Maxwell’s Chapter 5 focuses on the design of the Methods section of your research.

The focus is on how to design the use of specific approaches and methods in a qualitative study, not on how to actually do the research itself. The author stresses there is no “cookbook” or cut and dry method for doing a qualitative research study. There are general guidelines for different approaches but the subject you are researching and your available resources will guide the exact method you use.

Below is an outline style rundown of the important parts of the chapter.

More and Less Structured Approaches:

• Any substantial prior structuring of methods leads to a lack of flexibility to respond to emergent insights, and can create methodological tunnel vision in making sense of data.

Conducting a Qualitative Study has Four Main Components:

1. The research relationships that you establish with those you study
2. Selection: what settings or individuals you decide to observe or interview, and what other sources of information you decide to use
3. Data collection: how you gather the info you will use
4. Data analysis: what you do with this information to make sense of it

Negotiating Research Relationships:

• The researcher needs to interact with people to collect data, and these relationships create and structure this interaction. Ongoing contact continually restructures these relationships.
• Negotiating entry= allows the researcher to ethically gain the information that can answer your research questions.
• Example 5.1 on Page 94 gives a good narrative of how a researcher prepared for his study

Site and Participant Selection:

• Where to conduct your research and whom to include in it (sampling)
• In qualitative research, the typical way of selecting settings and individuals is neither probability sampling nor convenience sampling. It falls into a third category, which can be called purposeful selection or purposive sampling: particular settings, persons, or activities are selected deliberately to provide information that is particularly relevant to your questions and goals

Decisions About Data Collection:

The Relationship Between Research Questions and Data Collection Methods

• There is no way to mechanically convert research questions into methods. Your methods are the means to answering your research questions, not a logical transformation of the latter. The method selection depends not only on your research question, but on the actual research situation and on what will work most effectively in that situation to give you the data you need.
• Figure 5.1 on Page 109 shows an example of how collected data is organized from an interview-based study.

Using Multiple Data Collection Methods

• Collecting data using multiple methods in qualitative research is common.
• Mixed-methods research: joint use of qualitative and quantitative methods in a single study
• Different purposes: 1. Triangulation- using different methods as a check on one another, seeing if methods with different strengths and limitations all support a single conclusion. 2. Gain information about different aspects of the phenomena that you are studying. Different methods are used to broaden the range of aspects or phenomena that your address, rather than simply to strengthen particular conclusions about some phenomenon.
• The use of generalized, present-tense, and specific, past-tense questions as with the joint use of observations and interviews can address the same issues and research questions but from different perspectives. The goal is to gain a greater depth of understanding rather than simply greater breadth or confirmation of the results of a single method.

Decisions About Data Analysis:

Strategies for Qualitative Data Analysis:

• Different strategies and tools can be used for qualitative analyses
• First step is reading the interview transcripts, observational notes, or documents, and listening to tapes you are analyzing. During this you should write notes on what you see and hear.
• Analytical options: memos, categorizing strategies, and connecting strategies (narrative analysis).
• The distinction between categorizing and connecting strategizes is basic to understating qualitative data analysis. The distinction involves two different modes of relationship: similarity (resemblances or common features) and contiguity (juxtaposition in time and space, the influence of one thing on another, or relations among parts of a text; their identification involves seeing actual connections between things, rather than similarities and differences).
• Categorizing analysis begins with the identification of units of data that seem important or meaningful in some way. This often called “open coding”, which involves reading the data and developing your coding categories based on what data seems most important.
• Figure 5.2 (Page 117) and Example 5.4 (Page 118-119) show example data and provides a narrative on how the data would be analyzed.

Computers and Qualitative Data Analysis:

• Software designed for qualitative data analysis is now widely used and is almost obligatory for large-scale projects.
• The main strength of such software is in categorizing analysis and many current books on using computers for qualitative data analysis focus almost entirely on coding. 

Although this chapter does not provide detailed steps for crafting the method of your research study, it gives a good overview of how to go about creating your own method. Qualitative research is more “loose” than quantitative research, and your method should reflect the way you are planning to get the richest information with the time and resources you have available.

By Benjamin Young, Marissa Levitan, & Christina Markoski