Designing a Qualitative Study

Traditionally, works on research design (most of which focus on quantitative research) have understood “design ” in one of two ways. Some take designs to be fixed, standard arrangements of research conditions and methods that have their own coherence and logic, as possible answers to the question, “What research design are you using? ” (e.g., Campbell & Stanley, 1967). For example, a randomized, double-blind experiment is one research design; an interrupted timeseries design is another. Beyond such broad categories as ethnographies, qualitative interview studies, and case studies (which often overlap), qualitative research lacks any such elaborate typology into which studies can be pigeonholed. In…