 In this video we're going to talk about qualitative research design. Now research design is a lot more than just choosing the methods you're going to use. For a lot of people that's the exciting part. Am I going to use focus groups? Am I going to do semi-structured interviews? Am I going to use diaries or some creative method? But there's a lot more to planning a qualitative research project than just choosing the methods and in fact you need to make sure that the methods you choose are appropriate for the analysis you're going to do and the way you're going to recruit and your epistemology. So let's talk about some of those things and why creating a plan at the start can save you a lot of time. Now the first thing to consider is the epistemology. So this is known as your theory of knowledge and it's very important to have a good idea of what this is for you before you get started. In qualitative research a lot of people would take a structuralist or a post-positive approach and there are lots of different epistemologies which you can choose from. You need to read through these carefully and decide which best fits your worldview. How you think knowledge can be generated and what we can infer from doing research with other people and these would directly lead into the methods you choose and the type of analysis that you choose to do. For example a lot of people will use feminist methods in qualitative research and that doesn't necessarily mean just because you're doing projects which involve women. Feminist methodology is actually more of an epistemology and ontology. It has lots of ways of critiquing power, looking at structures which are often hidden, which make it very applicable to lots of different approaches. One of the things that feminist methodologies tend to look at is reflexivity. So in qualitative analysis there's a lot of subjective interpretation of the data. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's something to be aware of and reflexivity, doing a reflexivity statement, is one way that you can be clear about your biases as a researcher and how they might influence your results and that gives the reader a good sense of your process and how your own interpretations, your own background, influence the way you interpret the data. Once you've got a good sense of what your theory of knowledge is going to be for the project, the second thing to think about is a literature review, a systematic review or a scoping exercise to see what other kind of research has been done before. There are two good reasons to do this. The first of which is it's a good idea to make sure that your research question is unique and someone else hasn't done it before and the second is you may actually find that there's data sources which you can use already. So it may be appropriate to do secondary data analysis, something that's often overlooked in qualitative methods but can be very useful. Somebody's got a very rich data source or if you're using something like social media data you don't have to collect the data yourself and that can save you a lot of time. But even if you do intend to collect your own data it can be really useful to see what people have done in another context even if it's on the same topic or people who've worked with similar population but with a very different issue. I'm reading those will give you a sense of some of the challenges you might face and again we'll make sure that your research is unique and making a valuable contribution to the literature. That will be one of the key things to talk about when you come to write up. Qualitative analysis software can really help with a literature review and we've got a separate video tutorials which will help you through that. Now the third thing to think about is sampling and recruitment. I like to separate these as two different things. So sampling is deciding who you want to talk to and why and recruitment is how you're going to actually get those people to take part in a project. So sampling the first thing which a lot of people have when they come to qualitative research methods is that the sample size tends to be quite small. You don't talk to hundreds of people that you would do if you're doing a quantitative survey. You may just talk to a few people or a dozen. If you're doing an auto ethnography you may just talk to one person and that's okay as long as you can justify that within your epistemology and with your research methods that you've chosen. But sampling is a lot more than that. You may also decide if you're going to talk to many people what should their backgrounds be. Are you going to try and make sure you speak to the same number of men and women? Do you need to think about the age ranges? Are they all going to be in the same place? Are they all going to be in the same location? And then you come to the issue about recruitment and recruitment is literally now I've decided the kind of people I want to talk to. How do I make sure that they know about the project? They want to take part and that I get ethics permission for them so that there's a consent form that I've gone through so they understand what the project is about. Now if you're dealing with a university doing something like an IRB, so an institution review board or an ethics panel, they'll be very interested in the consent process that you have and so that becomes a very important part of your research plan and your recruitment strategy. Now when you've done all that the next thing to think about is the methods and again that's the exciting bit so for qualitative research there are lots of different methods that you can choose. So focus groups, semi-structured interviews tend to be the two most popular but you should also think about diary methods, you can do surveys for qualitative data, social media analysis, secondary data analysis but there are also lots of fun creative ways. Photo voice, you can get people to take photos of their lived environment, take videos, you can get them to do regular diaries, email diaries and you can even get them to do art projects. There's a really good book here by Helen Carr which is on creative methods. I really recommend you have a quick look through that and see if there's any kind of fun ways that you could extract really interesting data using some different methods other than the standard kind of interview and focus groups. The other thing that you might consider is mixed methods. Now technically when you say mixed methods that does mean using more than one method even if they're all qualitative methods. So focus groups and interviews together that's mixed methods but generally what people mean by that is mixed methods being quantitative and qualitative methods. So combining qualitative and quantitative methods can be very powerful. It can mean that you can do something like a very