Qualitative Data Collection and Analysis Methods

Qualitative Data Collection Methods in Each Design or Approach

The School of Education approves five approaches or designs within qualitative methodology: basic qualitative, case study, ethnography, grounded theory, and phenomenology. Each of these designs uses its own kind of data sources. Table 1 outlines the main primary and secondary sources of data in each design.

Primary sources are data from actual participants.
Secondary data sources are from others.
Field notes in qualitative terminology can mean either of the following:
- The researcher’s notes describing observations of participants or behaviors in their natural environments. This is the more common usage, and is most common in ethnographic studies.
- The researcher’s notes to self about themes noticed while collecting data, possibly important points in the data, ideas to come back to, and so on.
- Another related term is memos, although memos in grounded theory tend to be brief or extended essays charting the development of theory, rather than simple notes. Strictly speaking, these notes or memos are not data in themselves, but point to data in another source.

Table 1. The Fit of Method and the Type of Data


Chosen Method	Likely Data Sources
Ethnography	Primary: participant observation, field notes, unstructured or semi-structured interviews (sometimes audiotaped or videotaped). Secondary: documents, records, photographs, videotapes, maps, and sociograms.
Case Study	Primary: interviews (audiotapes), participant and nonparticipant observations, documents and records, detailed descriptions of context and setting, chronological data, conversations recorded in dairies and field notes. Secondary: audiovisual data.
Grounded Theory	Primary: interviews (audiotapes), participant and nonparticipant observations, conversations recorded in dairies and field notes. Secondary: documents and records.
Phenomenology	Primary: audiotapes of in-depth conversational interviews or dialogue. Secondary: journals, poetry, novels, biographies, literature, art, films.
Basic Qualitative Inquiry	Primary: Semi-structured interviews that have been field tested with content experts (audiotaped), and field notes. Secondary: observations, documents, journals or other artifacts.

Data Collection in Ethnography

Typically, ethnographers collect data while in the field. Their data collection methods can include

Participant observation.
Naturalistic observation.
Writing field notes.
Conducting semi-structured or structured interviews (sometimes audiotaped or videotaped).
Reviewing documents, records, photographs, videotapes, maps, and sociograms.
Any accessible and dependable source of information about the behaviors, interactions, customs, values, beliefs, attitudes, and practices of the members of that culture can be a source of data.

It is worth remembering that the time-world of cultural groups is longer than it is for individual persons, and so:

Data collection may need to cover a longer time in order to capture the true flavor of the culture.
Field research methods need to adapt to the demands of the field; ethnography allows for flexibility in the design of its methods to accommodate the challenges of the field.

However, for both of these reasons—the longer time-world of the culture or group and the occasional need to change data collection methods to meet challenges in the field—Institutional Review Board (IRB) complications can be introduced and must be addressed, further lengthening the time of the ethnographic study.

Data Collection in Case Studies

Case studies always include multiple sources of information because the case includes multiple kinds of issues. For example, a case study of a training program would obtain and analyze information about:

The participants.
The nature of the organizational issues calling for the training.
The kinds of training provided.
The outcomes of the program.
The background and training of the staff, and so on.

In addition to multiple information sources, every case study provides an in-depth description of the contexts of the case:

Its setting (for example, the kind of organizational structure and environment in which the training takes place).
Its contexts (social contexts, political contexts, affiliations affecting outcomes, and so on).

The setting and context are an intrinsic part of the case.

Consequently, because cases contain many kinds of information and contexts, case studies use many different methods of data collection. These can include the full range of qualitative methods such as:

Open-ended surveys.
Interviews.
Field observations.
Reviews of documents, records, and other materials.
Evaluation of audiovisual materials.
Descriptions of contexts and collateral materials; and so on.

A well-designed case study does not rely on a single method and source of data because any true case (bounded system) will have many characteristics and it is not known ahead of time which characteristics are important. Determining that is the work of the case study.

