methods for health research. SAGE. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.deakin.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat00097a&AN=deakin.b4151167&authtype=sso&custid=deakin&site=eds-live&scope=site   
• JANSEN, H. The Logic of Qualitative Survey Research and its Position in the Field of Social Research Methods. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 11(2), Retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1450/2946  
• Neilsen Norman Group, (2019). 28 Tips for Creating Great Qualitative Surveys. Retrieved from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/qualitative-surveys/   
• << Previous: Documents
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• Last Updated: Apr 8, 2024 11:12 AM
• URL: https://deakin.libguides.com/qualitative-study-designs

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Qualitative Surveys: What They Are, Benefits, and How to Conduct Them

Qualitative surveys have been an essential part of research as they help uncover aspects related to respondents’ emotions, behaviors, and perceptions beyond what numbers can convey.

This article will delve into qualitative surveys in detail, so you can effectively use them in your next study.

What are Qualitative Surveys?

Qualitative surveys are a research tool that employs open-ended questions to gather opinions, experiences, narratives, or accounts from respondents. 

These surveys are useful for generating information through a conversation that identifies initial topics or issues to explore further in research . 

Qualitative surveys seek comments, opinions, suggestions, and other types of responses that are not as easy to classify and quantify as numbers. Typically, fewer people may be surveyed compared to quantitative surveys, but richer data can be obtained.

Benefits of Qualitative Surveys

Opinions can change and evolve throughout a conversation; qualitative research can capture this. Here are some benefits of using qualitative surveys:

Capture Changing Attitudes

Researchers can quickly adapt questions, change the environment, or other variables to enhance responses if useful data isn’t obtained. Qualitative research can capture changing attitudes within a target group, such as consumers of a product or service or attitudes in the workplace.

Greater Flexibility

If responses don’t align with researcher expectations, qualitative data is equally useful for adding context and perhaps explaining something that numbers alone cannot reveal.

In-Depth Explanation

Qualitative research methods don’t have the same limitations as quantitative methods. When collecting non-numeric data, there’s the potential to provide explanations that reveal more about the data.

Explore Uncharted Areas

Qualitative surveys allow speculative research into areas that researchers find valuable. Capturing qualitative data empowers researchers to be more speculative about the areas they choose to investigate and how to do so.

Enhance Participation

Using qualitative surveys allows for a more direct approach to research participants , who may feel more listened to and motivated to complete the survey .

Types of Qualitative Surveys

There are numerous types of Qualitative Surveys, each offering a distinct approach to comprehending human experiences and perspectives. The selection of a method depends on research objectives, context, and available resources.

Some common types of qualitative surveys include:

Face-to-Face Surveys

In face-to-face surveys , the researcher asks participants one or more open-ended questions on a topic, usually observing participants’ facial expressions and other behaviors while they respond.

Being able to see participants’ reactions allows the researcher to ask follow-up questions for more detailed responses and record any facial or behavioral cues that seem contrary to what participants are explicitly saying.

Phone Surveys

Phone-based qualitative surveys are similar to face-to-face methods, but the researcher cannot see participants’ facial or behavioral responses to the questions asked. This means the researcher must rely on vocal clues.

Online Qualitative Surveys

Online surveys can collect more responses within a shorter time frame than in-person or phone surveys. Although the data may be less detailed, it is generally more abundant to compensate.

Open-ended questions are presented to participants in written format via email or online survey software , often alongside quantitative survey questions on the same topic.

Researchers may provide contextual information or key definitions to help “frame” how participants view qualitative survey questions, as they cannot directly ask the researcher about it in real-time.

Observational Studies

Observational studies involve systematically observing participants in their natural environments. This method provides insights into behaviors, interactions, and contextual factors.

Grounded Theory

Grounded theory aims to develop theories from the data itself, allowing researchers to derive concepts and relationships directly from participants’ responses.

Focus Groups

In a focus group, a small group of participants discuss a specific topic or issue under the guidance of a moderator. This method encourages participants to interact with each other, generating rich discussions.

How to Conduct a Qualitative Survey

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a qualitative survey in 7 steps:

1. Set Clear Objectives for Your Survey

Determine the purpose of your survey and be clear about what you want to know and the information you expect to gather. Plan precisely how you’ll record response data, including using specific tables or charts that are useful for report generation.

2. Craft Questions that Probe “Why” and “How”

Qualitative research aims to take a concrete idea, delve into why it exists, and determine how it has come about. 

With that in mind, your survey questions should be phrased and sequenced to elicit these types of insights. For instance, use open-ended text questions.

3. Place Key Questions at the Start

If you have a set of questions that you deem more important than others, place these questions at the beginning of your survey. Respondents may become fatigued after answering multiple questions, and if respondents stop responding to the survey after partially completing it, their response data will be severely affected.

Ensuring each question serves a purpose can mitigate survey fatigue, and it’s also a good idea to place the most important questions at the beginning.

4. Be Concise in Each Question and the Number of Questions

Responses to survey questions should be intuitive and straightforward for respondents. Therefore, complex instructions shouldn’t be necessary. 

Furthermore, each additional question reduces response rates, decreases validity, and makes all results suspect. 

People are much more likely to participate in single-question surveys. Therefore, realistically estimate the time needed to complete the survey, as the more open-ended questions and complex classifications you ask people, the more respondents you’ll lose.

5. Test Your Survey

Before using your survey in the actual research, it’s important to conduct a test to determine if the questions you’ve developed yield the responses you expect. This involves creating a draft of the questions and obtaining feedback from collaborators.

Test the survey system’s format with a small group of testers from your target audience , collecting feedback on each page, and examine the results of the test survey to ensure that the collected data is in a useful and analyzable format.

6. Code Text Responses

Researchers often talk about coding data during analysis. This involves converting text responses into something countable so that the most important trends can be extracted and communicated in a way that makes sense to the report’s audience. 

Coding text responses allows you to capture rich textual data for understanding and quoting.

Create Your Qualitative Surveys with QuestionPro!

QuestionPro is currently the most comprehensive tool for conducting qualitative surveys due to its integration of open-ended questions and as software for qualitative data analysis.

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Your ultimate guide to qualitative research (with methods and examples).

16 min read You may be already using qualitative research and want to check your understanding, or you may be starting from the beginning. Learn about qualitative research methods and how you can best use them for maximum effect.

What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research is a research method that collects non-numerical data. Typically, it goes beyond the information that quantitative research provides (which we will cover below) because it is used to gain an understanding of underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations.

Qualitative research methods focus on the thoughts, feelings, reasons, motivations, and values of a participant, to understand why people act in the way they do .

In this way, qualitative research can be described as naturalistic research, looking at naturally-occurring social events within natural settings. So, qualitative researchers would describe their part in social research as the ‘vehicle’ for collecting the qualitative research data.

Qualitative researchers discovered this by looking at primary and secondary sources where data is represented in non-numerical form. This can include collecting qualitative research data types like quotes, symbols, images, and written testimonials.

These data types tell qualitative researchers subjective information. While these aren’t facts in themselves, conclusions can be interpreted out of qualitative that can help to provide valuable context.

Because of this, qualitative research is typically viewed as explanatory in nature and is often used in social research, as this gives a window into the behavior and actions of people.

It can be a good research approach for health services research or clinical research projects.

Free eBook: The qualitative research design handbook

Quantitative vs qualitative research

In order to compare qualitative and quantitative research methods, let’s explore what quantitative research is first, before exploring how it differs from qualitative research.

Quantitative research

Quantitative research is the research method of collecting quantitative research data – data that can be converted into numbers or numerical data, which can be easily quantified, compared, and analyzed .

Quantitative research methods deal with primary and secondary sources where data is represented in numerical form. This can include closed-question poll results, statistics, and census information or demographic data.

Quantitative research data tends to be used when researchers are interested in understanding a particular moment in time and examining data sets over time to find trends and patterns.

The difference between quantitative and qualitative research methodology

While qualitative research is defined as data that supplies non-numerical information, quantitative research focuses on numerical data.

In general, if you’re interested in measuring something or testing a hypothesis, use quantitative research methods. If you want to explore ideas, thoughts, and meanings, use qualitative research methods.

While qualitative research helps you to properly define, promote and sell your products, don’t rely on qualitative research methods alone because qualitative findings can’t always be reliably repeated. Qualitative research is directional, not empirical.

The best statistical analysis research uses a combination of empirical data and human experience ( quantitative research and qualitative research ) to tell the story and gain better and deeper insights, quickly.

Where both qualitative and quantitative methods are not used, qualitative researchers will find that using one without the other leaves you with missing answers.

For example, if a retail company wants to understand whether a new product line of shoes will perform well in the target market:

• Qualitative research methods could be used with a sample of target customers, which would provide subjective reasons why they’d be likely to purchase or not purchase the shoes, while
• Quantitative research methods into the historical customer sales information on shoe-related products would provide insights into the sales performance, and likely future performance of the new product range.

Approaches to qualitative research

There are five approaches to qualitative research methods:

• Grounded theory: Grounded theory relates to where qualitative researchers come to a stronger hypothesis through induction, all throughout the process of collecting qualitative research data and forming connections. After an initial question to get started, qualitative researchers delve into information that is grouped into ideas or codes, which grow and develop into larger categories, as the qualitative research goes on. At the end of the qualitative research, the researcher may have a completely different hypothesis, based on evidence and inquiry, as well as the initial question.
• Ethnographic research : Ethnographic research is where researchers embed themselves into the environment of the participant or group in order to understand the culture and context of activities and behavior. This is dependent on the involvement of the researcher, and can be subject to researcher interpretation bias and participant observer bias . However, it remains a great way to allow researchers to experience a different ‘world’.
• Action research: With the action research process, both researchers and participants work together to make a change. This can be through taking action, researching and reflecting on the outcomes. Through collaboration, the collective comes to a result, though the way both groups interact and how they affect each other gives insights into their critical thinking skills.
• Phenomenological research: Researchers seek to understand the meaning of an event or behavior phenomenon by describing and interpreting participant’s life experiences. This qualitative research process understands that people create their own structured reality (‘the social construction of reality’), based on their past experiences. So, by viewing the way people intentionally live their lives, we’re able to see the experiential meaning behind why they live as they do.
• Narrative research: Narrative research, or narrative inquiry, is where researchers examine the way stories are told by participants, and how they explain their experiences, as a way of explaining the meaning behind their life choices and events. This qualitative research can arise from using journals, conversational stories, autobiographies or letters, as a few narrative research examples. The narrative is subjective to the participant, so we’re able to understand their views from what they’ve documented/spoken.

