Qualitative Research Designs

Phenomology

• Understand people’s lived experiences

• Descriptive phenomonology - describes the essence of an experience

• Interpretive phenomonology - goes beyond description to understand deeper meanings

grounded theory

• purpose is to generate a theory based on participants experiences and social processes

• participants are asked to describe problems related to the process/experience and then articulate how they solved it and the stages they went through

• often uses theoretical sampling

ethnography

• purpose is to understand the behaviours, beliefs, experiences of a culture sharing group

• not necessarily an “ethnic” culture but more so a group that is living with a phenomenon of interest

qualitative vs interpretive description

• qualitative provides a description of an experience or event

• interpretive description aims to generate knowledge that is relevant to a clinical context, goes beyond description to provide an in-depth understanding of a phenomenon

theoretical sampling

• used in grounded theory studies

• initial participants are sampled based on shared characteristics

• individuals who may contradict the argument/theory are recruited

rigour in data analysis - credibility

• confidence in “truth” of findings - internal validity

• the probability that the study’s methods will produce plausible findings

rigour in data analysis - transferability

how applicable is the data to the other contexts - external validity

rigour in data analysis - dependability

consistency within a study

rigour in data analysis - confirmability

neutrality of the study

triangulation

• a step in data analysis process to verify key findings using several information sources

• primarily establishes credibility

investigator triangulation

more than one investigator collects/analyzes the data so that the findings are cross checked

theory triangulation

emerging findings are examined in comparison to existing theories

member checking

Where researchers bring back data to the participants and participants review it to check if it accurately reflects their experience