Alternative Data Collection Methods

Alternative Data Collection Methods

Qualitative Surveys

  • Open-ended questions in a fixed order.
  • Can produce rich, complex accounts.
  • Capture participant language and terminology.
  • Offer a 'wide-angle lens' for diverse perspectives.
  • Increase anonymity for sensitive research.
  • Benefits:
    • Less burden for participants (no travel).
    • Flexibility in completion time and location.
    • Minimizes risks to researcher safety.
    • Less demanding of time and resources.
    • Beneficial for inexperienced researchers.
  • Appropriate when:
    • Best fit for participant needs (sensitive topics).
    • Population is dispersed or hard to access.
    • A wide range of perspectives is sought.

Research Diaries

  • Participants repeatedly answer questions about feelings, cognitions, and behaviors.
  • Now often completed on phones.
  • Good for accessing day-to-day experiences.
  • Useful for topics people avoid discussing.

Autoethnography

  • Personalized accounts drawing on researcher experience.
  • Study of the self through analytically-oriented retrospective self-study.
  • Valuable when personal experiences provide unique data access.
  • Challenges:
    • Personal experiences become 'common knowledge'.
    • Potential personal and professional impacts.
    • Emotionally draining and potentially triggering.
    • Consent issues involving others.

Story Completion

  • Participants write stories based on a predetermined stem.
  • Explores dominant assumptions about a topic.
  • Useful for sensitive and ethically complex topics.
  • Creative and engaging for participants and researchers.
  • Challenges:
    • Data less predictable, complicating analysis.
    • Wide variation in story richness and length.

Photo-Elicitation

  • Using photos or visual mediums to generate discussion.
  • Gains phenomenological sense of photo meanings to participants.
  • Elicits rich accounts of a given topic.
  • Formats:
    • Participant-driven (open): participants provide relevant photos.
    • Participant-driven (semi-structured): participants seek images aligning with questions.
    • Researcher-driven: researcher provides photos as stimuli.

Creative Methods

  • Includes artistic and arts-based work.
  • Data collection based on arts activities.
  • Use of visual materials.
  • Approach to analysis varies with data (e.g., textual analysis for poems, artistic analysis for paintings).
  • Poetry can conceptualize beyond literal language.
  • Use of metaphorical representations and objects to express difficult experiences (e.g. identity boxes).