Qualitative research methods can use structured research instruments for data collection, like:

Surveys for individual views

A survey is a simple-to-create and easy-to-distribute qualitative research method, which helps gather information from large groups of participants quickly. Traditionally, paper-based surveys can now be made online, so costs can stay quite low.

Qualitative research questions tend to be open questions that ask for more information and provide a text box to allow for unconstrained comments.

Examples include:

• Asking participants to keep a written or a video diary for a period of time to document their feelings and thoughts
• In-Home-Usage tests: Buyers use your product for a period of time and report their experience

Surveys for group consensus (Delphi survey)

A Delphi survey may be used as a way to bring together participants and gain a consensus view over several rounds of questions. It differs from traditional surveys where results go to the researcher only. Instead, results go to participants as well, so they can reflect and consider all responses before another round of questions are submitted.

This can be useful to do as it can help researchers see what variance is among the group of participants and see the process of how consensus was reached.

• Asking participants to act as a fake jury for a trial and revealing parts of the case over several rounds to see how opinions change. At the end, the fake jury must make a unanimous decision about the defendant on trial.
• Asking participants to comment on the versions of a product being developed , as the changes are made and their feedback is taken onboard. At the end, participants must decide whether the product is ready to launch .

Semi-structured interviews

Interviews are a great way to connect with participants, though they require time from the research team to set up and conduct, especially if they’re done face-to-face.

Researchers may also have issues connecting with participants in different geographical regions. The researcher uses a set of predefined open-ended questions, though more ad-hoc questions can be asked depending on participant answers.

• Conducting a phone interview with participants to run through their feedback on a product . During the conversation, researchers can go ‘off-script’ and ask more probing questions for clarification or build on the insights.

Focus groups

Participants are brought together into a group, where a particular topic is discussed. It is researcher-led and usually occurs in-person in a mutually accessible location, to allow for easy communication between participants in focus groups.

In focus groups , the researcher uses a set of predefined open-ended questions, though more ad-hoc questions can be asked depending on participant answers.

• Asking participants to do UX tests, which are interface usability tests to show how easily users can complete certain tasks

Direct observation

This is a form of ethnographic research where researchers will observe participants’ behavior in a naturalistic environment. This can be great for understanding the actions in the culture and context of a participant’s setting.

This qualitative research method is prone to researcher bias as it is the researcher that must interpret the actions and reactions of participants. Their findings can be impacted by their own beliefs, values, and inferences.

• Embedding yourself in the location of your buyers to understand how a product would perform against the values and norms of that society

Qualitative data types and category types

Qualitative research methods often deliver information in the following qualitative research data types:

• Written testimonials

Through contextual analysis of the information, researchers can assign participants to category types:

• Social class
• Political alignment
• Most likely to purchase a product
• Their preferred training learning style

Advantages of qualitative research

• Useful for complex situations: Qualitative research on its own is great when dealing with complex issues, however, providing background context using quantitative facts can give a richer and wider understanding of a topic. In these cases, quantitative research may not be enough.
• A window into the ‘why’: Qualitative research can give you a window into the deeper meaning behind a participant’s answer. It can help you uncover the larger ‘why’ that can’t always be seen by analyzing numerical data.
• Can help improve customer experiences: In service industries where customers are crucial, like in private health services, gaining information about a customer’s experience through health research studies can indicate areas where services can be improved.

Disadvantages of qualitative research

• You need to ask the right question: Doing qualitative research may require you to consider what the right question is to uncover the underlying thinking behind a behavior. This may need probing questions to go further, which may suit a focus group or face-to-face interview setting better.
• Results are interpreted: As qualitative research data is written, spoken, and often nuanced, interpreting the data results can be difficult as they come in non-numerical formats. This might make it harder to know if you can accept or reject your hypothesis.
• More bias: There are lower levels of control to qualitative research methods, as they can be subject to biases like confirmation bias, researcher bias, and observation bias. This can have a knock-on effect on the validity and truthfulness of the qualitative research data results.

How to use qualitative research to your business’s advantage?

Qualitative methods help improve your products and marketing in many different ways:

• Understand the emotional connections to your brand
• Identify obstacles to purchase
• Uncover doubts and confusion about your messaging
• Find missing product features
• Improve the usability of your website, app, or chatbot experience
• Learn about how consumers talk about your product
• See how buyers compare your brand to others in the competitive set
• Learn how an organization’s employees evaluate and select vendors

6 steps to conducting good qualitative research

Businesses can benefit from qualitative research by using it to understand the meaning behind data types. There are several steps to this:

• Define your problem or interest area: What do you observe is happening and is it frequent? Identify the data type/s you’re observing.
• Create a hypothesis: Ask yourself what could be the causes for the situation with those qualitative research data types.
• Plan your qualitative research: Use structured qualitative research instruments like surveys, focus groups, or interviews to ask questions that test your hypothesis.
• Data Collection: Collect qualitative research data and understand what your data types are telling you. Once data is collected on different types over long time periods, you can analyze it and give insights into changing attitudes and language patterns.
• Data analysis: Does your information support your hypothesis? (You may need to redo the qualitative research with other variables to see if the results improve)
• Effectively present the qualitative research data: Communicate the results in a clear and concise way to help other people understand the findings.

Qualitative data analysis

Evaluating qualitative research can be tough when there are several analytics platforms to manage and lots of subjective data sources to compare.

Qualtrics provides a number of qualitative research analysis tools, like Text iQ , powered by Qualtrics iQ, provides powerful machine learning and native language processing to help you discover patterns and trends in text.

This also provides you with:

• Sentiment analysis — a technique to help identify the underlying sentiment (say positive, neutral, and/or negative) in qualitative research text responses
• Topic detection/categorisation — this technique is the grouping or bucketing of similar themes that can are relevant for the business & the industry (eg. ‘Food quality’, ‘Staff efficiency’ or ‘Product availability’)

How Qualtrics products can enhance & simplify the qualitative research process

Even in today’s data-obsessed marketplace, qualitative data is valuable – maybe even more so because it helps you establish an authentic human connection to your customers. If qualitative research doesn’t play a role to inform your product and marketing strategy, your decisions aren’t as effective as they could be.

The Qualtrics XM system gives you an all-in-one, integrated solution to help you all the way through conducting qualitative research. From survey creation and data collection to textual analysis and data reporting, it can help all your internal teams gain insights from your subjective and categorical data.

Qualitative methods are catered through templates or advanced survey designs. While you can manually collect data and conduct data analysis in a spreadsheet program, this solution helps you automate the process of qualitative research, saving you time and administration work.

Using computational techniques helps you to avoid human errors, and participant results come in are already incorporated into the analysis in real-time.

Our key tools, Text IQ™ and Driver IQ™ make analyzing subjective and categorical data easy and simple. Choose to highlight key findings based on topic, sentiment, or frequency. The choice is yours.

Some examples of your workspace in action, using drag and drop to create fast data visualizations quickly:

Related resources

Market intelligence 10 min read, marketing insights 11 min read, ethnographic research 11 min read, qualitative vs quantitative research 13 min read, qualitative research questions 11 min read, qualitative research design 12 min read, primary vs secondary research 14 min read, request demo.

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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.

Qualitative Research: Surveys

• Getting Started
• Focus Groups
• Observation
• Case Studies
• Data Collection
• Cleaning Text
• Analysis Tools
• Institutional Review

Photo: http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/survsel.ph p

Survey Research Topics

DISM Tipsheets

What is surveying?

• Involves gathering information from individuals by using a questionnaire.
• Can generate standardized, quantifiable, empirical data as well as qualitative data.
• Can reach large number of respondents.
• Development involves creating questions and response categories; writing up background information and instructions; and determining organization, layout and design.

Duke Resources for help with Surveys

• Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology Provides advising on individual projects, funding opportunities, and training in survey research methods.  
• Qualtrics Survey tool that can create surveys with open-ended questions; free access with Duke NetID
• Encyclopedia of Survey Research Methods (e-book) Provides information about important topics across the entirety of survey methodology; serves as a “first place” to turn to learn about aspects of survey methodology.

Suggested Readings

• Fowler, F. J. (1995). Improving survey questions: Design and evaluation . Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
• Groves, R. M., Fowler, F. J., Couper, M. P., Lepkowski, J. M., Singer, E., Tourangeau, R. (2004). Survey methodology . NY: John Wiley & Sons.
• Oppenheimer, A.N. (1999). Questionnaire design, interviewing, and attitude measurement . London: Pinter.
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• Doing Survey Research | A Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

Doing Survey Research | A Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

Published on 6 May 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 10 October 2022.

Survey research means collecting information about a group of people by asking them questions and analysing the results. To conduct an effective survey, follow these six steps:

• Determine who will participate in the survey
• Decide the type of survey (mail, online, or in-person)
• Design the survey questions and layout
• Distribute the survey
• Analyse the responses
• Write up the results

Surveys are a flexible method of data collection that can be used in many different types of research .

Table of contents

What are surveys used for, step 1: define the population and sample, step 2: decide on the type of survey, step 3: design the survey questions, step 4: distribute the survey and collect responses, step 5: analyse the survey results, step 6: write up the survey results, frequently asked questions about surveys.

