Develop a research design report in qualitative analysis (i.e. interviews, case studies)
The report shall focus on elucidating the following issues (as you understand them):
1. The domain and rationale of your research design and method.
2. Boundaries and design of the research idea.
3. Data collection methods you plan to choose and why.
4. Research approach you plan to use
5. Potential problems with your planned research project.
The most important thing is to focus and write on development of the ontological and epistemological basis of the research, the assessment, the limitations of the study, & elucidate well on the complexity of the managerial problem. Select one of these five approaches that best fits the research question(s) and data suitability, availability and validity relevant to the study; the Narrative, Phenomenological, Grounded Theory, Ethnographic and Case Study research approach involving definitions, typologies and procedures.
Qualitative analysis is the analysis of qualitative data such as text data from interview transcripts. Unlike quantitative analysis, which is statistics driven and largely independent of the researcher, qualitative analysis is heavily dependent on the researcher’s analytic and integrative skills and personal knowledge of the social context where the data is collected.
The emphasis in qualitative analysis is “sense making” or understanding a phenomenon, rather than predicting or explaining. A creative and investigative mindset is needed for qualitative analysis, based on an ethically enlightened and participant-in-context attitude, and a set of analytic strategies. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of these qualitative analysis strategies. Interested readers are referred to more authoritative and detailed references such as Miles and Huberman’s (1984) [17] seminal book on this topic.
How can you analyze a vast set qualitative data acquired through participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups, narratives of audio/video recordings, or secondary documents? One of these techniques for analyzing text data is grounded theory – an inductive technique of interpreting recorded data about a social phenomenon to build theories about that phenomenon.
The technique was developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) [18] in their method of constant comparative analysis of grounded theory research, and further refined by Strauss and Corbin (1990) [19] to further illustrate specific coding techniques – a process of classifying and categorizing text data segments into a set of codes (concepts), categories (constructs), and relationships.
The interpretations are “grounded in” (or based on) observed empirical data, hence the name. To ensure that the theory is based solely on observed evidence, the grounded theory approach requires that researchers suspend any preexisting theoretical expectations or biases before data analysis, and let the data dictate the formulation of the theory.