Lesson 33: Qualitative Research Designs

Definition

Design is a word which means a plan or something that is conceptualized by the mind. As a result of a mental activity characterized by unfixed formation of something but an extensive interconnection of things, a design in the field of research serves as a blueprint or a skeletal framework of your research study. It includes many related aspects of your research work. A choice of a research design requires you to finalize your mind on the purpose, philosophical basis, and types of data of your research, including your method of collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and presenting the data. It is a plan that directs your mind to several stages of your research work. (De Mey 2013)

There are five research designs that are commonly used in a qualitative research, but these are also labelled as types of qualitative research by some books on qualitative research because when you speak of a research design, you plan your methods or techniques in collecting and analyzing data. Your research design is realized by any of these types of qualitative research that has its own data collecting technique: case study, ethnography, historical study, phenomenology, and grounded theory. Whether you think of them as research types or research designs, just the same, you get to deal with the same features or aspects involved in each type or design.

Types Research Designs

1. Case Study

To do a research study based on this research design is to describe a person, a thing, or any creature on Earth for the purpose of explaining the reasons behind the nature of its existence. Your aim here is to determine why such creature (person, organization, thing, or event) acts, behaves, occurs, or exists in a particular manner. Usually, a case study centers on an individual or single subject matter. Your methods of collecting data for this qualitative research design are interview, observation, and questionnaire. One advantage of case study is its capacity to deal with a lot of factors to determine the unique characteristics of the entity. (Meng 2012; Yin, 2012)

2. Ethnography

A qualitative research design called ethnography involves a study of a certain cultural group or organization in which you, the researcher, to obtain knowledge about the characteristics, organizational set-up, and relationships of the group members, must necessarily involve you in their group activities. Since this design gives stress to the study of a group of people, in a way, this is one special kind of a case study. The only thing that makes it different from the latter is your participation as a researcher in the activities of the group.

Ethnography requires your actual participation in the group members’ activities while a case study treats you, the researcher, as an outsider whose role is just to observe the group. Realizing this qualitative research design is living with the subjects in several months; hence, this is usually done by anthropologists whose interests basically lie in cultural studies. (Winn 2014)

3. Historical Study

This qualitative research design tells you the right research method to determine the reasons for changes or permanence of things in the physical world in a certain period (i.e., years, decades, or centuries). What is referred to in the study as time of changes is not a time shorter than a year but a period indicating a big number of years. Obviously, historical study differs from other research designs because of this one element that is peculiar to it, the scope. The scope or coverage of a historical study refers to the number of years covered, the kind of events focused on, and the extent of new knowledge or discoveries resulting from the historical study.

A clue about the scope is usually reflected by the title of the study such as the following:

Examples:

• A Five-Year Study of the Impact of the K-12 Curriculum on the Philippine Employment System

• The Rise and Fall of the Twenty-Year Reign of Former Philippine President, Ferdinand E. Marcos

• Filipino-Student Activism from the Spanish Era to the Contemporary Period

• Telephones from the Nuclear Era to the Digital Age

The data collecting techniques for a study following a historical research design are biography or autobiography reading, documentary analysis, and chronicling activities. This last technique, chronicling activities, makes you interview people to trace series of events in the lives of people in a span of time. However, one drawback of historical study, is the absence, or loss of complete and well-kept old that may hinder the completion of the study.

4. Phenomenology

A phenomenon is something you experience on Earth as a person. It is a sensory experience that makes you perceive or understand things that naturally occur in your life such as death, joy, friendship, caregiving, defeat, victory, and the like. This qualitative research design makes you follow a research method that will let you understand the ways of how people go through inevitable events in their lives. You are prone to extending your time in listening to people’s recount of their significant experiences to be able to get a clue or pattern of their techniques in coming to terms with the positive or negative results of their life experiences.

Comparing these two qualitative research designs, phenomenology and ethnography, the first aims at getting a thorough understanding of an individual’s life experiences for this same person’s realistic dealings with hard facts of life while the second aims at defining, describing, or portraying a certain group of people possessing unique cultural traits. Focusing on people’s meaning and making strategies in relation to their life experiences, phenomenology as a qualitative research design finds itself relevant or useful to people such as teachers, nurses, guidance counselors, and the like, whose work entails giving physical and emotional assistance or relief to people. Unstructured interview is what this research design directs you to use in collecting data. (Paris 2014; Winn 2014)

5. Grounded Theory

A research study adhering to a grounded theory research design aims at developing a theory to increase your understanding of something in a psycho-social context. Such study enables you to develop theories to explain sociologically and psychologically influenced phenomena for proper identification of a certain educational process. Occurring in an inductive manner, a research study following a grounded theory design takes place in an inductive manner, wherein one basic category of people’s action and interactions gets related to a second category; to third category; and so on, until a new theory emerges from the previous data. (Gibson 2014; Creswell 2012)

A return to the previous data to validate a newly found theory is a zigzag sampling. Moving from category to category, a study using a grounded theory design is done by a researcher wanting to know how people fair up in a process-bound activity such as writing. Collecting data based on this qualitative research design called grounded theory is through formal, informal, or semi-structured interview, as well as analysis of written works, notes, phone calls, meeting proceedings, and training sessions. (Picardie 2014)