Surveys are used as a method of gathering data in many different fields. They are a good choice when you want to find out about the characteristics, preferences, opinions, or beliefs of a group of people.

Common uses of survey research include:

• Social research: Investigating the experiences and characteristics of different social groups
• Market research: Finding out what customers think about products, services, and companies
• Health research: Collecting data from patients about symptoms and treatments
• Politics: Measuring public opinion about parties and policies
• Psychology: Researching personality traits, preferences, and behaviours

Surveys can be used in both cross-sectional studies , where you collect data just once, and longitudinal studies , where you survey the same sample several times over an extended period.

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Before you start conducting survey research, you should already have a clear research question that defines what you want to find out. Based on this question, you need to determine exactly who you will target to participate in the survey.

Populations

The target population is the specific group of people that you want to find out about. This group can be very broad or relatively narrow. For example:

• The population of Brazil
• University students in the UK
• Second-generation immigrants in the Netherlands
• Customers of a specific company aged 18 to 24
• British transgender women over the age of 50

Your survey should aim to produce results that can be generalised to the whole population. That means you need to carefully define exactly who you want to draw conclusions about.

It’s rarely possible to survey the entire population of your research – it would be very difficult to get a response from every person in Brazil or every university student in the UK. Instead, you will usually survey a sample from the population.

The sample size depends on how big the population is. You can use an online sample calculator to work out how many responses you need.

There are many sampling methods that allow you to generalise to broad populations. In general, though, the sample should aim to be representative of the population as a whole. The larger and more representative your sample, the more valid your conclusions.

There are two main types of survey:

• A questionnaire , where a list of questions is distributed by post, online, or in person, and respondents fill it out themselves
• An interview , where the researcher asks a set of questions by phone or in person and records the responses

Which type you choose depends on the sample size and location, as well as the focus of the research.

Questionnaires

Sending out a paper survey by post is a common method of gathering demographic information (for example, in a government census of the population).

• You can easily access a large sample.
• You have some control over who is included in the sample (e.g., residents of a specific region).
• The response rate is often low.

Online surveys are a popular choice for students doing dissertation research , due to the low cost and flexibility of this method. There are many online tools available for constructing surveys, such as SurveyMonkey and Google Forms .

• You can quickly access a large sample without constraints on time or location.
• The data is easy to process and analyse.
• The anonymity and accessibility of online surveys mean you have less control over who responds.

If your research focuses on a specific location, you can distribute a written questionnaire to be completed by respondents on the spot. For example, you could approach the customers of a shopping centre or ask all students to complete a questionnaire at the end of a class.

• You can screen respondents to make sure only people in the target population are included in the sample.
• You can collect time- and location-specific data (e.g., the opinions of a shop’s weekday customers).
• The sample size will be smaller, so this method is less suitable for collecting data on broad populations.

Oral interviews are a useful method for smaller sample sizes. They allow you to gather more in-depth information on people’s opinions and preferences. You can conduct interviews by phone or in person.

• You have personal contact with respondents, so you know exactly who will be included in the sample in advance.
• You can clarify questions and ask for follow-up information when necessary.
• The lack of anonymity may cause respondents to answer less honestly, and there is more risk of researcher bias.

Like questionnaires, interviews can be used to collect quantitative data : the researcher records each response as a category or rating and statistically analyses the results. But they are more commonly used to collect qualitative data : the interviewees’ full responses are transcribed and analysed individually to gain a richer understanding of their opinions and feelings.

Next, you need to decide which questions you will ask and how you will ask them. It’s important to consider:

• The type of questions
• The content of the questions
• The phrasing of the questions
• The ordering and layout of the survey

Open-ended vs closed-ended questions

There are two main forms of survey questions: open-ended and closed-ended. Many surveys use a combination of both.

Closed-ended questions give the respondent a predetermined set of answers to choose from. A closed-ended question can include:

• A binary answer (e.g., yes/no or agree/disagree )
• A scale (e.g., a Likert scale with five points ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree )
• A list of options with a single answer possible (e.g., age categories)
• A list of options with multiple answers possible (e.g., leisure interests)

Closed-ended questions are best for quantitative research . They provide you with numerical data that can be statistically analysed to find patterns, trends, and correlations .

Open-ended questions are best for qualitative research. This type of question has no predetermined answers to choose from. Instead, the respondent answers in their own words.

Open questions are most common in interviews, but you can also use them in questionnaires. They are often useful as follow-up questions to ask for more detailed explanations of responses to the closed questions.

The content of the survey questions

To ensure the validity and reliability of your results, you need to carefully consider each question in the survey. All questions should be narrowly focused with enough context for the respondent to answer accurately. Avoid questions that are not directly relevant to the survey’s purpose.

When constructing closed-ended questions, ensure that the options cover all possibilities. If you include a list of options that isn’t exhaustive, you can add an ‘other’ field.

Phrasing the survey questions

In terms of language, the survey questions should be as clear and precise as possible. Tailor the questions to your target population, keeping in mind their level of knowledge of the topic.

Use language that respondents will easily understand, and avoid words with vague or ambiguous meanings. Make sure your questions are phrased neutrally, with no bias towards one answer or another.

Ordering the survey questions

The questions should be arranged in a logical order. Start with easy, non-sensitive, closed-ended questions that will encourage the respondent to continue.

If the survey covers several different topics or themes, group together related questions. You can divide a questionnaire into sections to help respondents understand what is being asked in each part.

If a question refers back to or depends on the answer to a previous question, they should be placed directly next to one another.

Before you start, create a clear plan for where, when, how, and with whom you will conduct the survey. Determine in advance how many responses you require and how you will gain access to the sample.

When you are satisfied that you have created a strong research design suitable for answering your research questions, you can conduct the survey through your method of choice – by post, online, or in person.

There are many methods of analysing the results of your survey. First you have to process the data, usually with the help of a computer program to sort all the responses. You should also cleanse the data by removing incomplete or incorrectly completed responses.

If you asked open-ended questions, you will have to code the responses by assigning labels to each response and organising them into categories or themes. You can also use more qualitative methods, such as thematic analysis , which is especially suitable for analysing interviews.

Statistical analysis is usually conducted using programs like SPSS or Stata. The same set of survey data can be subject to many analyses.

Finally, when you have collected and analysed all the necessary data, you will write it up as part of your thesis, dissertation , or research paper .

In the methodology section, you describe exactly how you conducted the survey. You should explain the types of questions you used, the sampling method, when and where the survey took place, and the response rate. You can include the full questionnaire as an appendix and refer to it in the text if relevant.

Then introduce the analysis by describing how you prepared the data and the statistical methods you used to analyse it. In the results section, you summarise the key results from your analysis.

A Likert scale is a rating scale that quantitatively assesses opinions, attitudes, or behaviours. It is made up of four or more questions that measure a single attitude or trait when response scores are combined.

To use a Likert scale in a survey , you present participants with Likert-type questions or statements, and a continuum of items, usually with five or seven possible responses, to capture their degree of agreement.

Individual Likert-type questions are generally considered ordinal data , because the items have clear rank order, but don’t have an even distribution.

Overall Likert scale scores are sometimes treated as interval data. These scores are considered to have directionality and even spacing between them.

The type of data determines what statistical tests you should use to analyse your data.

A questionnaire is a data collection tool or instrument, while a survey is an overarching research method that involves collecting and analysing data from people using questionnaires.

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Article Contents

Introduction, when to use qualitative research, how to judge qualitative research, conclusions, authors' roles, conflict of interest.

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Qualitative research methods: when to use them and how to judge them

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K. Hammarberg, M. Kirkman, S. de Lacey, Qualitative research methods: when to use them and how to judge them, Human Reproduction , Volume 31, Issue 3, March 2016, Pages 498–501, https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dev334

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In March 2015, an impressive set of guidelines for best practice on how to incorporate psychosocial care in routine infertility care was published by the ESHRE Psychology and Counselling Guideline Development Group ( ESHRE Psychology and Counselling Guideline Development Group, 2015 ). The authors report that the guidelines are based on a comprehensive review of the literature and we congratulate them on their meticulous compilation of evidence into a clinically useful document. However, when we read the methodology section, we were baffled and disappointed to find that evidence from research using qualitative methods was not included in the formulation of the guidelines. Despite stating that ‘qualitative research has significant value to assess the lived experience of infertility and fertility treatment’, the group excluded this body of evidence because qualitative research is ‘not generally hypothesis-driven and not objective/neutral, as the researcher puts him/herself in the position of the participant to understand how the world is from the person's perspective’.

Qualitative and quantitative research methods are often juxtaposed as representing two different world views. In quantitative circles, qualitative research is commonly viewed with suspicion and considered lightweight because it involves small samples which may not be representative of the broader population, it is seen as not objective, and the results are assessed as biased by the researchers' own experiences or opinions. In qualitative circles, quantitative research can be dismissed as over-simplifying individual experience in the cause of generalisation, failing to acknowledge researcher biases and expectations in research design, and requiring guesswork to understand the human meaning of aggregate data.

As social scientists who investigate psychosocial aspects of human reproduction, we use qualitative and quantitative methods, separately or together, depending on the research question. The crucial part is to know when to use what method.

The peer-review process is a pillar of scientific publishing. One of the important roles of reviewers is to assess the scientific rigour of the studies from which authors draw their conclusions. If rigour is lacking, the paper should not be published. As with research using quantitative methods, research using qualitative methods is home to the good, the bad and the ugly. It is essential that reviewers know the difference. Rejection letters are hard to take but more often than not they are based on legitimate critique. However, from time to time it is obvious that the reviewer has little grasp of what constitutes rigour or quality in qualitative research. The first author (K.H.) recently submitted a paper that reported findings from a qualitative study about fertility-related knowledge and information-seeking behaviour among people of reproductive age. In the rejection letter one of the reviewers (not from Human Reproduction ) lamented, ‘Even for a qualitative study, I would expect that some form of confidence interval and paired t-tables analysis, etc. be used to analyse the significance of results'. This comment reveals the reviewer's inappropriate application to qualitative research of criteria relevant only to quantitative research.

