U8D1 & A1 - Answer Questions regarding Sampling Design & Develop a Sampleing Plan Flow Chart ...see instructions below

SAMPLING IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

WHAT ARE SAMPLING PROCEDURES? Sampling in qualitative research has a different meaning than it does in quantitative research. Qualitative sampling, you are looking to find a group of individuals or a culture or a social organization in which you can get rich description of the load experience of either the question under inquiry or the culture or social organization under inquiry.

So, what you are really looking for is finding participants who are capable of offering a rich description. Therefore, probably the most often used sampling strategy is something called purposeful sampling, sometimes purposive sampling is another term some authors use. And purposeful sampling is essentially looking for individuals to be interviewed, which is usually the way collect qualitative data, although it could be collective written documents as well, who have had the experience under inquiry and are able to verbalize it in a rich and meaningful way.

Therefore, things like snowballing which is really sort of a sampling strategy but it is really more of a recruitment strategy, all fall under the umbrella of purposeful sampling. Unlike quantitative research, we are hoping to get a representative sample, in a representative sample that can then data be generalized back to the population. That is the less the case in qualitative research. Since your sample size is so small in qualitative research, usually 8 to 14 participants.

Since this is the case, for the most part, you are not looking to generalize back to the population but to get rich data and rich description of the experience of the participants. Therefore, you are not doing representative sampling which you do in quantitative research, you are doing purposeful sampling.

Things like snowballing are really more of a recruitment strategy and snowballing is asking participants for other participants to the researcher to be part of the study. The problem with snowballing is you have to be very careful that you are not breaching confidentiality and in some way, outing people who have had this experience. So you had to be very careful how the process of referral goes.

But it is a whole different thing in qualitative research, you are just looking for a rich experience and you are looking for participants who can provide that to you. This very rich experience is sort of descriptive kind of data, which is often done in an open-ended interview but can sometimes be done using documents. I can think of a grounded theory study in which the data was all just holiday letters that people send to each other over the holidays and there was no interviews. The data was just written. So, that is also a possibility.

WHAT TECHNIQUES ARE EMPHASIZED? It depends on how you look at it. Qualitative research is just a whole different way of looking at research than quantitative research. Quantitative research is larger samples and usually random samples, there

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are samples that can be then generalize back to the population. So, it is a whole different paradigm, you are really looking for something different. Does it minimizes the quality of the research? No, not at all because you are just looking for something different. You are looking for rich description, you are looking for personal points of view of the participant and you are not looking for generalization back to the population. That may happen. I mean, you might get lucky. Piaget, the cognitive developmentalist, started out his research by watching his kids and his attempt to learn how they learn to think which is cognitive development. As it turns out, his initial research and research since then has pretty much verified that he has got some good information—a pretty good theory—particularly at the young ages, however he did case study, participants being his kids and his thought does seemed to have generalized out pretty well his theory based on his research and therefore is pretty credible.

I mean, there are other cognitive-developmentalists who were slightly different but his stuff is still pretty good. So you might get lucky. But for the most part, your goal is to understand that the lived experience or the point of view of your participants which is just a different way of looking at research. It actually fits more in some ways with sociology and anthropology although it has been used in psychology in human services for about the last 30 or 40 years going back probably to the phenomenological work of Dequense University in their books there called the Duquense Studies. Qualitative research has a long history particularly in anthropology.

People like Margaret Mead and Malinowski were doing qualitative research and their attempt to understand cultures from the inside out and there work predates to some degree to qualitative frenzy currently occurring in psychology and other social sciences where we were to some degree very much bound in this traditional scientific method in quantitative research and probably based on the idea of behaviorism and measurable criteria.

DO YOU HAVE ANY RECOMMENDATIONS? My recommendations for learners conducting qualitative research regarding their sampling procedures would be to take the time to screen your participants, to make sure that they are fairly verbal and to make sure that they have indeed had the experience under inquiry and to enough of a degree to discuss it, to describe it, to talk about it. I would also be sure you keep your sample size somewhere between 8 to 14 participants if you have too many people—30 to 40 participants—you will spend a very long time trying to analyze the data. Keep in mind that for the most part the dissertation is done by one person, the learner, and some of the big qualitative studies that you read about are sometimes conducted by big companies and have lots of arms and legs to do the work. You are doing this all by yourself.

I would also consider collecting data from more than one type of data which is called triangulation of data source. For example, you might interview participants that you might also ask them to submit a written description of the experience under inquiry. That written description might be a journal, it might be what we call a descriptive essence, it could also be an unsent letter. Sometimes people talk better than they write and sometimes they write better than they talk, and sometimes collecting data in two different ways, you would get a combination of very rich data and that can sometimes be very helpful.

Sometimes also, having someone journal or think about or write about the experience under inquiry can prepare them for the interviews and still be immersing themselves in the question or the topic prior to the interview by doing their writing. So, that is also a good strategy to collect good data.

The bottom line is if you do not end up with good descriptive data, you have to keep interviewing until you get enough and that is all very time consuming.

CREDITS Subject Matter Expert: Interactive Design:

Instructional Design:

Project Manager:

Kim Kostere, PhD, PsyS

Patrick Lapinski

Julie Primoli

Annne Echtenkamp, Julie Greunke

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