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1/3/08 2:26 PMDESIGNING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PROPOSALS

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DESIGNING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PROPOSALS Some simple suggestions

Ethnographic or qualitative studies are always to some degree emergent: they're dances in which the researchers follow the leads of the participants. Still, you've got to have some idea of what kind of dance event it is (a masked ball or a rave) before you can proceeed. You need, in other words, a clear picture of the issues and questions you want to investigate, some idea of how you're going to go about investigating them, but also a readiness to improvise and revise. Ideally, you work out designs with colleagues and advisors (including participants), but there are also some standard features, forms, and cautions that can be suggested (the numbered components below are taken from the chapter titles in Joe Maxwell's Qualitative Research Design: An interactive approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996, the best available text on design that I'm aware of (which isn't to say that I agree with all of it). The rest, e.g., my suggestions on framing research questions, are my own, though it should go without saying that these are simply ways of thinking that I've absorbed ideas from others over the years.).

1) What's the topic, the focal process you're interested in? What are the goals of the study? Why do you want to conduct it? Why is it worthwhile?

Qualitative studies are ways of learning about how processes and events unfold. They are usually not useful for asking questions about the distribution or variance of taken-for-granted-entities. So, a goal for an ethnographic study might entail examining some taken-for-granted or ignored process that seems important or central to some vital institution. It might involve questioning familiar categories (asking how they come to be, for example). And so forth.

2) What is the context for the study? What are the theories, or the research literatures, or the policy positions you anticipate drawing on, challenging, or addressing, through your research?

Bear in mind that "contexts" are not given in the phenomena or settings you study: in other words, your research is a wau of creating or defining what counts as a context: you're crafting representations of people, things, events within certain frames - either ones you've choosen, or the participants have choosen, or ones promoted by governments, disciplines, organizations (and of course, the processes of contextualization and framing should be topics of inquiry). My own preference is to recognize layers - or perhaps it would be better to simply say "alternative" frames - of context. Multiply possible connections. Many theories are better than one.

3) Research Questions: what do you want to get smart about? What are you presently ignorant about?

These questions should be how questions, they should be grounded in concrete situations, events, processes. Many of you have been exposed to simplified ideas of "hypothesis testing" (along the lines of formulating "null hypotheses") or have become proficient at asking the questions of questions standard in population- analytic (e.g., survey) research (about the distribution and co-variations of essences in a population). Though others disagree, I don't think these are viable forms of questions for qualitative or ethnographic

1/3/08 2:26 PMDESIGNING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PROPOSALS

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research. At the risk of over-simplifying, I offer the following guidelines:

Research Question Shells

These are forms you can use to structure research questions for qualitative studies.

i. How has (activity/relations) changed as (activity/relations) has changed?

ii. How do (concrete actors) make sense of/ respond to/ accomplish (activity/policy) that plays a key role in their lives?

iii. How is (artifact/tool/policy) used by (concrete actors)?

iv. What happens to (system of relations) when (activity) takes place?

"Activities" are relatively long-term, on-going, collective social endeavors (e.g., going to school, making a living, raising a family, etc.) "Relations" refers to on-going systems of relations organized around, e.g., class, gender, ethnic lines, or between the occupants of roles in formal organizations, e.g., worker/boss; student/teacher. "Concrete actors" are historically and geographically situated people, organizations, institutions, not actors identified by abstract category labels. "Artifacts, tools, and policies" are used in more or less their everyday meanings, although "tools and artifacts" should be thought of as encompassing technologies and technological systems, not simply individual examples of tools.

Focusing devices

What are the rhythms or periodicity of the activity you're studying?

In what range of settings or situations are policies enacted/activities undertaken/tools and artifacts used?

4) Methods. What will you actually do? What methods and techniques will you employ?

More and more often, over the years, students begin talking to me about their research interests by saying something like "I want to do focus groups about . .." Although I'm not so naive as to suggest that anyone formulates an immaculate "research problem" and then "rationally" selects the best methods to pursue it, I do believe that methodological particulars are relatively easy to work out once you have good research questions. Proposals should address the concrete features of the research: how much time you spend, where you spend it, what settings, people, or events will be observed, how they will be sampled, how talk and discourse will be studied, or interviews conducted. It's sometimes a good idea to try to figure out what kinds of data sources will allow you to sample as wide a variety as possible of instances of the processes your questions focus on: Interviews with: e.g., children, teachers, school board members, legilators, administrators, professors, etc. Observations of: meetings, events, settings, territories, etc. Audio and video recordings Official Reports Correspondence Newspaper accounts Published research Anything else you can think of .

1/3/08 2:26 PMDESIGNING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PROPOSALS

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5) Validity. This is an unusual proposal feature that Maxwell introduces: How might your initial biases/theories about the topic/process/event be wrong? In addition to the more common concerns, I would direct your attention to the following typical problems, which you should try to avoid:

Condensation: Masking multiple, complex processes under nouns.

Detemporalization: Sectioning out a particular period of time (e.g., a school day) and treating it as if nothing came before or after

Localism: Ignoring the connections between whatever setting you're studying and the rest of the world

Reductionism: Treating many different things as if they're simply manifestations of one fundamental thing

Here you ask yourself how can you build in procedures that will force you to collect, produce, notice and address evidence that may be inconsistent with your initial or emerging understandings of what you're studying?