QRMSS Ch. 2 Designing Qualitative Research

Chapter 2 of QRMSS is all about designing your research project, and the literal plan for how the study will be conducted. As social scientists, we recognize the social patterns in our world. A few points Professor Casso pointed out in helping to decide what kind of project to embark on could be: What are you interested or have access to? What are observed patterns you want to know more about? How are you trying to pursue people's meanings? What theories will be used to explain people's meanings? Through this research, we can figure out relationship between concept and ideas. Remembering that we don't have to prove hypotheses in qualitative research.

A place to start is through literature review. While this can be easier in today's technologic age, remember to search for scholarly and peer reviewed articles. I already had some luck looking through UTSA's articles on the topic that interests me. Much emphasis is put on checking sources when evaluating websites for information. From here, we can then decide what theoretical perspective or what 'lens' we will use to frame the project. I really liked the idea of concept mapping as shown in our book, Berg, B. L. (2001) pp.43-47. I visually need to see the relationships between ideas, plans of action or through pic representation, because like most students, I have a million ideas running all over the place in my mind. The spiraling research approach was also interesting when wanting to revisit theory used, and could refine methods of your research process. Berg, B. L. (2001) pp.25-26.

Next, how will we conduct research? There are many approaches we may take. Interviews, focus groups, observations, etc. Besides the how, consideration should be taken to make your participants feel at ease. We need to know when to reel in the interview, and/or when to probe a bit more. Be careful with wording as we don't want to put people on the defensive! Never challenge how participants self identify. Most importantly is informed consent!

After massive amounts of note taking, possible interviews/surveys, audio recordings later transcribed, its time to conduct research with your collected data. Collected data can also be pictures or visuals. Organize and analyze the data. What did you learn? This will be time to write up your findings, careful to cite along the way, give credit where it's due.

Little by little, Professor Casso and the book are breaking down what it is to begin a qualitative research project. I'm actually enjoying reading the book, and looking forward to beginning this project that at first seemed so daunting!