Qualitative Research

Methods
Judife N. Magallanes
 Lesson outcome
 By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
In this lesson, you  Identify the role of qualitative methods in
will build on the interdisciplinary agriculture research.
foundations from Time
the previous unit.  This lesson will take approximately 20 minutes
to complete.
  Qualitative research will usually feature these elements (adapted
from Patton 1990):
 Studies real world situations as they unfold.
 Starts with observations (not theory, hypotheses or predictions) and
explores open questions.
 The phenomenon being studied is viewed as a whole system - research
focuses on connections between parts within the system.
 Researchers collect detailed data capturing people's personal
What is perspectives and experiences - each case is treated as special and

qualitative unique.
 The researcher's personal experiences and insights are part of the
research? research process.
 Change is viewed as continuous.
 The social, historical and temporal (time) context of each case is
recognized - researchers avoid generalizing beyond these boundaries.
 The researcher’s role is to understand through active participation, but
accepts whatever findings may emerge.
 Flexible research design - the approach is adapted as understandings or
situations change.
  Social Sciences focuses on society and
culture in its many different guises.
 Its all about the ways that we interact
What is Social and manage our institutions for the
Science? purpose for development social science
includes geography, anthropology,
linguistics, education, developmental
studies, political science and economics.
  Social sciences focus on society and culture. In
agricultural research for development, social science
includes geography, anthropology, linguistics,
education, development studies, political science,
and economics.
 Social science puts people at the centre of
What is Social agricultural research for development - people doing
the farming on the ground, or developing and
Science? enacting the policies that will impact on agriculture.
 Farmers know their crops, and their livestock.
Fishers know the oceans, and the rivers. We can
collaborate with them to build on their local
knowledge, and bring the scientific, and that local
knowledge together.
 1.Researchers and participants actively
construct knowledge together
2.Aims to create the critical and self
awareness that enables individual and
Participatory community change and development
action research
3.Builds relationships and understanding
between researchers, participants and
other key stakeholders. This leads to
locally relevant, validated findings.
  This is especially useful with participants who
have lower literacy levels, since researchers learn
about their lives using visual techniques and
activities such as resource mapping, social
network mapping, cropping calendar, wealth
Participatory rankings, oral histories, role playing, games, small
Rapid Rural group discussions, and village map drawings.
Appraisal  Data from these activities can be used to create
rich and meaningful representations of people's
lives in a way that allows other researchers to
fully understand the lives and local living
conditions of communities.
  These provide meaningful ways to identify the local and place-specific
geographies of communities.
 They provide valuable data for the researcher by helping to surface
participants’ knowledge and experience.
 With participants’ permission, the researcher can photograph the maps for
later analysis. Ideally, the maps are then left with the community or
individual.

Collaborative  Community asset mapping - to help participants identify the built and
natural assets in their village and to understand the different ways women
mapping and men relate to their environment.

activities  Social organization or social network mapping - this makes visible the
organizational assets in a community. For example, the relationships between
people within the community, including who has the biggest and least
influence. Data generated from these maps can be used to identify leadership
pathways for girls and women.
 Personal network mapping - this method enables participants to identify
and analyze their multiple roles in the family and community. These activities
enable a participant to see their own family and/or community connections in
a new or enhanced way.
  Visual activities are used to understand and interpret images
(Barbour, 2014). This includes: photos, film, video, paintings,
drawings, collages, sculpture, artwork, graffiti, advertising, or
cartoons. Visual activities are often used in participatory action
research to:
1.Enhance data collection in interviews, focus group discussions,
or workshops - asking questions using images and/or having
participants respond using images can help to build rapport with
Visual and between participants, facilitate communication, sharing of
activities local knowledge, engagement, and reflection.
2.Help build the relationship between researcher and
participants - by enabling participants to tell their own stories or
document activities in their lives using images, words, and/or
video. This can show participants their experience and expertise is
valued, reduce power imbalance between researcher and
participants, empower participants, and effect change in
individuals or communities. (Pain, 2012 cited by Pamphilon 2019)
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 Value Chain Analysis is an overarching, multi-disciplined research