In this commentary, we give illustrative examples of questions most appropriately answered using qualitative methods and provide general advice about how to appraise the scientific rigour of qualitative studies. We hope this will help the journal's reviewers and readers appreciate the legitimate place of qualitative research and ensure we do not throw the baby out with the bath water by excluding or rejecting papers simply because they report the results of qualitative studies.

In psychosocial research, ‘quantitative’ research methods are appropriate when ‘factual’ data are required to answer the research question; when general or probability information is sought on opinions, attitudes, views, beliefs or preferences; when variables can be isolated and defined; when variables can be linked to form hypotheses before data collection; and when the question or problem is known, clear and unambiguous. Quantitative methods can reveal, for example, what percentage of the population supports assisted conception, their distribution by age, marital status, residential area and so on, as well as changes from one survey to the next ( Kovacs et al. , 2012 ); the number of donors and donor siblings located by parents of donor-conceived children ( Freeman et al. , 2009 ); and the relationship between the attitude of donor-conceived people to learning of their donor insemination conception and their family ‘type’ (one or two parents, lesbian or heterosexual parents; Beeson et al. , 2011 ).

In contrast, ‘qualitative’ methods are used to answer questions about experience, meaning and perspective, most often from the standpoint of the participant. These data are usually not amenable to counting or measuring. Qualitative research techniques include ‘small-group discussions’ for investigating beliefs, attitudes and concepts of normative behaviour; ‘semi-structured interviews’, to seek views on a focused topic or, with key informants, for background information or an institutional perspective; ‘in-depth interviews’ to understand a condition, experience, or event from a personal perspective; and ‘analysis of texts and documents’, such as government reports, media articles, websites or diaries, to learn about distributed or private knowledge.

Qualitative methods have been used to reveal, for example, potential problems in implementing a proposed trial of elective single embryo transfer, where small-group discussions enabled staff to explain their own resistance, leading to an amended approach ( Porter and Bhattacharya, 2005 ). Small-group discussions among assisted reproductive technology (ART) counsellors were used to investigate how the welfare principle is interpreted and practised by health professionals who must apply it in ART ( de Lacey et al. , 2015 ). When legislative change meant that gamete donors could seek identifying details of people conceived from their gametes, parents needed advice on how best to tell their children. Small-group discussions were convened to ask adolescents (not known to be donor-conceived) to reflect on how they would prefer to be told ( Kirkman et al. , 2007 ).

When a population cannot be identified, such as anonymous sperm donors from the 1980s, a qualitative approach with wide publicity can reach people who do not usually volunteer for research and reveal (for example) their attitudes to proposed legislation to remove anonymity with retrospective effect ( Hammarberg et al. , 2014 ). When researchers invite people to talk about their reflections on experience, they can sometimes learn more than they set out to discover. In describing their responses to proposed legislative change, participants also talked about people conceived as a result of their donations, demonstrating various constructions and expectations of relationships ( Kirkman et al. , 2014 ).

Interviews with parents in lesbian-parented families generated insight into the diverse meanings of the sperm donor in the creation and life of the family ( Wyverkens et al. , 2014 ). Oral and written interviews also revealed the embarrassment and ambivalence surrounding sperm donors evident in participants in donor-assisted conception ( Kirkman, 2004 ). The way in which parents conceptualise unused embryos and why they discard rather than donate was explored and understood via in-depth interviews, showing how and why the meaning of those embryos changed with parenthood ( de Lacey, 2005 ). In-depth interviews were also used to establish the intricate understanding by embryo donors and recipients of the meaning of embryo donation and the families built as a result ( Goedeke et al. , 2015 ).

It is possible to combine quantitative and qualitative methods, although great care should be taken to ensure that the theory behind each method is compatible and that the methods are being used for appropriate reasons. The two methods can be used sequentially (first a quantitative then a qualitative study or vice versa), where the first approach is used to facilitate the design of the second; they can be used in parallel as different approaches to the same question; or a dominant method may be enriched with a small component of an alternative method (such as qualitative interviews ‘nested’ in a large survey). It is important to note that free text in surveys represents qualitative data but does not constitute qualitative research. Qualitative and quantitative methods may be used together for corroboration (hoping for similar outcomes from both methods), elaboration (using qualitative data to explain or interpret quantitative data, or to demonstrate how the quantitative findings apply in particular cases), complementarity (where the qualitative and quantitative results differ but generate complementary insights) or contradiction (where qualitative and quantitative data lead to different conclusions). Each has its advantages and challenges ( Brannen, 2005 ).

Qualitative research is gaining increased momentum in the clinical setting and carries different criteria for evaluating its rigour or quality. Quantitative studies generally involve the systematic collection of data about a phenomenon, using standardized measures and statistical analysis. In contrast, qualitative studies involve the systematic collection, organization, description and interpretation of textual, verbal or visual data. The particular approach taken determines to a certain extent the criteria used for judging the quality of the report. However, research using qualitative methods can be evaluated ( Dixon-Woods et al. , 2006 ; Young et al. , 2014 ) and there are some generic guidelines for assessing qualitative research ( Kitto et al. , 2008 ).

Although the terms ‘reliability’ and ‘validity’ are contentious among qualitative researchers ( Lincoln and Guba, 1985 ) with some preferring ‘verification’, research integrity and robustness are as important in qualitative studies as they are in other forms of research. It is widely accepted that qualitative research should be ethical, important, intelligibly described, and use appropriate and rigorous methods ( Cohen and Crabtree, 2008 ). In research investigating data that can be counted or measured, replicability is essential. When other kinds of data are gathered in order to answer questions of personal or social meaning, we need to be able to capture real-life experiences, which cannot be identical from one person to the next. Furthermore, meaning is culturally determined and subject to evolutionary change. The way of explaining a phenomenon—such as what it means to use donated gametes—will vary, for example, according to the cultural significance of ‘blood’ or genes, interpretations of marital infidelity and religious constructs of sexual relationships and families. Culture may apply to a country, a community, or other actual or virtual group, and a person may be engaged at various levels of culture. In identifying meaning for members of a particular group, consistency may indeed be found from one research project to another. However, individuals within a cultural group may present different experiences and perceptions or transgress cultural expectations. That does not make them ‘wrong’ or invalidate the research. Rather, it offers insight into diversity and adds a piece to the puzzle to which other researchers also contribute.

In qualitative research the objective stance is obsolete, the researcher is the instrument, and ‘subjects’ become ‘participants’ who may contribute to data interpretation and analysis ( Denzin and Lincoln, 1998 ). Qualitative researchers defend the integrity of their work by different means: trustworthiness, credibility, applicability and consistency are the evaluative criteria ( Leininger, 1994 ).

Trustworthiness

A report of a qualitative study should contain the same robust procedural description as any other study. The purpose of the research, how it was conducted, procedural decisions, and details of data generation and management should be transparent and explicit. A reviewer should be able to follow the progression of events and decisions and understand their logic because there is adequate description, explanation and justification of the methodology and methods ( Kitto et al. , 2008 )

Credibility

Credibility is the criterion for evaluating the truth value or internal validity of qualitative research. A qualitative study is credible when its results, presented with adequate descriptions of context, are recognizable to people who share the experience and those who care for or treat them. As the instrument in qualitative research, the researcher defends its credibility through practices such as reflexivity (reflection on the influence of the researcher on the research), triangulation (where appropriate, answering the research question in several ways, such as through interviews, observation and documentary analysis) and substantial description of the interpretation process; verbatim quotations from the data are supplied to illustrate and support their interpretations ( Sandelowski, 1986 ). Where excerpts of data and interpretations are incongruent, the credibility of the study is in doubt.

Applicability

Applicability, or transferability of the research findings, is the criterion for evaluating external validity. A study is considered to meet the criterion of applicability when its findings can fit into contexts outside the study situation and when clinicians and researchers view the findings as meaningful and applicable in their own experiences.

Larger sample sizes do not produce greater applicability. Depth may be sacrificed to breadth or there may be too much data for adequate analysis. Sample sizes in qualitative research are typically small. The term ‘saturation’ is often used in reference to decisions about sample size in research using qualitative methods. Emerging from grounded theory, where filling theoretical categories is considered essential to the robustness of the developing theory, data saturation has been expanded to describe a situation where data tend towards repetition or where data cease to offer new directions and raise new questions ( Charmaz, 2005 ). However, the legitimacy of saturation as a generic marker of sampling adequacy has been questioned ( O'Reilly and Parker, 2013 ). Caution must be exercised to ensure that a commitment to saturation does not assume an ‘essence’ of an experience in which limited diversity is anticipated; each account is likely to be subtly different and each ‘sample’ will contribute to knowledge without telling the whole story. Increasingly, it is expected that researchers will report the kind of saturation they have applied and their criteria for recognising its achievement; an assessor will need to judge whether the choice is appropriate and consistent with the theoretical context within which the research has been conducted.

Sampling strategies are usually purposive, convenient, theoretical or snowballed. Maximum variation sampling may be used to seek representation of diverse perspectives on the topic. Homogeneous sampling may be used to recruit a group of participants with specified criteria. The threat of bias is irrelevant; participants are recruited and selected specifically because they can illuminate the phenomenon being studied. Rather than being predetermined by statistical power analysis, qualitative study samples are dependent on the nature of the data, the availability of participants and where those data take the investigator. Multiple data collections may also take place to obtain maximum insight into sensitive topics. For instance, the question of how decisions are made for embryo disposition may involve sampling within the patient group as well as from scientists, clinicians, counsellors and clinic administrators.

