13 Research methods, statistics, critical review and evidence-based practice13.7 Qualitative research
13.7.1 Qualitative methodologies
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
Matching the question to the method
Qualitative methods suit questions about meaning, perspective, lived experience, or how a role, process or policy works in its real setting.
Quantitative methods suit questions that reduce to counting, measuring or comparing.
A trial can count how many people stopped an antipsychotic, but a qualitative study asks how stopping develops and what it means to them.
A method is a technique, such as interviewing. A methodology is the reasoning that links the question, assumptions, sampling, analysis and claims.
The aim of a study
The aim is the overall problem the study was designed to address. It is not the findings, the background, or an objective the design could not address.
An exploratory qualitative aim is to identify barriers, not to measure them or prove anything about them.
Recognising a qualitative study
A study that explores experience, process or barriers, and does not test a hypothesis or measure an exposure or outcome, is qualitative.
Stage | Qualitative design | Hypothesis-testing, experimental or survey design |
|---|---|---|
Sampling | Purposive sampling | Randomisation |
Sample size | Set by data saturation | Fixed in advance |
Data collection | Open interviews, observation, field notes | Measured exposure and outcome |
Analysis | Verbatim transcription, coding into categories, thematic analysis, participant feedback | Hypothesis testing |
Named approaches
Grounded theory, phenomenology and ethnography are named qualitative methodologies. Quantitative designs and statistical techniques are not.
Approach | What it describes | Typical data |
|---|---|---|
Grounded theory | How a process works and why it varies, as an explanatory theory | Interviews analysed while collection continues |
Phenomenology | A phenomenon as participants subjectively live it, such as what an illness is like from the inside | A few detailed first-person accounts |
Ethnography | A social group's culture, values, customs and practices, from the inside | Participant observation, field notes, interviews and documents |
Ethnography needs the researcher to be immersed in the group over a prolonged period, usually weeks or months.
Goffman's hospital fieldwork, an ethnography, produced Asylums (1961), which described total institutions and patients' moral careers.
Interpretative phenomenological analysis studies small, homogeneous samples case by case, and its double hermeneutic is the researcher interpreting the participant's own meaning-making.
Participatory action research makes the people studied partners and co-researchers who shape the research focus and act on the findings, blurring the line between researcher and researched.
Content analysis codes existing texts or media into categories against a coding frame and compares how often each category occurs.
Discourse analysis reads language for meaning and power rather than counting categories.
Grounded theory
Glaser and Strauss developed grounded theory in the 1960s to build theory from data.
Constant comparison is its analytic technique: each new piece of data is compared with what is already coded, so categories and theory emerge while collection continues.
Constant comparison lets the emerging categories be refined iteratively and flexibly as analysis proceeds.
Theoretical sampling chooses further participants or data sources according to the categories emerging from analysis, to develop and refine the theory.
Theoretical saturation is reached when the categories are fully developed, not merely when words recur.
Interpreting findings and their limits
An inference must stay within what the study explored: participants experienced problems worth addressing, not that a remedy works, how common the problem is or what outcome follows.
"Most participants held this view" describes the sample, not a population percentage.
The conclusion links themes across the whole dataset into a cautious, interpretive explanation that raises a question for further work, not a restated single finding or a statistical generalisation.
Limited generalisability is inherent to the design, because a small purposive sample cannot support statistical generalisation.
Response rate and interviewer effects are problems of how a study was conducted, not inherent limits of the design.
Reflexivity makes the researcher's influence on the data explicit and examines its effects.