1. Qualitative Research Design
Interpretive/Naturalistic/Emergent Design

2. Data collection design
Defining Your Role
Conceptual
Framework
Research design
Data collection design
Researcher role

3. Defining Your Role Researcher as instrument:
Fundamental assumption that you bring all your bags with you wherever you go.
they are always there and you must recognize the ways in which they affect your action and thinking.

4. Defining Your Role Effect of being studied (reactivity):
You are always a participant in the context despite your efforts to the contrary – once you enter a context it is changed.
Qualitative research allows/encourages the researcher to experiment with increased and/or decreased levels of participation in the environment.
How can you best get at a phenomenon in a context?

5. Defining Your Role Post-positivist Experimental Deductive Etic
Observer
Controlled
Interpretivist
Emergent
Inductive
Emic
Participant
Naturalistic

6. Defining Your Role
Your level of participation is fluid and can fluctuate as the study proceeds.
The decision about level of participation must strike a balance between the needs of the study and the needs of your participants.
Avoid“going native”
Whatever level of participation you use, your decision must be conscious and fully explained to your reader

7. Problem definition/research questions
What do you want to know?
What aspect of the participants’ experience is of interest to you?
Daily life
Larger social issues
Are they answerable?
Are they feasible?

8. Problem definition/research questions
Do they get at experience?
Are they open-ended?
Start general and get specific
Relevance – are you interested in your own question?

9. Clarify: The purpose of this study is…
The theory that guides this study is…
The questions guiding this study are…
The literature related to this study is…
Methodological
Topical
(from Janesick)

10. Constructivist/Symbolic Interactionist Perspective
Social construction of reality
Impossibility of objectivity
Impossibility of control

11. “Emic” vs. “etic” perspective
Emic: Understanding social phenomena from the participant’s (subject’s) perspective
Etic: Understanding social phenomena from an objective, third-party (researcher’s) perspective
**Derivation: From ‘phonemic’ and ‘phonetic’ respectively

12. Essential Features Researcher as instrument Naturalistic – field based
Purposeful sampling
Iterative nature of field visits – Researcher does not return to the field until previous data is analyzed (constant-comparative method)
Time-intensive – leave no stone unturned (discrepant case analysis)

13. Emergent design Limited literature review
Limited, flexible question generation (modifications expected)
Nothing is firm until data saturation is reached