Descriptive Qualitative Research Design

ResearchArticles.com April 15, 2020 Data Collection, Data Collection, Research Design, Research Design Selection Leave a

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What is a descriptive qualitative research design? Qualitative description is another name for this research design.
It can answer questions like what, who, where, and when. The answers to these questions are not possible form first
hand experiments, or observations. Therefore, the researcher asks these questions from people who know about the
phenomenon. Or gathers information from secondary sources like books and periodicals etc. As the name suggests
this type of research describes the phenomenon it does not inquire about the questions like “how” and “why”. While,
these questions are answered in causal, explanatory, or exploratory studies.

According to Kumar, 2011, “a study in which the main focus is on description, rather than examining relationships
or associations, is classified as a descriptive study. A descriptive study attempts systematically to describe a
situation, problem, phenomenon, service or programme, or provides information about, say, the living conditions of
a community, or describes attitudes towards an issue”.

The researcher asks respondents about their knowledge relevant to a particular phenomenon. The phenomenon that
the researcher is addressing has happened sometime in past and the researcher cannot find any other way to describe
it. It can relate to a historical event like a war that took place sometime and somewhere in the past.

The phenomenon can relate to some current situation as well. In this case, the aim of the researcher is to collect
some descriptive information before conducting experiments or survey. For example, in health care the researcher
gathers information from a selected respondents about a diet plan or a diabetes medicine etc. Later the researcher
uses this information to formulate questionnaire or conduct experiments. Therefore, descriptive study can also add
depth to a quantitative research.

References
 Kim, Hyejin et al. “Characteristics of Qualitative Descriptive Studies: A Systematic Review.” Research in
nursing & health vol. 40,1 (2017): 23-42. doi:10.1002/nur.21768
 Kumar, R. “Research Methodology: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners.” Sage Publications: 3rd Ed. Pp-
334.

CITATION DATA ANALYSIS PROCESS

O'Connor, H. & Gibson, Nancy. (2003). A Step-By-Step Guide To Qualitative Data Analysis. Pimatisiwin: A
Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous Community Health. 1. 63-90.
Akinyode, Babatunde & Khan, Tareef. (2018). Step by step approach for qualitative data
analysis. International Journal of Built Environment and Sustainability. 5.
10.11113/ijbes.v5.n3.267.

Chapter 13 Qualitative Analysis

Qualitative analysis is the analysis of qualitative data such as text data from interview
transcripts. Unlike quantitative analysis, which is statistics driven and largely
independent of the researcher, qualitative analysis is heavily dependent on the
researcher’s analytic and integrative skills and personal knowledge of the social context
where the data is collected. The emphasis in qualitative analysis is “sense making” or
understanding a phenomenon, rather than predicting or explaining. A creative and
investigative mindset is needed for qualitative analysis, based on an ethically
enlightened and participant-in-context attitude, and a set of analytic strategies. This
chapter provides a brief overview of some of these qualitative analysis strategies.
Interested readers are referred to more authoritative and detailed references such as
Miles and Huberman’s (1984) [17] seminal book on this topic.

Grounded Theory