Conducting qualitative research in education

Abstract

This chapter reviews qualitative research methods that have been employed to study phenomena in the education discipline. We examine how these methods of data collection and analysis have been applied by drawing on recent examples of effective applications. We identify the most commonly adopted qualitative data generation methods in education including case studies, ethnography, interviews and focus groups, and archival or textual data. We also discuss commonly applied qualitative data analysis approaches including content analysis, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. Beyond these established approaches, we discuss emerging methods ranging from mixed data sources and multi-phased studies, video and technology-aided research, social media and the internet as data sources, to culture-specific qualitative methods. We conclude by highlighting the value of qualitative methods and how the most commonly cited limitation of generalisability may be overcome through establishing transferability.