Data driven decision making -Milestone 3
About Qualitative Research
Qualitative research design is a branch of research focused understanding the 'qualities' of phenomena, as opposed to quantitative research, which is fundamentally concerned with 'quantities'. Qualitative researchers work to build understandings of human lives and social worlds, beliefs, experiences, and perceptions. The data produced by qualitative research is non-numerical, but can be used to build narratives, descriptions, and understandings of why phenomena occur the way they do.
The tools used in qualitative research include interviews, focus groups, open-ended (write-in) questions on surveys, document analysis, artifacts and photographs, and ethnographic observation (when a researcher embeds themselves in a context to observe it). For this module, we're going to focus on the tools most often used for business and organizational research: focus groups, and open-ended questions. To begin with, to understand the distinction between qualitative and quantitative research, review https://www.mcgill.ca/mqhrg/resources/what-difference-between-qualitative-and-quantitative-research
Watch the video below for an introduction to qualitative research, and the tools available to you as a qualitative researcher.
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Focus Groups
Focus groups are a research approach in which a small group of people engage in a discussion led by a facilitator to generate ideas, feedback, and opinions. Focus groups have a few advantages over individual interviews: you reach a larger number of people faster because you're speaking to multiple people at once, and focus groups are dynamic because participants respond to each other's ideas. Focus groups can also be challenging: focus groups can easily become dominated by a few opinionated or confident members, and it can be difficult to coax all members to participate. The act of observing a focus group as a facilitator can shape the proceedings, and social pressure can shape people's responses. Review the following vide for additional information about the history, value, and limitations of focus groups:
Because of the unique limitations and strengths of focus groups, they're best used in a specific array of research situations, including providing feedback on an idea, or brainstorming. For more information about the best uses of focus groups and what the markers of hiqh-quality focus groups are, review the following video.
As the video above outlines, focus groups are conducted by a moderator with the aid of a 'protocol' designed in advance. This protocol sets out the preparation, location, informed consent procedures & confidentiality, and questions that the moderator will use to steer the discussion. A high quality protocol is vital to not only make sure your focus groups stay on track and follow the same broad pattern, but to ensure that your questions and procedures are crafted to minimize bias and follow the rules governing the ethical conduct of research.
Review this guide for designing focus groups to understand both how to evaluate the focus groups of other researchers, and how to design your own focus group protocol:
Krueger, R. (2002). Designing and Conducting Focus Group Interviews (p. 18). Eastern Illinois University, https://www.eiu.edu/ihec/Krueger-FocusGroupInterviews.pdf
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Open-Ended Survey Question Design
As we discussed in the previous module, focus groups are best suited to research environments where you want to collect feedback or brainstorm ideas on subjects that aren't too personal or 'risky' for the participants. But what if you do want to elicit more personal information, or invite subjects to discuss personal struggles, challenges, or even failures? What if you need information about areas of behavior or belief that are possibly subject to social pressure? And what if you simply need more responses or more geographically dispersed responses than you can manage with a focus group? Your answer may be a survey.
You've probably taken a lot of surveys in your life; from satisfaction surveys after a purchase to phone polls during an election to course feedback surveys at the end of term, surveys are common in our day-to-day life. There are two main categories of survey question: open-ended and structured or closed-ended. Open ended are those questions which are structured to elicit complex, personal and free-form responses in open text boxes. Structured or closed-ended questions are those that you can respond to by selecting an option from a drop-down menu, list, or yes/no box.
If you think about your own experience with open-ended questions on surveys, you may have some intuitive idea of some of their strengths and weaknesses: these questions can suggest areas of inquiry you didn't think to include in more structured survey questions, and give you feedback on topics that are too complex to easily be captured on 'agree-disagree' scales, but people may be too tired or disinterested to respond fully to these question (or they simply may not enjoy or be skilled at writing).
Ultimately, skillfully crafted open-ended questions can engage survey respondents and elicit interesting and valuable responses that add nuance and new ideas to research data. They allow you to see what language respondents use to describe their views without your guidance, and how they prioritize ideas in their answer. Their use of emotional language can give you context about their perspective, and even the amount of detail included can tell you how passionate people in-general may be about sharing information on this topic.
Open-ended questions are also valuable for use in pilot studies when you don't know what options to include for a closed-ended survey. Say you wanted to survey employees about the benefits that matter most for their workplace satisfaction, but don't know enough about your employees' preferences to have them rank items from a list. What if you left off an important option? You could ask an open-ended question to a smaller group of people asking about what benefits matter to them, and use those responses to develop a short list that your larger number of respondents can quickly rank or rate.
We will learn more about closed-ended question design and survery design overall in the quantitative methods sub-module. Read this guide to creating open-ended questions for additional information about the design of these question types: https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/research/open-ended-questions/
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Qualitative Analysis Approaches
Once you've collected qualitative information, it has to be analyzed. In order to make coherent and reliable meaning out of the complex array of transcripts, text and other data collected as a part of qualitative research, researchers need a strategy for analyzing that complex content.
The most common approach is to develop a code structure based on reading open-ended survey responses, and focus group and interview transcripts. The researcher notes commonly occurring themes, dynamics of interest, and sentiment to understand what ideas were most important and represent the opinions of their subjects as a whole. As there is an element of subjectivity to this process, researchers must carefully document their choices, especially when collaborating between teams of research, so that codes are clear and applied evenly across all data. Qualitative researchers should very clearly describe their approach to analyzing qualitative data in the methods section of any article.
Review the video below for more information about data analysis and code production in qualitative research to prepare yourself to understand and evaluate the methodological choices of sources sued in your research.