Consistency

Consistency, or dependability of the results, is the criterion for assessing reliability. This does not mean that the same result would necessarily be found in other contexts but that, given the same data, other researchers would find similar patterns. Researchers often seek maximum variation in the experience of a phenomenon, not only to illuminate it but also to discourage fulfilment of limited researcher expectations (for example, negative cases or instances that do not fit the emerging interpretation or theory should be actively sought and explored). Qualitative researchers sometimes describe the processes by which verification of the theoretical findings by another team member takes place ( Morse and Richards, 2002 ).

Research that uses qualitative methods is not, as it seems sometimes to be represented, the easy option, nor is it a collation of anecdotes. It usually involves a complex theoretical or philosophical framework. Rigorous analysis is conducted without the aid of straightforward mathematical rules. Researchers must demonstrate the validity of their analysis and conclusions, resulting in longer papers and occasional frustration with the word limits of appropriate journals. Nevertheless, we need the different kinds of evidence that is generated by qualitative methods. The experience of health, illness and medical intervention cannot always be counted and measured; researchers need to understand what they mean to individuals and groups. Knowledge gained from qualitative research methods can inform clinical practice, indicate how to support people living with chronic conditions and contribute to community education and awareness about people who are (for example) experiencing infertility or using assisted conception.

Each author drafted a section of the manuscript and the manuscript as a whole was reviewed and revised by all authors in consultation.

No external funding was either sought or obtained for this study.

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

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Qualitative Research Methods: Types, Examples, and Analysis

In a universe swarming with data, numbers, and algorithms, lies a lesser-known realm where emotions, stories, and intimate revelations take center stage. When you want to get inside your customers’ heads to understand their thoughts, feelings, perceptions, beliefs, and emotions, numbers are unlikely to provide a complete picture.

Let’s set the scene: picture a cozy bakery buzzing with conversations. People from different walks of life gather, each carrying a unique story to tell. You observe that your sale of pancakes is more than that of pastries, numerical data will tell you that much. But numbers won’t tell you why.

This is exactly where qualitative surveys come into play; they take you right to the heart of people’s minds and experiences – the “why” behind the statistics.

Quantitative data may offer a bird’s-eye view of the crowd, but qualitative surveys open the doorways to your audience’s individual tales. In this blog, we are going to explore qualitative research, its types, analytical procedures, positive and negative aspects, and examples.

Here we go!

What Is Qualitative Research?

Qualitative research is a branch of market research that involves collecting and analyzing qualitative data through open-ended communication. The primary purpose of conducting qualitative research is to understand the individual’s thoughts, feelings, opinions, and reasons behind these emotions.

It is used to gather in-depth and rich insights into a particular topic. Understanding how your audience feels about a specific subject helps make informed decisions in research.

As opposed to quantitative research, qualitative research does not deal with the collection of numerical data for statistical analysis. The application of this research method is usually found in humanities and social science subjects like sociology, history, anthropology, health science, education, etc.

Types of Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative research methods are designed to understand the behavior and perception of the target audience about a particular subject.

Qualitative research methods include observations, one-on-one interviews, case study research, focus groups, ethnographic research, phenomenology, and grounded theory.

Let’s discuss them one by one.

1. Observations

Observation is one of the oldest qualitative methods of research used to collect systematic data using subjective methodologies. It is based on five primary sense organs – smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing, and their functioning. This method focuses on characteristics and qualities rather than numbers.

The qualitative observation technique involves observing the interaction patterns in a particular situation. Researchers collect data by closely watching the behaviors of others. They rely on their ability to observe the target audience rather than communicating with people about their thoughts on a particular subject.

2. One-on-One Interviews

Conducting one-on-one interviews is one of the most common types of qualitative research methods. Although both open-ended and closed-ended questions can be a part of these interviews, open-ended conservation between researchers and participants related to a particular subject is still the preferred mode of communication. This is to gather in-depth qualitative data for the research purpose.

Here, the researcher asks pre-determined questions to the participants to collect specific information about their research topic. Interviews can be conducted face-to-face, by email, or by phone. The drawback of this method is that sometimes the participants feel uncomfortable sharing honest answers with the researcher.

3. Focus Groups

A Focus group involves collecting qualitative data by conducting a group discussion of 6-12 members along with a moderator related to a particular subject. Here the moderator asks respondents a set of predetermined questions so that they can interact with each other and form a group discussion. It helps researchers to collect rich qualitative data about their market research.

However, it is essential to ensure that the moderator asks open-ended questions like “how,” “what,” and “why” that will enable participants to share their thoughts and feelings.

Close-ended questions like “yes” and “no” should be avoided as they do not lead to engagement among participants.

4. Case Study Research

A case study is another example of qualitative research that involves a comprehensive examination of a particular subject, person, or event.

This method is used to obtain in-depth data and complete knowledge of the subject. The data is collected from various sources like interviews and observation to supplement the conclusion.

This qualitative approach is extensively used in the field of social sciences, law, business, and health. Many companies use this technique when marketing their products/services to new customers. It tells them how their business offerings can solve a particular problem. Let’s discuss an example of this method of qualitative research.

5. Digital Ethnography

This is an innovative form of qualitative research that focuses on understanding people and their cultures in the context of the digital realm. Digital ethnography aims to study individuals’ behavior, interactions, and social dynamics within online environments and digital communities.

In digital ethnography, the researcher acts as both an observer and a participant in these said online communities to gain firsthand insight into the lifestyles, cultures, and traditions of people navigating these digital landscapes.

Unlike traditional ethnography, digital ethnography is more efficient and accessible. The studies are conducted remotely, reducing the need for extended physical presence in a specific location, and the data collection process is often more streamlined.

6. Grounded Theory

This is another data collection method of qualitative research used across various disciplines. The Grounded Theory aims to provide the reasons, theories, and explanations behind an event. It focuses on why a course of action has happened the way it did.

The grounded theory model collects and analyzes the data to develop new theories about the subject. The data is collected using different techniques like observation, literature review, and document analysis.

This qualitative method is majorly used in business for conducting user satisfaction surveys to explain why a customer purchases a particular product or service. It helps companies in managing customer loyalty.

Watch: How to Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey

7. Phenomenology

Phenomenology is another qualitative research example that describes how an individual experiences or feels about a particular event. It also explores the experience of a specific event in a community.

Here, the researcher interviews people who have experienced a particular event to find similarities between their experiences. The researcher can also record what they learn from the target audience to maintain the credibility of the data.

Although this qualitative technique depends majorly on interviews, other data collection methods like observation, interviews, and survey questionnaires are also used to supplement the findings. The application of this method is found in psychology, philosophy, and education.

For example, to prompt a participant to share their experience around an event they encountered, you can ask:

“What was your experience like when you first encountered [a specific phenomenon or event]?”

8. Record Keeping

This approach involves using existing trustworthy documents and other reliable sources as the basis of data for new research. It’s comparable to visiting a library, where you can explore books and reference materials to gather relevant data that might be helpful for your research.

How Do You Analyze Qualitative Data?

1. Arranging the Data

Qualitative data is collected in different forms like audio recordings, interviews, video transcriptions, etc. This step involves arranging all the collected data in the text format in the spreadsheet. This can be done either manually or with the help of data analysis tools.

2. Organizing the Data

Even after putting the data into a spreadsheet, the data is still messy and hard to read. Due to this, the data needs to be organized in a readable and understandable pattern.

For example, you can organize data based on questions asked. Organize your data in such a way that it appears visually clear. Data organization can be tedious, but it is essential for the next step.

3. Assigning Codes

Developing codes for the data helps simplify the data analysis methods in qualitative research. Assigning code implies categorizing and setting patterns and properties to the collected data. It helps in compressing the vast amount of information collected. By developing codes for your data, you can gather deep insight into the data to make informed business decisions.

4. Analyzing the Data

Qualitative data cannot be analyzed based on any universally accepted equation like quantitative data. Qualitative data analysis depends on the thinking and logical skill of the researcher.

However, there are a few techniques by which you can easily interpret data by identifying themes and patterns between sample responses:

• Checking the data for repetitive words and phrases commonly used by the audience in their answers.
• Comparing the primary and secondary data collection to find the difference between them.
• Scanning the data for expected information that has not been included in answers provided by respondents.

5. Summarizing the Data

The final stage is to link the qualitative data to the hypothesis. Highlight significant themes, patterns, and trends by using essential quotes from the data, as well as any possible contradictions.

One of the main things about qualitative data is that there isn’t a single, formal way to collect and analyze data. Each research project will have its own set of methods and techniques that it needs to use.

The key is to look at the specific needs of each project and change the research method accordingly.

Advantages and Limitations of Qualitative Research

Qualitative market research techniques offer a more comprehensive and complete picture of the subject than quantitative research, which focuses on specific and narrow areas. Other advantages of using qualitative research methods are:

• Explore the subject in-depth: Qualitative research is personal and offers a deep understanding of the respondent’s feelings, thoughts, and actions so that the researcher can perform an in-depth analysis of the subject.
• Promotes discussion: Qualitative research methods are open-ended in approach rather than rigorously following a predetermined set of questions. It adds context to the research rather than just numbers.
• More flexibility: The interviewer can study and ask questions on the subject they feel is pertinent or had not previously thought about during the discussions. Moreover, open-ended questions enable respondents to be free to share their thoughts, leading to more information.
• Capture trends as they change: Qualitative research can track how people’s feelings and attitudes change over time. Respondents’ opinions can change during the conversation, and qualitative research can show this.