method - it uses mixed research methods from different disciplines
including marketing, economics, physical sciences and social
sciences.
 It is used by researchers in agribusiness projects to identify
improvements in how food is produced and delivered to consumers,
across all businesses in the chain of production.
 VCA identifies what consumers value and will pay for in a product or
service (i.e. its value attributes), and where that value is created or
destroyed in the chain (Collins et al, 2015, p. 28).
Undertaking qualitative research
1. Define the purpose of the research - this will stem directly from the research objectives,
and research question. Research objectives and questions that align with qualitative
methods aim to understand the lives of farmers and producers in the community, how they
behave, and what they think and feel about adopting new farming practices, technologies
etc.
2. Decide methods & develop tools - decide what qualitative data collection methods will
be used and develop the data collection tools (observation sheets, interview or survey
questions, participatory workshop activities etc).
3. Engage with the community - decide on your sampling method to engage participants;
build relationships with the community; obtain permission, consent and ethics approvals
to do the research; test and refine your data collection tools with participants.
4. Collect the data - undertake qualitative research activities using the qualitative data
collection methods and tools you developed in Step 2, with the participants you engaged
in Step 3.
5. Analyse data and communicate results - use suitable qualitative analysis methods to
organise, code, analyse and interpret the data collected in Step 4. Use qualitative formats
to communicate and present results (e.g. case studies, narratives etc).
  The qualitative research methods and
1. Define the approaches that will be most suitable to use

purpose stems directly from the research objective

and question to be addressed.
  Most qualitative research methods will collect data in 3 ways:
 Observation - of participant behaviour in naturalistic settings (e.g. at
farmer’s farm site, farmer meet or field day, in their household,
community, stallholders at market stalls etc). Researchers will record
field notes of their observations through written notes, photos, audio,
and/or video.
 Examining documents - these may contain text, pictures, audio, or
2. Decide video. Researchers use qualitative analysis methods to analyse and
interpret the data in these documents. Documents may include the
methods & researcher’s own field notes collected through participant observations

develop tools and interviews; participant observations (e.g. collected through diary
studies, interviews, participatory workshops); or secondary data from
previous research (e.g. government census data, maps, household
survey data etc.)
 Interview - this includes both indirect and direct questioning using
data collection methods such as field & farmer surveys, individual or
group interviews (structured, semi-structured, and unstructured), focus
group discussions, and/or participatory workshops.
  To decide what combination of qualitative data collection methods you will use,
and the tools you need to develop to collect this data, ask these questions:
 What information do you need to answer the research questions and objectives?
 What can be collected in a low-cost and practical manner? (e.g. through
secondary data sources)
 Will the chosen methods allow you to get all of the information you need to
answer the research question or objectives?

Decide data  What other methods could be used if more information is needed?
 Will the information appear as credible to decision makers and stakeholders?
collection  Are the methods suitable to use with the participants? For example: will
methods & tools participants have the education or language literacy levels to complete surveys
on their own, will they engage in interviews or focus groups, and allow you to
observe their daily household or farming practices etc.?
 Are there cultural, social, or other considerations to account for?
 Who can collect the data? How much training will researchers need to collect
valid and reliable data using the qualitative research methods and tools
developed?
 How will the data be analysed?
  Use a suitable sampling method to decide who you
will ask to participate in the research.
 Engage with the community to encourage
participation, obtain consent and ethics approvals.
Maintain confidentiality of any personal or
sensitive data you collect.
3.Engage with  Test your research methods and tools with a small
the community sample of participants - do the questions and
activities make sense to participants? Do you need
to translate them into the local language, or change
them in other ways to make them suitable for the
local community? Share results with your
participants.
  Even if it were possible, it is not necessary to collect data
from everyone in the community.
 In qualitative research a sample (a subset) of a
population is selected for any given study. The goal is to
get a rich understanding of a given issue or phenomenon.
There is no magic number.

Sampling in  “An appropriate sample size for a qualitative study is one

qualitative that adequately answers the research question” (Marshall
1996)
research  Considerations for deciding the sample size:
 Achieve depth of understanding rather than breadth.
 A sample may be big enough when no new information is
found - known as the “saturation point”.
 The sample may be sufficient when participants represent the
range of population members or criteria such as ethnicity,
location, occupation, region, gender etc.
  Use the qualitative research tools you
developed to collect data according to the
research methods you decided on.
 Methods for data collection through
structured, semi-structured, and
4. Collect data unstructured interview formats, and
techniques for how to develop good
interview questions, will be covered in
the next lesson: interview techniques and
methods.
  The trustworthiness of qualitative research has two components:
validity and reliability.
 Validity asks if the findings are:
 Credible - can you be confident the findings represent the participant
or community group in their local settings and context?

Rigour in  Applicable - to what extent can your findings be applied beyond this
particular case?

qualitative  The trustworthiness of qualitative research has two components:

research validity and reliability.

 Validity asks if the findings are:
 Credible - can you be confident the findings represent the participant
or community group in their local settings and context?
 Applicable - to what extent can your findings be applied beyond this
particular case?
  Triangulation is a process of strengthening the findings obtained by
data collection by using and cross-checking information from
different sources and methods.
 For example, a researcher may:
Triangulation:  Use a survey questionnaire to quickly collect a great deal of information
from a large sample of people.
strengthening  Conduct follow-up interviews to get more in-depth information from
qualitative certain respondents.
 Use case studies for more in-depth analysis of unique and notable cases,
methods e.g., those who benefited or not from the program, those who left the
program, or did not know about it etc.

