Qualitative Research Methods Explained for PhD Students

Summary: Qualitative Research Methods Explained for PhD Students

The video introduces five common qualitative research strategies and explains how each is suited to a different kind of research question. Choosing a strategy helps define what the study investigates, whom or what it studies, and how data will be collected, analyzed, and presented.

Five Qualitative Research Approaches

1. Narrative Research

• Purpose: Explore the experiences of one or a small number of people through their stories.
• Focus: Individual lives, identities, and how people understand their experiences.
• Data: Interviews and documents, as well as possible observations, photographs, and other qualitative materials.
• Analysis: Organize and retell participants’ stories, often chronologically. Researchers may also analyze stories thematically or structurally.
• Important features: Include the circumstances in which events occurred and highlight transitions, interruptions, tensions, or “turning points.”
• Typical result: A developed account of an individual’s experiences and life story.

2. Phenomenological Research

• Purpose: Describe the shared meaning, or essence, of an experience or phenomenon.
• Focus: What people experience and how they experience it. Possible subjects include grief, stigma, anger, or undergoing surgery.
• Participants: People who have experienced the phenomenon being studied.
• Data: Primarily interviews, though documents, observations, and audiovisual materials may also be used.
• Analysis: Move from smaller units, such as codes or significant statements, toward broader themes and a description of the experience’s essence.
• Typical result: A combined description of the common features of participants’ experiences.

3. Grounded Theory Research

• Purpose: Develop a theory or general explanation grounded in participants’ data.
• Focus: A process, action, or interaction that unfolds over time and may have distinct phases.
• Participants: People who have experienced or taken part in the process under study.
• Data: Mainly interviews. Data collection may be iterative: researchers gather data, analyze it, identify gaps, and return to participants or seek further data.
• Analysis: The video describes coding and memo-writing. Memos record developing ideas about the process and how its stages connect. The transcript’s coding terminology is unclear, but the approach is presented as involving successive stages of coding.
• Typical result: A theory or framework explaining the process, sometimes presented visually.

4. Ethnographic Research

• Purpose: Describe and interpret the shared culture of a group.
• Focus: Patterns in a group’s behavior, values, beliefs, language, customs, and rituals.
• Participants: A group whose members share a culture and have interacted over time. The group may be large or relatively small.
• Data: Extended observation—often participant observation—in which the researcher spends time immersed in the group’s day-to-day life. Interviews and artifacts may also be used.
• Analysis: Look for recurring patterns and interpret the group’s culture, drawing on participants’ perspectives and, where appropriate, a theoretical lens.
• Typical result: An in-depth account of how the group functions and what its way of life means.

5. Case Study Research

• Purpose: Develop an in-depth understanding of one case or several cases in a real-life setting.
• Possible cases: An individual, organization, community, event, project, relationship, decision process, or small group.
• Boundaries: Define the case clearly, for example by its location or the period being studied.
• Data: Often draws on multiple sources, such as interviews, observations, documents, reports, and audiovisual materials.
• Analysis: Describe each case, identify themes within it, and, when studying multiple cases, consider themes across cases.
• Typical result: A detailed account and analysis of the case or cases, with conclusions about patterns, explanations, or broader lessons.

Choosing Among the Approaches

• Choose narrative research when the aim is to understand and present individual stories.
• Choose phenomenology when the aim is to describe the shared essence of an experience.
• Choose grounded theory when the aim is to develop an explanation or theory of a process or interaction.
• Choose ethnography when the aim is to understand the shared culture and practices of a group.
• Choose case study research when the aim is to investigate a clearly bounded case in depth.

The video also includes brief promotions for the presenter’s NVivo consulting and qualitative data-analysis services.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Presenter/narrator: One speaker explains the research approaches and promotes NVivo-related services. The subtitles do not name the presenter; the channel metadata identifies the channel as Survivingresearch- Bernard.
• Other speakers or cited sources: None are featured or identified in the subtitles.