With that being said, however, we do not mean that qualitative data is entirely devoid of flaws. Like most things, it, too, has its fair share of limitations, the prime among them being:

• Subjectivity: Qualitative data can be influenced by the researcher’s bias or interpretation, potentially affecting the objectivity of the findings. The absence of strict guidelines in qualitative research can lead to variations in data collection and analysis too.
• Time-Consuming & Resource-Intensive: Conducting qualitative research can be a lengthy process, from data collection through transcription and analysis. It also often requires skilled researchers, making it more resource-intensive compared to some quantitative methods.
• Difficulty in Analysis: Analyzing qualitative data can be complex, as it involves coding, categorizing, and interpreting open-ended responses. This data category often does not lend itself well to traditional statistical tests, limiting the depth of statistical analysis as well.
• Challenges in Replication: Replicating qualitative studies can be challenging due to the unique context and interactions involved.

Advantages of Using Website Surveys for Qualitative Research

The role of surveys and questionnaires in collecting quantitative data is pretty obvious, but how exactly would you use them to capture qualitative data, and why? Well, for starters, website surveys offer numerous advantages here, such as letting researchers explore diverse perspectives, collect rich and detailed data, conduct cost-effective and time-efficient studies, etc.

Let’s have a brief rundown of the significant benefits below:

Reach and Diversity: Website surveys enable researchers to engage with a diverse and global audience. They break geographical barriers, allowing participation from individuals residing in different regions, cultures, and backgrounds, leading to a richer pool of perspectives.

• Cost-Effectiveness: Conducting traditional face-to-face qualitative research can be expensive and time-consuming. In contrast, website surveys are cost-effective, as they eliminate the need for travel, venue rentals, and other logistical expenses.
• Convenience and Flexibility: Website surveys offer unparalleled convenience to both researchers and participants. Respondents can take part in the study at their own pace and preferred time, promoting higher response rates and reducing non-response bias.
• Anonymity and Honesty: Participants often feel more comfortable expressing themselves honestly in online surveys. Anonymity ensures confidentiality, encouraging candid responses, and allowing researchers to gain deeper insights into personal experiences and opinions.
• Rich Data Collection: Website surveys can accommodate various question types, including open-ended questions, allowing respondents to elaborate on their thoughts. This results in the collection of rich, detailed, and nuanced data, enriching the qualitative analysis.
• Time-Efficient Data Collection: Website surveys facilitate efficient data collection, reaching a large number of participants in a short span. Researchers can access real-time data, enabling quick analysis and timely decision-making.
• Ease of Analysis: Online survey platforms often provide tools for automated data analysis, simplifying the coding and categorization process. Researchers can swiftly identify themes and patterns, expediting the interpretation of qualitative findings.
• Longitudinal Studies: Website surveys are well-suited for longitudinal studies, as they allow researchers to follow up with the same participants over an extended period. This longitudinal approach enables the exploration of changes in attitudes or behaviors over time.
• Integration with Multimedia: Website surveys can seamlessly incorporate multimedia elements, such as images, videos, or audio clips, enabling respondents to provide more context and depth to their responses.
• Eco-Friendly Approach: By reducing the need for paper and physical materials, website surveys promote a sustainable and eco-friendly approach to data collection, aligning with responsible research practices.

Most website survey tools are equipped with features that efficiently collect and analyze diverse perspectives, ultimately furthering your data collection process. For example:

• Question Customization: These tools allow users to create and customize a wide range of questions, including open-ended, closed-ended, rating scale, and more. This flexibility allows participants to express their thoughts and feelings in their own words, paving the way for gathering diverse qualitative data.
• Anonymity and Confidentiality: Ensuring confidentiality in qualitative research is crucial for building trust and obtaining more accurate and sensitive data. Participants can often remain anonymous when using website survey tools, which can encourage them to provide honest and candid responses.
• Data Analysis Support: Many website survey tools offer built-in data analysis features, such as basic statistical summaries and visualizations. While these features are more suited for quantitative data, they can still aid in organizing and understanding qualitative responses, making the analysis process more manageable.
• Flexibility in Survey Design: Researchers can use skip logic and branching features in these tools to create dynamic surveys that adapt based on participants’ responses. This can be greatly valuable in qualitative research, where participants’ experiences might vary widely.
• Ease of Participation: Participants can access website surveys using various devices like computers, tablets, or smartphones, making it convenient and accessible for them to take part in the research. This ease of participation can contribute to a higher response rate and a more diverse participant pool.
• Data Storage and Security: Many website survey tools offer secure data storage and backup, ensuring the safety of the collected qualitative data. This feature is essential for maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of participants’ responses.

Examples of Website Survey Questions for Qualitative Research

These examples can greatly help in targeting customers through Click-to-WhatsApp Ads on various social media platforms. Crafting effective survey questions is crucial for qualitative research. Ensuring clarity, avoiding leading questions, and maintaining a balanced mix of question types is paramount if you are looking to gather comprehensive and valuable qualitative data.

With well-designed website survey questions, you can delve deep into participants’ thoughts, emotions, and experiences, providing a solid foundation for insightful qualitative analysis.

Let’s explore some of the prime examples:

1. Open-Ended Questions (Exploratory):

• “Please describe your experience with our product/service in your own words.”
• “What are the main challenges you face in your daily work?”

2. Multiple-Choice Questions (Categorization):

“Which age group do you belong to?”

• 18-25 years
• 26-35 years
• 36-45 years
• 46-55 years

3. Likert Scale Questions (Rating/Opinion): “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with our customer support?” 1 (Not satisfied at all) 2 (Slightly satisfied) 3 (Moderately satisfied) 4 (Very satisfied) 5 (Extremely satisfied)

4. Ranking Questions (Preference):

“Please rank the following factors in order of importance for choosing a smartphone:”

• Battery life
• Camera quality
• Processor speed
• Display resolution

5. Semantic Differential Questions (Contrast): “How would you describe our website’s user interface?”

• Difficult _ Easy Unattractive Attractive
• Confusing ___ Clear

6. Picture Choice Questions (Visual Feedback):

“Which logo do you find more appealing for our brand?”

• Option A (Image)
• Option B (Image)

7. Demographic Questions (Participant Profiling):

“Which of the following best describes your occupation?”

• Professional

8. Dichotomous Questions (Yes/No):

• “Have you ever purchased products from our online store?”

9. Follow-Up Probing Questions (In-depth Insight):

• “You mentioned facing challenges at work. Could you please elaborate on the specific challenges you encounter?”

10. Experience-Based Questions (Narrative):

• “Tell us about a memorable customer service experience you’ve had, whether positive or negative.”

Ready to Obtain Quality Data Using Qualitative Research?

So, there you have it all about qualitative research methods: their types, examples, use, and importance. Quantitative research is one of the most effective instruments to understand individuals’ thoughts and feelings or identify their needs and problems.

After figuring out the problem, quantitative research is used to make the conclusion and offer a reliable solution for business.

You can also supplement your qualitative market research with ProProfs Survey Maker to reach your target audience more effectively and in a shorter duration. Use the 15-day free trial to enhance your qualitative research – no commitment, no credit card details!

About the author

Emma David is a seasoned market research professional with 8+ years of experience. Having kick-started her journey in research, she has developed rich expertise in employee engagement, survey creation and administration, and data management. Emma believes in the power of data to shape business performance positively. She continues to help brands and businesses make strategic decisions and improve their market standing through her understanding of research methodologies.

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Home » Survey Research – Types, Methods, Examples

Survey Research – Types, Methods, Examples

Table of Contents

Survey Research

Definition:

Survey Research is a quantitative research method that involves collecting standardized data from a sample of individuals or groups through the use of structured questionnaires or interviews. The data collected is then analyzed statistically to identify patterns and relationships between variables, and to draw conclusions about the population being studied.

Survey research can be used to answer a variety of questions, including:

• What are people’s opinions about a certain topic?
• What are people’s experiences with a certain product or service?
• What are people’s beliefs about a certain issue?

Survey Research Methods

Survey Research Methods are as follows:

• Telephone surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to respondents over the phone, often used in market research or political polling.
• Face-to-face surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to respondents in person, often used in social or health research.
• Mail surveys: A survey research method where questionnaires are sent to respondents through mail, often used in customer satisfaction or opinion surveys.
• Online surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to respondents through online platforms, often used in market research or customer feedback.
• Email surveys: A survey research method where questionnaires are sent to respondents through email, often used in customer satisfaction or opinion surveys.
• Mixed-mode surveys: A survey research method that combines two or more survey modes, often used to increase response rates or reach diverse populations.
• Computer-assisted surveys: A survey research method that uses computer technology to administer or collect survey data, often used in large-scale surveys or data collection.
• Interactive voice response surveys: A survey research method where respondents answer questions through a touch-tone telephone system, often used in automated customer satisfaction or opinion surveys.
• Mobile surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to respondents through mobile devices, often used in market research or customer feedback.
• Group-administered surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to a group of respondents simultaneously, often used in education or training evaluation.
• Web-intercept surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to website visitors, often used in website or user experience research.
• In-app surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to users of a mobile application, often used in mobile app or user experience research.
• Social media surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to respondents through social media platforms, often used in social media or brand awareness research.
• SMS surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to respondents through text messaging, often used in customer feedback or opinion surveys.
• IVR surveys: A survey research method where questions are administered to respondents through an interactive voice response system, often used in automated customer feedback or opinion surveys.
• Mixed-method surveys: A survey research method that combines both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, often used in exploratory or mixed-method research.
• Drop-off surveys: A survey research method where respondents are provided with a survey questionnaire and asked to return it at a later time or through a designated drop-off location.
• Intercept surveys: A survey research method where respondents are approached in public places and asked to participate in a survey, often used in market research or customer feedback.
• Hybrid surveys: A survey research method that combines two or more survey modes, data sources, or research methods, often used in complex or multi-dimensional research questions.