 Findings that are consistent across all three sources are considered
much more reliable than findings based on just one data source.
 • Spend as much time as you can in the field, actively
observing and participating - this allows you to collect richer
and more detailed data
• Share your qualitative data (field notes, interview notes and
transcripts etc) with participants - check that you accurately
recorded what they said. This is especially important if you
Other ways to have used language translators as part of the research process.
strengthen • Take care when making field notes - use descriptions which
qualitative are as close as possible to the meaning

research • Include all cases - even the ones which seem to lead to
opposite conclusions to other cases in your sample
• Reflect on your own potential biases when gathering data
• Keep all notes and records - make them available and easy to
access, so you can answer questions about how you arrived at
your findings
 Conclusion
In this lesson, you have seen how important qualitative
research methods are for achieving benefits to stakeholders.
However to enable valid and reliable data to be collected,
qualitative research must be carefully planned and
considered. This starts with defining a clear research
question. Then, selecting, and using suitable qualitative
data collection methods and tools to collect the information
you need to answer the research question and objectives.
Interview techniques and
methods
Judife N. Magallanes
 Lesson outcome
 By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

Interview  Apply best practice principles in question design,

interview techniques and methods to collect high quality
techniques and qualitative data.

methods Time
 This lesson will take approximately 20 minutes to
complete.
  An interview is a conversation with a purpose.
 In qualitative research, interview questions are
designed to obtain information that addresses
the research question. Interviews are the most
common way that qualitative researchers
introduction collect data from participants.
 This lesson will give you an overview of the
principles and practices for designing and
facilitating interviews to collect high quality
qualitative data.
  Interviews help researchers understand people’s experiences or
perceptions, and learn more about what's been documented or
observed; or to discover more about what can't be easily
observed (e.g. thought processes, intentions). They are used in
qualitative research to:
 Understand other people’s beliefs, behaviours, feelings, and
When are attitudes.

interviews used  Discover people’s thought processes and what they might intend
to do in the future.
in qualitative  Explore the meaning of things to the people involved.
research?  Clarify or follow-up data obtained through other methods (e.g. a
survey, field experiments)

 Interviews can be time consuming to plan and implement.

Good planning, design and testing of interview questions,
structure, and format is important to ensure that the data
collected from participants is valid, reliable and unbiased.
Process of interview design
1.Think about the main research question (s).
2.Separate your research question into a series of sub-
questions - use these to identify possible interview topics or
themes.
3.Design and draft interview questions for each topic or
theme. Decide if questions need to be open or closed based
on the information you need to obtain from participants.
4.Decide the interview format and structure - will it be
structured, semi-structured, unstructured, or a combination?
This will depend on the purpose of the interview, the
research method you are using, and types of questions you
need to ask.
5.Test the interview design on a small sample of participants.
  Deciding what type of questions to ask
depends on your research focus. Different
question designs will produce different
results.
 Key decisions you will need to make are:
Designing • Will participants all answer the same set of
interview standardized questions, structured in the same
questions order and format? Or,
• Will questions be open ended and unstructured,
or semi-structured to enable participants to
respond in their own way? Or,
• Will you need a mix of both types and formats of
questions?
 Open questions - provide opportunity for participants
to give a range of longer, more descriptive responses.
Open questions start with the words: How, What, Why,
or Describe, Explain, Compare. They get information
or seek options and tend to prompt discussion and
varied responses. Examples of open questions include:
Common  How can you…?
question types  How does…?
 What do you want …?
 What is …?
 Why does …?
 Why might …?
  Closed questions - seek very specific information –
often facts with a short, direct response, or a yes/no
answer. They start with: Are, Can, Could, Do,
Have, Is, How many, How much etc.
 Hypothetical questions - ask "What if...?": e.g. what
would happen if….? They suggest possible options
Common or possibilities. Use hypothetical questions to test
question types ideas and explore boundaries.
 Reflective questions - paraphrase what the other
person has said. They encourage further responses
and seek to clarify. They require you to listen
carefully and are non-judgemental. For example:
So you mean that….? (Stake 2010).
 These are usually the most common interview formats used in
qualitative research:
 Individual interviews - between the researcher and one
participant only.
 Group interviews – 2 or more participants responding to
questions in the presence of others.

Interview  Public forums – an open invitation to people to publicly voice

formats their views about an issue.

 Focus groups – a semi-structured facilitated, open-ended,
interactive discussion among a group of people focussing on a
single topic or experience the facilitator nominates.
 Narratives and case studies.
Interviews may also be structured, semi-structured, or
unstructured.
  When to use them: to systematically gather data from
a specific number of respondents. For example: a
socio-economic household survey.
 Key features:
 Uses an interview guide
 Questions are often mostly close-ended. For example: Do
you think the farmers will adopt this technique in the future?
Structured Strongly agree; somewhat agree; no view; somewhat

interviews disagree; strongly disagree.