large quantitative survey where you've got a statistically significant sample size that proves with a validated test, a particular thing that you're trying to find out and then you can use a qualitative method to get to the how and the why of that so you get a much more deeper understanding with a small subset of the population. The issue with mixed methods is always triangulation. So how do you bring together things across those different types of data? How do you take a quantitative metric and match it to your qualitative data? So again an important part of the research design process is making sure that you know in advance before you start choosing these methods and collecting the data how you're going to integrate all those different things together. Even if you've just got interviews and focus groups pulling things across is not always as straightforward as it may seem and you need to understand the differences that focus groups represent people talking in public so they may say very different things to how they would in a private one-to-one interview and again that's going to affect your triangulation and your analysis approach. One of the other considerations with a lot of these methods is transcription. If again if you're using focus groups or you're using semi-structured interviews are you going to have those transcribed? Are you going to transcribe themself so you've got a write-up word for word of what people have said? Most people want to do that because it tends to be easier to analyze transcript and it also is a lot quicker to read through and eventually you're going to probably want to write up some of them anyway. Even if your output at the end is going to be a really fun comic or a blog or a podcast or a video most people are going to have to write up a thesis or a research paper or a textbook chapter at some stage and they're going to need those written quotes. Transcription can take a very long time so if you're doing it yourself it's something you really want to consider. Even if you're outsourcing it you're using an automated online service or you're getting someone else a professional transcriber you still need to go through and read and check it. They'll always be misheard things especially if someone's not familiar with the context or very special words or place names and things like that usually get mixed up so take time to make sure that your transcripts are accurate as well. Now the next thing we'll come to is analysis and the analysis of qualitative data is something that you can take a very long time part of the research plan should be making sure that you've left enough time to do the qualitative analysis. This can sometimes take weeks or months something you may do with other people you may do yourself and there are very many different types of analysis that you can do so some examples would be IPA interpretive phenomenological analysis lots of people use grounded theory framework analysis. There are dozens and dozens of subcategories even within those categories so again part of your research planning should be reading through those different textbooks about these different approaches and making sure you choose one that's appropriate for your research question and appropriate for the kind of data that you have. You should also bear in mind that qualitative analysis tends to be a non-linear process often people will go back and over and over again sometimes using different methods and sometimes people will get stuck and you need to leave some time for that to go wrong basically or at least to get stuck and then find a new way to do it it's not always a very clear process and you need to leave time for experimentation and play with the data and find the best way of working with it. So one of the things that can help with the analysis process is qualitative analysis software or cacdash software there are lots of options out there quirkos is one of them and there's some more information about this at the end of the video but it can really help the analysis process not because it does the analysis for you but it makes it a lot easier to manage all the different sources to play with the different sources of data to experiment and then to find those quotes that you want to use in the writing up process and so finally we come to the writing up process now the writing up process isn't something else that can take quite a long time and people often don't lose a lot of time for you should have a very clear idea what your outputs are going to be before you start are you writing a phd thesis or your master's thesis are there specific requirements around that are you going to be writing a journal article is it a textbook chapter are you going to make sure that you've got some interesting output which is appropriate for sometimes called the the lay population so something you don't have to be an academic to read all these things take time to produce and a research plan will really help speed the writing up process though because you have a good sense from your literature review about why you've chosen these methods what your epistemology is what analysis approach you took but also just finding the quotes again qualitative software can help that part of the the process a lot but extracting bits of the data and having a managed system to play with your data really helps speed up the writing up process so i hope you can see that a research plan when started before you get going can really help speed up the process and make things go a lot smoother it's also important to note that it should be a living document so it may look like something that's in a spreadsheet or a word document but something that you update as you go along a lot of people also keep a research journal or a research diary to track kind of their processes as they're going along and that can really help with the writing up process as well so i hope this has really helped you create a research plan and think about how your qualitative research process is going to be the final thing is to consider if you want to use qualitative analysis software whether something like Quercos could help we design Quercos to be very simple to use very intuitive and straightforward and to give a very visual approach to analyzing qualitative data and it can definitely help not just at the analysis stage but also managing participant data and when you come to writing up so do download the free trial of Quercos we've got many more videos and tutorials here on our youtube channel about Quercos specifically but also general qualitative tips and tricks and we've also got a blog which has got lots more information about specific types of analysis different tips and tricks for using semi-structured interviews and focus groups and some of these other fun methods so do check it out and don't forget to like and subscribe