Types of Survey Research

There are several types of survey research that can be used to collect data from a sample of individuals or groups. following are Types of Survey Research:

• Cross-sectional survey: A type of survey research that gathers data from a sample of individuals at a specific point in time, providing a snapshot of the population being studied.
• Longitudinal survey: A type of survey research that gathers data from the same sample of individuals over an extended period of time, allowing researchers to track changes or trends in the population being studied.
• Panel survey: A type of longitudinal survey research that tracks the same sample of individuals over time, typically collecting data at multiple points in time.
• Epidemiological survey: A type of survey research that studies the distribution and determinants of health and disease in a population, often used to identify risk factors and inform public health interventions.
• Observational survey: A type of survey research that collects data through direct observation of individuals or groups, often used in behavioral or social research.
• Correlational survey: A type of survey research that measures the degree of association or relationship between two or more variables, often used to identify patterns or trends in data.
• Experimental survey: A type of survey research that involves manipulating one or more variables to observe the effect on an outcome, often used to test causal hypotheses.
• Descriptive survey: A type of survey research that describes the characteristics or attributes of a population or phenomenon, often used in exploratory research or to summarize existing data.
• Diagnostic survey: A type of survey research that assesses the current state or condition of an individual or system, often used in health or organizational research.
• Explanatory survey: A type of survey research that seeks to explain or understand the causes or mechanisms behind a phenomenon, often used in social or psychological research.
• Process evaluation survey: A type of survey research that measures the implementation and outcomes of a program or intervention, often used in program evaluation or quality improvement.
• Impact evaluation survey: A type of survey research that assesses the effectiveness or impact of a program or intervention, often used to inform policy or decision-making.
• Customer satisfaction survey: A type of survey research that measures the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of customers with a product, service, or experience, often used in marketing or customer service research.
• Market research survey: A type of survey research that collects data on consumer preferences, behaviors, or attitudes, often used in market research or product development.
• Public opinion survey: A type of survey research that measures the attitudes, beliefs, or opinions of a population on a specific issue or topic, often used in political or social research.
• Behavioral survey: A type of survey research that measures actual behavior or actions of individuals, often used in health or social research.
• Attitude survey: A type of survey research that measures the attitudes, beliefs, or opinions of individuals, often used in social or psychological research.
• Opinion poll: A type of survey research that measures the opinions or preferences of a population on a specific issue or topic, often used in political or media research.
• Ad hoc survey: A type of survey research that is conducted for a specific purpose or research question, often used in exploratory research or to answer a specific research question.

Types Based on Methodology

Based on Methodology Survey are divided into two Types:

Quantitative Survey Research

Qualitative survey research.

Quantitative survey research is a method of collecting numerical data from a sample of participants through the use of standardized surveys or questionnaires. The purpose of quantitative survey research is to gather empirical evidence that can be analyzed statistically to draw conclusions about a particular population or phenomenon.

In quantitative survey research, the questions are structured and pre-determined, often utilizing closed-ended questions, where participants are given a limited set of response options to choose from. This approach allows for efficient data collection and analysis, as well as the ability to generalize the findings to a larger population.

Quantitative survey research is often used in market research, social sciences, public health, and other fields where numerical data is needed to make informed decisions and recommendations.

Qualitative survey research is a method of collecting non-numerical data from a sample of participants through the use of open-ended questions or semi-structured interviews. The purpose of qualitative survey research is to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences, perceptions, and attitudes of participants towards a particular phenomenon or topic.

In qualitative survey research, the questions are open-ended, allowing participants to share their thoughts and experiences in their own words. This approach allows for a rich and nuanced understanding of the topic being studied, and can provide insights that are difficult to capture through quantitative methods alone.

Qualitative survey research is often used in social sciences, education, psychology, and other fields where a deeper understanding of human experiences and perceptions is needed to inform policy, practice, or theory.

Data Analysis Methods

There are several Survey Research Data Analysis Methods that researchers may use, including:

• Descriptive statistics: This method is used to summarize and describe the basic features of the survey data, such as the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation. These statistics can help researchers understand the distribution of responses and identify any trends or patterns.
• Inferential statistics: This method is used to make inferences about the larger population based on the data collected in the survey. Common inferential statistical methods include hypothesis testing, regression analysis, and correlation analysis.
• Factor analysis: This method is used to identify underlying factors or dimensions in the survey data. This can help researchers simplify the data and identify patterns and relationships that may not be immediately apparent.
• Cluster analysis: This method is used to group similar respondents together based on their survey responses. This can help researchers identify subgroups within the larger population and understand how different groups may differ in their attitudes, behaviors, or preferences.
• Structural equation modeling: This method is used to test complex relationships between variables in the survey data. It can help researchers understand how different variables may be related to one another and how they may influence one another.
• Content analysis: This method is used to analyze open-ended responses in the survey data. Researchers may use software to identify themes or categories in the responses, or they may manually review and code the responses.
• Text mining: This method is used to analyze text-based survey data, such as responses to open-ended questions. Researchers may use software to identify patterns and themes in the text, or they may manually review and code the text.

Applications of Survey Research

Here are some common applications of survey research:

• Market Research: Companies use survey research to gather insights about customer needs, preferences, and behavior. These insights are used to create marketing strategies and develop new products.
• Public Opinion Research: Governments and political parties use survey research to understand public opinion on various issues. This information is used to develop policies and make decisions.
• Social Research: Survey research is used in social research to study social trends, attitudes, and behavior. Researchers use survey data to explore topics such as education, health, and social inequality.
• Academic Research: Survey research is used in academic research to study various phenomena. Researchers use survey data to test theories, explore relationships between variables, and draw conclusions.
• Customer Satisfaction Research: Companies use survey research to gather information about customer satisfaction with their products and services. This information is used to improve customer experience and retention.
• Employee Surveys: Employers use survey research to gather feedback from employees about their job satisfaction, working conditions, and organizational culture. This information is used to improve employee retention and productivity.
• Health Research: Survey research is used in health research to study topics such as disease prevalence, health behaviors, and healthcare access. Researchers use survey data to develop interventions and improve healthcare outcomes.

Examples of Survey Research

Here are some real-time examples of survey research:

• COVID-19 Pandemic Surveys: Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, surveys have been conducted to gather information about public attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions related to the pandemic. Governments and healthcare organizations have used this data to develop public health strategies and messaging.
• Political Polls During Elections: During election seasons, surveys are used to measure public opinion on political candidates, policies, and issues in real-time. This information is used by political parties to develop campaign strategies and make decisions.
• Customer Feedback Surveys: Companies often use real-time customer feedback surveys to gather insights about customer experience and satisfaction. This information is used to improve products and services quickly.
• Event Surveys: Organizers of events such as conferences and trade shows often use surveys to gather feedback from attendees in real-time. This information can be used to improve future events and make adjustments during the current event.
• Website and App Surveys: Website and app owners use surveys to gather real-time feedback from users about the functionality, user experience, and overall satisfaction with their platforms. This feedback can be used to improve the user experience and retain customers.
• Employee Pulse Surveys: Employers use real-time pulse surveys to gather feedback from employees about their work experience and overall job satisfaction. This feedback is used to make changes in real-time to improve employee retention and productivity.

Survey Sample

Purpose of survey research.

The purpose of survey research is to gather data and insights from a representative sample of individuals. Survey research allows researchers to collect data quickly and efficiently from a large number of people, making it a valuable tool for understanding attitudes, behaviors, and preferences.

Here are some common purposes of survey research:

• Descriptive Research: Survey research is often used to describe characteristics of a population or a phenomenon. For example, a survey could be used to describe the characteristics of a particular demographic group, such as age, gender, or income.
• Exploratory Research: Survey research can be used to explore new topics or areas of research. Exploratory surveys are often used to generate hypotheses or identify potential relationships between variables.
• Explanatory Research: Survey research can be used to explain relationships between variables. For example, a survey could be used to determine whether there is a relationship between educational attainment and income.
• Evaluation Research: Survey research can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a program or intervention. For example, a survey could be used to evaluate the impact of a health education program on behavior change.
• Monitoring Research: Survey research can be used to monitor trends or changes over time. For example, a survey could be used to monitor changes in attitudes towards climate change or political candidates over time.

When to use Survey Research

there are certain circumstances where survey research is particularly appropriate. Here are some situations where survey research may be useful:

• When the research question involves attitudes, beliefs, or opinions: Survey research is particularly useful for understanding attitudes, beliefs, and opinions on a particular topic. For example, a survey could be used to understand public opinion on a political issue.
• When the research question involves behaviors or experiences: Survey research can also be useful for understanding behaviors and experiences. For example, a survey could be used to understand the prevalence of a particular health behavior.
• When a large sample size is needed: Survey research allows researchers to collect data from a large number of people quickly and efficiently. This makes it a useful method when a large sample size is needed to ensure statistical validity.
• When the research question is time-sensitive: Survey research can be conducted quickly, which makes it a useful method when the research question is time-sensitive. For example, a survey could be used to understand public opinion on a breaking news story.
• When the research question involves a geographically dispersed population: Survey research can be conducted online, which makes it a useful method when the population of interest is geographically dispersed.

How to Conduct Survey Research

Conducting survey research involves several steps that need to be carefully planned and executed. Here is a general overview of the process:

• Define the research question: The first step in conducting survey research is to clearly define the research question. The research question should be specific, measurable, and relevant to the population of interest.
• Develop a survey instrument : The next step is to develop a survey instrument. This can be done using various methods, such as online survey tools or paper surveys. The survey instrument should be designed to elicit the information needed to answer the research question, and should be pre-tested with a small sample of individuals.
• Select a sample : The sample is the group of individuals who will be invited to participate in the survey. The sample should be representative of the population of interest, and the size of the sample should be sufficient to ensure statistical validity.
• Administer the survey: The survey can be administered in various ways, such as online, by mail, or in person. The method of administration should be chosen based on the population of interest and the research question.
• Analyze the data: Once the survey data is collected, it needs to be analyzed. This involves summarizing the data using statistical methods, such as frequency distributions or regression analysis.
• Draw conclusions: The final step is to draw conclusions based on the data analysis. This involves interpreting the results and answering the research question.

