Business Research Methods
1. Qualitative Research in Management
1.1 Qualitative research in general
1.1.1 Description of qualitative research
• Reason for knowledge creation:
o To understand how people/organizations act and how they attach meaning to events
• Nature of (social) reality:
o Complex, constructed and subjective (their own reality)
• Evidence:
o Comes from interaction with people
• Knowledge accumulation:
o By conducting research in or close to natural setting
TWO BROAD RESEARCH PARADIGMS
Analysis with quantitative → numbers, analyzed with numbers, you calculate ratio’s,…
apply statistics on the numbers
Deductive → from existing theory you deduct data gathering
qualitative → more text information, you cannot change it into numbers to calculate
inductive → from the data induce general ideas, interaction between
data/theory is bigger
1.1.2 Quantitative versus qualitative research
• Logical positivism :
o Social scientists borrowed methods from physical and life scientists
o Concerned about counting and measuring subjects
o Methods prevailed until 1960s
o Researcher-centered approach
• Post positivism :
o Social scientists began to reexamine assumptions about positivism, adopted concepts
and methods from anthropology
o Concerned with watching, listening, talking with subjects
o Participant-centered approach
1.1.3 Types of qualitative studies
• → To understand how/why things happen
• Descriptive studies
• Theory-building studies: try to find out the reasons WHY
• Hypothesis-testing studies
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,1.1.3.1 Theory-building qualitative studies
• In situation when:
o No existing/ only partial theories
o Complex phenomena
o Lived experiences of people
o Temporal or practice dynamics in organizational life
▪ ‘how are things changing over time’
1.1.4 Approaching qualitative research
‘Qualitative research can mean many different things, including a wide range of methods, and can be
informed by contrasting models’ (Silverman 2017) → we go to people’s natural settings, every setting
will be different. You have to adjust to every setting.
• Case study:
o Exploration of a single entity or phenomenon bounded by time and activity (e.g.
program, event, institution, group)
o using variety of data collection procedures: quantitative and qualitative data
• Grounded theory:
o Inductive development of a theory
o which is ‘grounded’ directly in the empirical data
o we forget about any existing theory and we go to the field and listen to what they say
• Ethnography:
o Long term investigation of a group (often a culture)
o based on immersion and, optimally, participation in the group
• Phenomenology:
o Descriptive study of how individuals experience a phenomenon
o often searching for commonalities across individuals
ALL OF THESE APPROACHES REQUIRE
• Time in the field: extensive, look for participants
• Data analysis: complex, time-consuming process
• Writing up the study:
o Writing long passages
o Claims -> evidence
o Reflecting multiple perspectives
• No firm guidelines or specific procedures, qualitative research constantly evolving and changing
1.1.5 Designing a qualitative study
• ‘Conventional image: field research keeps pre-structuring and tight designs to a minimum’
HOWEVER
• ‘Contrary to what you might have heard, qualitative research designs do exist’
• Purpose:
o Why are you doing the study?
• Conceptual context
o What do you think is going on?
• Research questions
o What do you want to understand?
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,• Methods
o What will you actually do?
• Quality
o How might you be wrong?
1.1.5.1 Purpose
• Understanding the meaning
• Understanding the context
• Identifying unanticipated issues and generating grounded theories
• Understanding the processes by which events and actions take place
• Developing causal explanations → more difficult with surveys, you cannot ask ‘why are you doing
this,…’
1.1.5.2 Conceptual context
• System of concepts, assumptions, expectations, beliefs, theories that informs your research
• How to build a conceptual framework?
o Experiential knowledge
o Existing theory and research
o Pilot and exploratory studies
o Thought experiments
1.1.5.3 Research question
• Evolving because embedded in purpose and conceptual framework
• Help to focus your study
• Give guidance for how to conduct the study
• Sources of confusion
o Research issues versus practical issues
o Research questions versus interview questions
1.1.5.4 Methods
• Decisions about data collection
o Field research: observation, participant observation, ethnography
o (In-depth) interviewing: one-on-one, focus groups
o Textual analysis: content analysis
▪ Can also be turned into quantitative methods
• Decisions about data ordering and analysis
o Categorizing, contextualizing, memos and displays (Miles & Huberman 1994)
1.1.5.5 Sampling/selection
• Poor case selection impedes making valid causal inferences
• Select cases in such a way that they enable in-depth understanding
• Purposeful/purposive sampling
o Set of procedures whereby the researcher manipulates analysis, theory and sampling
activities interactively during the research process <-> statistical sampling
o Changing the size of your sample during your research may be appropriate
▪ New insights after 3 cases → ask 4th case about their opinion
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, PURPOSEFUL SAMPLING
• Theoretical:
o Select participants/ texts/ situations based on their usefulness to examine the issue of
interest
• Deviant case:
o Select participants/ texts/ situations because they might contradict other evidence
• Quota/stratified:
o Select participants/ texts/ situations to represent features of a population
o Take smaller/larger companies and compare
1.1.6 Quality in qualitative research
• Validity
• Reliability
• Theoretical sophistication and creativeness
1.1.6.1 Validity
• ‘True’ reflection of the real world, are the conclusions authentic
• The way in which field researchers manage to analyze the often large volumes of qualitative data
in order to reach credible results
• ‘Internal validity’, ‘credibility’, ‘authenticity’
• Trustworthiness
• Threats of validity in qualitative research:
o Researcher bias: has a particular view of the results and ignores the things that
contradict it
o Selection bias
o Reactivity
• Validity check list:
o Asking open questions, be open to different perspectives
o Diverse the set of people that you interview
o Quality of sampling = crucial
▪ Searching for discrepant evidence and ‘negative’ cases
o Triangulation
▪ the more people are confirming your observation, the more you can say your
observation is legit.
o Feedback
o Quasi statistics (combining qualitative research with quantitative measures of
populations…)
o Comparison own observations with literature
1.1.6.2 Reliability
• Extent to which evidence is independent of a person using it (researcher)
• Independent and impersonal point of view (Yin 1994).
• ‘Dependability’, ‘auditability’ (Miles & Huberman 1998)
o Make clear what decisions you took to select a particular case
• Rigor
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