Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation, 4th Edition

Chapter TwoSix Common Qualitative Research Designs

In fields from education to social work to anthropology to management science, researchers, students, and practitioners are conducting qualitative studies. It is not surprising, then, that different disciplines and fields ask different questions and have evolved somewhat different strategies and procedures. Although qualitative research or qualitative inquiry remains the umbrella term, writers of qualitative texts have organized the diversity of forms of qualitative research in various ways. Patton (2015) discusses sixteen “theoretical traditions”; some, like ethnography and grounded theory, are familiar classifications, whereas others, such as semiotics and chaos theory, are less common. ...