Types of Qualitative

Research
• Phenomenological
 It is designed to describe and interpret an experience by
determining the meaning of the experience as perceived by the
people who have participated in it.

 The key question is “What is the experience of an activity or

concept from the perspective of particular participants?”

 The assumption is that there are many ways of interpreting the

same experience and that the meaning of the experience to each
person is what constitutes reality.
describe a "lived experience" of a phenomenon.
 The central research question aims to determine the essence of the
experience as “perceived by the participant”.

Data Collection
 Interviewing multiple individuals is the typical data collection
approach

 The assumption that there is an essence or essences to shared

experience. These essences are the core meanings mutually
understood through a phenomenon commonly experienced.
 A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY INTO HOW STUDENTS
EXPERIENCE AND UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSITY
PRESIDENCY
Little is known about how college students experience and understand the
university presidency. Students are important consumers of the academic
experience and by affiliation are constituents of organizational leadership.
The social distance between students and university presidents continues to
narrow. To address the void in scholarly literature, my study explored how
students experience and understand the university presidency. My
investigation utilized phenomenological methodology to form descriptive
themes. I interviewed 10 college students who self-identified as being
involved with extracurricular activities and having, at minimum, occasional
interaction with their president. Participants were selected from two small,
public, Midwestern universities where their president had served for five or
more consecutive years. The in-depth face-toface interviews with students
provided rich data.
• Grounded Theory
 This research approach focuses on gathering data about
peoples’ experiences in a particular context and then
inductively building a theory “from the bottom up”.

 Moves beyond description to generate or discover a theory

that emerges from the data and that provides an explanation of
a process, action, or interaction.
 Data may be collected by interview and observation( as the
primary data collection tools) , records, or a combination of this.
 This process is initiated by coding and categorizing

Types of Coding

Open coding
It deals with labeling and categorizing phenomenon in the data.
It uses the comparative method. Data are broken down by asking
what, where, how, when, how much, etc.
◦ Axial coding

 It is designed to put data back together that were broken

apart in open coding. It develops connections between a
category and its subcategories (not between discrete
categories). It’s purpose is to develop main categories and
subcategories

◦ Selective coding

 It shows the connections between the discrete categories.

Categories that have been developed to build the theoretical
framework are integrated. It’s purpose is to bring the categories
together into an overall theory.
• Historical Studies
 are oriented to the past rather than to the present and thus use
different data collection methods from those used in other qualitative
approaches.
 included in qualitative research because of its emphasis on
interpretation and its use of nonnumeric data
 the historian systematically locates, evaluates, and interprets
evidence from which people can learn about the past.
Historians can study only those people for whom records and
artifacts survive.
Sources of Information:

Primary sources
are original documents (correspondence, diaries, reports, etc.), relics, remains, or
artifacts.
Secondary Sources
second-hand observation, i.e. the author collected the data from
eyewitnesses
Two ideas that have proved useful in evaluating historical sources
are the concepts of external (or lower) criticism and internal (or
higher) criticism.

 External Criticism asks if the evidence under consideration is authentic

and, depending on the nature of the study, may involve such techniques as
authentication of signatures, chemical analysis of paint, or carbon dating of
artifacts.

The Historical investigator proceeds to internal criticism, which requires

evaluating the worth of the evidence, for instance, whether a document
provides a true report of an event.