Advantages of Survey Research

There are several advantages to using survey research, including:

• Efficient data collection: Survey research allows researchers to collect data quickly and efficiently from a large number of people. This makes it a useful method for gathering information on a wide range of topics.
• Standardized data collection: Surveys are typically standardized, which means that all participants receive the same questions in the same order. This ensures that the data collected is consistent and reliable.
• Cost-effective: Surveys can be conducted online, by mail, or in person, which makes them a cost-effective method of data collection.
• Anonymity: Participants can remain anonymous when responding to a survey. This can encourage participants to be more honest and open in their responses.
• Easy comparison: Surveys allow for easy comparison of data between different groups or over time. This makes it possible to identify trends and patterns in the data.
• Versatility: Surveys can be used to collect data on a wide range of topics, including attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and preferences.

Limitations of Survey Research

Here are some of the main limitations of survey research:

• Limited depth: Surveys are typically designed to collect quantitative data, which means that they do not provide much depth or detail about people’s experiences or opinions. This can limit the insights that can be gained from the data.
• Potential for bias: Surveys can be affected by various biases, including selection bias, response bias, and social desirability bias. These biases can distort the results and make them less accurate.
• L imited validity: Surveys are only as valid as the questions they ask. If the questions are poorly designed or ambiguous, the results may not accurately reflect the respondents’ attitudes or behaviors.
• Limited generalizability : Survey results are only generalizable to the population from which the sample was drawn. If the sample is not representative of the population, the results may not be generalizable to the larger population.
• Limited ability to capture context: Surveys typically do not capture the context in which attitudes or behaviors occur. This can make it difficult to understand the reasons behind the responses.
• Limited ability to capture complex phenomena: Surveys are not well-suited to capture complex phenomena, such as emotions or the dynamics of interpersonal relationships.

Following is an example of a Survey Sample:

Welcome to our Survey Research Page! We value your opinions and appreciate your participation in this survey. Please answer the questions below as honestly and thoroughly as possible.

1. What is your age?

• A) Under 18
• G) 65 or older

2. What is your highest level of education completed?

• A) Less than high school
• B) High school or equivalent
• C) Some college or technical school
• D) Bachelor’s degree
• E) Graduate or professional degree

3. What is your current employment status?

• A) Employed full-time
• B) Employed part-time
• C) Self-employed
• D) Unemployed

4. How often do you use the internet per day?

•  A) Less than 1 hour
• B) 1-3 hours
• C) 3-5 hours
• D) 5-7 hours
• E) More than 7 hours

5. How often do you engage in social media per day?

6. Have you ever participated in a survey research study before?

7. If you have participated in a survey research study before, how was your experience?

• A) Excellent
• E) Very poor

8. What are some of the topics that you would be interested in participating in a survey research study about?

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

9. How often would you be willing to participate in survey research studies?

• A) Once a week
• B) Once a month
• C) Once every 6 months
• D) Once a year

10. Any additional comments or suggestions?

Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey. Your feedback is important to us and will help us improve our survey research efforts.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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The Guide to Qualitative Research: Methods, Types, and Examples

Daniel Ndukwu

Qualitative research is an important part of any project. It gives you insights that quantitative research can’t hope to match.

To receive the benefits that qualitative research can bring to the table, it’s essential to do it properly. That’s easier said than done.

This in-depth guide will give you a better understanding of qualitative research, how it can be used, the methods for carrying it out, and its limitations.

Table of Contents

What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research is the process of gathering non-numerical data that helps you understand the deeper meaning behind a topic. It can help you decipher the motivations, thought processes, and opinions of people who are experiencing the problem or situation.

For example, an entrepreneur wants to start a shoe brand targeted at a younger demographic. They know younger people spend more money on name-brand basketball shoes. Qualitative research will help them understand the motivations and thought processes behind why those shoes are appealing.

With the help of capable marketing teams and mentors , they can use this data to craft communication plans that will resonate with their audience.

The data gained helps develop better hypotheses, confirm or disprove theories, and informs quantitative research studies. There are multiple quantitative research methods that are ideal for certain situations and this guide delves deeper into those data collection processes .

Keep in mind that qualitative research gives you descriptive data that must then be analyzed and interpreted. This process is much more difficult than a quantitative analysis which is why many organizations opt to skip it entirely.

What’s the purpose of qualitative research?

Qualitative research was popularized by psychologists and sociologists who were unhappy with the scientific method in use. Traditional scientific methods were only able to tell what was happening but failed to understand why.

Qualitative research, on the other hand, seeks to find the deeper meaning behind actions and situations. For example, you may realize a relationship between two things exist like poverty and lower literacy rates. It’s qualitative data that can help you understand why this relationship exists.

In the diverse landscape of qualitative research its application extends beyond conventional fields offering valuable insights in specialized areas take for instance the legal sector where understanding nuanced human experiences is crucial a cerebral palsy lawyer leveraging qualitative research delves deeper into the multifaceted experiences of individuals and families impacted by cerebral palsy this methodical approach aids in comprehending the broader social emotional and economic ramifications thereby guiding more compassionate and effective legal representation.

When should qualitative research be used

There’s a simple stress test to understand whether qualitative research or quantitative research should be used. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you have a clear understanding of the problem? If not, use it;
• Do you understand the reasons that contribute to the problem or situation? If not, use it;
• Are the attitudes of the people who experience or display the behavior clear to you? If not, use it;
• Have you already analyzed first-person accounts or research related to the topic? If not, use it.

Qualitative research vs quantitative research

There’s a big difference between the two types of research. For the most part, qualitative research is exploratory. You’re trying to figure out the reasons behind situations and form a clearer hypothesis. Those hypotheses are then tested with further qualitative or quantitative research.

Quantitative research focuses on collecting numerical data that can be used to quantify the magnitude of a situation. The data gained can be organized and statistical analysis carried out.

For example, qualitative research may tell you that people in lower-income areas drop out of school and have lower literacy rates. Quantitative research can tell you the percentage of people that end up dropping out of school within a given population.

As you can see, they work together to give you a holistic understanding of a market or problem.

Qualitative research data collection Methods

We’ve written an in-depth guide about the data collection methods you can use for both quantitative and qualitative research. This section will give you a quick overview of the data collection methods available.

The first data collection method and the most common are surveys. More specifically, surveys with open-ended questions . These give your respondents the opportunity to explain things with their own words.

Another benefit of surveys, especially with online survey tools like KyLeads is that you can quickly distribute your survey to a huge audience. This can cut down on your costs while still giving you the insights you need.

There are two problems with surveys. The first one is that you’re unable to ask relevant clarifying questions. Some of the data you collect may be unclear and lead you to the wrong conclusions.

The second problem is that respondents, unless adequately incentivized, may abandon the survey or give inadequate answers. This is known as survey fatigue and is a challenge when you have longer surveys. You can mitigate the effects by placing the most important questions first.

Focus groups

A focus group involves 3 – 10 people and a specialized moderator. Groups larger than ten should be broken up and those fewer than three won’t be able to deliver the insights you need.

The benefits of a focus group come from the ability to recreate specific situations or test scenarios before they happen. To get the most out of the focus group, it’s important to carefully select the participants based on their demographic and psychographic profiles .

The advantage of a focus group is that the information is insightful and comes from multiple people within your target market. The disadvantage is that groupthink can be a real problem.

You can prevent groupthink by having people write their opinions down before voicing them and even assigning one person to play devil’s advocate. Don’t discourage divergent opinions or perspectives.

Another challenge is that focus groups are expensive compared to other methods listed here. The participants are usually paid for their time and it requires things like meeting space and specialized staff.

Interviews are an old staple of qualitative research and are almost as common as surveys. Interviews can be conducted over the phone, in person, or even through a video conference. The important part is that they’re real-time and you can ask clarifying questions so you don’t draw the wrong conclusions.

There are multiple types of interviews. You can use structured interviews, unstructured interviews, or semi-structured interviews. Keep in mind that the structured interview may not be the best option if you’re doing exploratory =research.

Observation/immersion

This is the process of observing the ongoing behavior of an individual or group. It’s most prevalent in social sciences and marketing applications. This data collection method is the most passive and may not be ideal when doing initial exploratory research. You may be drawing conclusions on incomplete information.

There is an option of participating actively in what you’re observing. Keep in mind that this is frowned upon because the researcher may accidentally introduce biases. The biggest disadvantage is that some things simply can’t be observed by a researcher without interaction.

Try to use team collaboration to cut down on the biases that will be introduced. Compare notes and, as much as possible, look at things objectively. A teammate is invaluable for this kind of exercise.

Pros and cons of qualitative research

Qualitative research is powerful and has many benefits but it also has multiple disadvantages you should be aware of before jumping in.

• Get a deep understanding of the behaviors and attitudes of your target group
• You can get those insights from smaller samples sizes
• As long as you choose the right aspects to focus on and groups to work with, the insights can have much wider applications.
• Helps reduce biases because you’re doing exploratory research to get a baseline of information
• Most qualitative research is fluid meaning it adapts to the inputs to get a better understanding of the overall situation
• The data itself is subjective because it’s based on the experiences and biases of the respondents
• It’s more expensive than quantitative research
• It can take much longer to go through the more involved data collection methods like focus groups and interviews
• It’s more difficult to analyze and often requires people with specialized skills
• It’s nonnumerical in nature so statistical analysis cannot be applied to the data
• Results can’t be easily replicated following the scientific method

Qualitative research can be a powerful tool in your arsenal but there are many things to take into consideration. It tends to take longer to collect the data and analyze it. It’s also more expensive than most quantitative research methods.

Before diving into a qualitative research strategy, define clear goals, a timeframe for completion, and the kind of information you need to solve your problem.

Let me know what you think in the comments and don’t forget to share.

what types of questionnaire appropriate to be use in qualitative research ?

This guide will give you a detailed answer https://www.kyleads.com/blog/questionnaire/

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