Doing Qualitative Research: Design and plan

I know you want to just get out there and do the research, but setting things up carefully and with the right infrastructure and permissions in place can save you time and stress later in your project. We don’t expect you want to intentionally do poor research or harm, but there are important things to consider to avoid unintentional errors and make sound decisions quickly when you face choices later in your projects.

This module will help you think about your research, before outlining examples of formal plans or protocols you will need to produce your research. This will demonstrate your own competence, as well as meeting expectations around research integrity, further discussed in the modules 💭 Epistemology and Meta issues and 💻 Manage and handle data.

This course is aimed at those undertaking qualitative research and using qualitative methods. It's important you chose qualitative methods because it is the right approach for investigating and exploring your research question, rather than because you don’t like numbers. Analysing qualitative data can be every bit as challenging as using numerical and statistical methods. Computer Aided Qualitative Data AnalysiS Software (CAQDAS) can't do the thinking for you, any more than a stats package can tell you the implications of a significant t-test.

“Qualitative research can help researchers access the thoughts and feelings of research participants, which can enable understanding of the meaning people ascribe to their experiences. While quantitative research methods can be used to determine how many people undertake particular behaviours, qualitative methods help researchers understand how and why such behaviours take place”.^[1]

To understand more on choosing the right approach, read our blog:

Remember, “quantitative and qualitative approaches make different assumptions about the world, about how science should be conducted, and about what constitutes legitimate problems, solutions and criteria of ‘proof’.”^[2].

You will learn more about research assumptions, ontology and epistemology in 💭 Epistemology and Meta issues.

By now it should be apparent that before you gather any data you need to consider quite a few things. This next section provides some tools to assist you in planning your unique piece of research.

First, take a moment to think about what you need to have, know or do before you even get to gather any data.

Formal requirements in design and planning

Even though many qualitative projects are exploratory, you will have to have some kind of plan and sense of the choices and limitations you will face, as well as the methods you plan to use. Qualitative research is iterative and your plans will develop as you go through the cycle of research. It is important that you understand that as the process is iterative, changes will occur. However this is not an excuse for making no plans at all: you need a rationale for what you are doing. You may already have done some of this work as part of a research proposal before being accepted on to a programme of study, or as part of an application for funding. However once proposals are accepted, much greater depth is required to demonstrate competence and integrity. Qualitative research projects will typically need:

• Project rationale
• Design protocol - outlining methods of data collection and analysis, stages of the research or decision points and timings.
• Ethical review and risk assessments
• Data management plan

These may be written as separate documents or combined under single headings. This will largely depend upon the requirements of your department, the norms of your discipline, your institution, and/or funding the funding body. How precise you need to be will be determined by ontological perspective, as well as local policy, regulatory requirements and the customs and needs of your participants and stakeholders.

Optional blogs

If you need to understand more about the kinds of data you could use, read:

Further reading: Research pre-registration

The requirement to pre-register research designs is designed to prevent distortion of research findings, especially in publication/research outputs. It is becoming more common in disciplines where null hypotheses are posited, and where researchers have noticed a bias in reporting towards positive results e.g. in clinical and technical research areas. Qualitative research is not generally viewed in this way. However pre-registration is an important discussion across research diciplines, so you may wish to discuss the implications for your project with your project supervisors. However it is far from established practice for even doctoral students at this point in time.

You can read more here:

Your thinking in this module might have alerted you to the many processes and structures that are involved in the research, such as ethical permissions. But be assured that the work that you do in designing and setting up your project will pay dividends when it comes to the work you will do for ethical or any kind of panel approval.

We suggest you continue this course with 💭 Epistemology and Meta issues.

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