Data Collection in Grounded Theory

The dominant methods of data collection in grounded theory research are:

Interviews (usually audiotaped).
Participant and nonparticipant observations.
Conversations.
Recorded diaries.
Field notes.
Descriptions of comparative instances.
Personal narratives of experiences.

The participants in a grounded theory study often will be interviewed more than once and asked to reflect on and refine the preliminary conclusions drawn by the researcher. Grounded theory designs use the constant comparative data analysis technique that requires simultaneously interviewing, analyzing, and constantly comparing the data. As a result of the constant comparison of interview data, the participants in a grounded theory study often will be interviewed more than once and asked to reflect on and refine the preliminary conclusions drawn by the researcher.

Grounded theorists will develop substantive theories through:

Employing a theoretical sampling process that might lead to interviewing new rounds of participants until theoretical saturation is reached.
Reinterviewing participants about them, asking for their feedback.

Data Collection in Phenomenology

There are two descriptive levels of the empirical phenomenological model that arise from the data collected:

Level 1: The original data are comprised of naïve descriptions obtained from participants through open-ended questions and dialogue. Naïve means simply, “in their own words, without reflection.”
Level 2: The researcher describes the structures of the experiences based on reflective analysis and interpretation of the research participant’s account or story.

To collect data for these levels of analysis, the primary tool is the in-depth personal interview.

Interviews typically are open (meaning, no forced answers), with three main kinds of questions:

An opening or initial question. Usually this is only pre-written question, designed carefully to inquire into the participant’s lived (everyday) experience of the phenomenon under investigation.
Follow-up questions are asked to tease out deeper or more detailed elaborations of the earlier answers or to clarify unclear statements or ask about non-verbal gestures.
Guiding questions are asked to help the respondents return to the topic of the interview when they stray or digress.

The goal of the opening question (and all other questions) is to allow the respondent the maximum freedom to respond from within his or her lived (everyday, non-reflective) experience.

Because the objective is to collect data that are profoundly descriptive (rich in detail) and introspective, these interviews often can be lengthy, sometimes lasting as long as an hour or more.

Sometimes other sources of data are used in phenomenological studies, when those sources are equivalent in some way to the in-depth interview. For example:

In a study of the lived experience of teacher creativity, poems or other writings by the participants (or other people) about creative experiences might be collected in the same way as the in-depth interviews.
Audiovisual materials having a direct bearing on the lived experience of creativity might be included as data (for example, art work or other illustrations of creativity).

Although other less personal data sources (such as letters, official documents, and news accounts) are seldom used as direct information about the lived experience, the researcher may find in a particular case that these are useful either in illuminating the participant’s story itself or in creating a rich and textured background description of the contexts and settings in which the participant experienced the phenomenon.

Data Collection in Basic Qualitative Inquiry

Data collection in this approach typically uses data collection methods that elicit people’s verbal descriptions and interpretations of their experiences and the meaning they ascribe to those experiences. Basic qualitative research can also focus on understanding a process; for example, a study that examines innovative teaching strategies and practices used by general education teachers in large inclusive classrooms. Basic qualitative researchers will use semi-structure interviews as their main data collection tool. When appropriate, observations and artifacts might be includes.

Merriam (2009) describes a basic interpretive qualitative research study as having philosophically been derived from constructionism, phenomenology, and symbolic interaction and is used by researchers who are "interested in “(1) how people interpret their experiences, (2) how they construct their worlds, and (3) what meaning they attribute to their experiences. The overall purpose is to understand how people make sense of their lives and their experiences" (p. 23).

This concludes the discussion of qualitative data collection methods. Please review the Presentation on “Quantitative Data Analysis Methods” in Unit 4, if you have not done so already.

(For a more thorough discussion of data collection, see the guide Qualitative Research Approaches in Psychology and Human Services.)

Consider this quotation from Charmaz (2006), “Simply thinking through how to word open-ended questions averts forcing responses into narrow categories” (p. 18).

References

Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. ISBN: 9780761973522.

Merriam, S. B. (2009). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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