 Same purpose and design as a written survey
 The interviewer has limited influence
 The time commitment is clearly stated
 Comprises of key sections: explanation; demographic; core
questions; closure
 Generally easier to analyze and report on, compared to less
structured formats
Semi-structured interviews
 When to use them: to elicit free-form
conversation or responses from participants
with a specific focus. For example: focus
group discussions, visual activities,
collaborative mapping activities, value chain
analysis, farmer meets or field days.
 Key features:
 Combines some closed-ended questions,
with open-ended questions.
 Uses an interview guide.
 Builds conversation around a particular
focus.
 Systematic and comprehensive since it
gathers data which may be unexpected.
 Uses limited time better than having no
structure.
 Can be used with groups.
 Allows individual experience and
perspective to emerge.
 When using this data collection method, researchers first want to know how much
participants know about the value chain. In any chain or business there are multiple,
sometimes divergent perspectives and those views drive behavior. Some of the research
project team may also have little knowledge of the industry or the businesses in the
chain under scrutiny.

 Collins et al (2015), describes the types of questions used in VCA interviews as:
 Introducing questions (I hope our discussion can explore …?)

Value Chain  Follow-up questions (So the next step would be …?

Analysis: types  Probing questions (So, will you explain that in more detail …?)
 Specifying questions (What would the precise numbers be for this …?)
of interview  Direct questions (How long has she been your retailer?)
questions  Indirect questions (If it were possible, how could you …?)
 Structuring questions (Could we summarise so far …?)
 Interpreting questions (If I understand what you are saying, problem is …?)
Imagine you are designing questions to interview a stallholder selling vegetables. You
are aiming to understand what impacts their supply of vegetables, the price they sell
them at, and what their customers want. What are some questions you would ask the
stallholder?
 Sample questions for a stallholder selling vegetables (adapted from Collins et
al, 2015, p.176).
 How do you choose what vegetables to sell? What are you looking for in the
vegetables you buy? How do you assess quality?
 What are your customers like? What do your customers want?
 Where and how much waste is generated in your market stall? What have
Value Chain you done to reduce this waste? Has this worked?

Analysis:  How much change in supply and demand for particular vegetables is there
(i.e. does it change daily, weekly, seasonally and annually)? How do you
interview manage this? Does it lead to waste or require you to sell vegetables for less
questions than they are worth? What do you think could be done to improve the
situation?
 Are there problems fulfilling orders for particular vegetables? Are these
problems due to low availability or quality? Why are some suppliers more
reliable? What can we learn from them?
 What other risks do you face that are either caused, or could be reduced, by
your suppliers?
  When to use them: to gather in depth
information on a limited number of topics.
 Key features:
 Can be labor intensive but can collect high
Unstructured quality data.
interviews  Conversation can easily be distracted and go
off topic. The researcher should prepare to
prevent this, by having a clear purpose and
focus for the interview.
  Narratives are short stories. They follow a set structure
and provide a link between the project activities and
desired outcomes.
 Depending on the structure of the questions, narratives:
 provide an illustration of change
 enable researchers to start to quantify what is happening on the
‘ground’ - once there are enough narratives systematically
Narratives collected, collated and analysed.

 These can be a low-cost method of data collection

providing richness and detail to research.
 The same information can be gathered from a number
of participants, using a proforma like the example
shown here - either by the researcher or participant.
  Case studies are similar to narratives, but are used to collect and organize a
wider range of information about a case (e.g. specific groups within a
community). Researchers then analyze the contents using qualitative
analysis methods to identify patterns and themes in the data for each case.
Further analysis may then be conducted by comparing a number of case
studies.
 When to use them: researchers often use case studies to understand sectors
of society which are marginalized or struggle to have a voice due to socio-

Case studies economic, cultural, ethnic or gendered barriers (Tellis 1997).

 How to develop them: Yin (1994) recommends the use of a systematic
protocol, structured with these sections:
 Overview of the project (project objectives and case study issues)
 Field procedures (credentials and access to sites)
 Questions (specific questions that the researcher must keep in mind during data
collection)
 Guide for the report (outline, format for the narrative), (Yin, 1994, p. 64).

 Case studies, like narratives, are often most useful combined with other
methods.
 Good interviewers have these skills:
 Effective, active listening
 Able deal with uncertainty or new situations
Skills for good  Strong communication skills
interviewing  Can think of new, and relevant questions under
pressure
 Good note-taking skills
 Are prepared and organized
 Conclusion
In this lesson, you have been given an overview
of the process and practices for collecting data
using the most common qualitative collection
method: participant interviews. Hopefully, you
have also gained some new ideas on how you
might be able to use different interview formats
and structures to answer research questions.