Qualitative Research Designs: Selection and Implementation

(this article cites 28 articles hosted on the Citations use or unauthorized distribution. Counseling psychologists face many approaches from which to choose when they conduct a qualitative research study. This article focuses on the processes of selecting, contrasting, and implementing five different qualitative approaches. Based on an extended example related to test interpretation by counselors, clients, and communities , this article provides a detailed discussion about five qualitative approaches— narrative research; case study research; grounded theory; phenomenology; and participatory action research—as alternative qualitative procedures useful in understanding test interpretation. For each approach, the authors offer perspectives about historical origins, definition, variants, and the procedures of research. The qualitative researcher today faces a baffling array of options for conducting qualitative research. are available for selection. What criteria should govern whether researchers choose one approach over another? Although writers have discussed the variety of qualitative approaches for counseling psychologists (Haverkamp, Morrow, & Ponterotto, 2005; Haverkamp & Young, 2007 [this issue]), there has been little in the field about the process of selecting an approach and few comparative analyses of the differences among approaches. Moreover, once counseling psychologists have chosen an approach, what procedures might they follow to develop a rigorous, systematic inquiry? Typically, qualitative discussions focus on paradigms, on theoretical overviews (e.g., Morrow & Smith, 2000), or on identity and moral agency (e.g., Hoshmand, 2005), and researchers are left without guidance as to how to proceed with an inquiry (cf. that methods are antithetical to the spirit of scholarship can no longer carry the day. Today, we find that federally Creswell et al. / QUALITATIVE RESEARCH DESIGNS 237 funded organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation, have issued reports on procedures that inquir-ers need to be aware of and follow when conducting qualitative research and Creswell and Maietta (2002) discussed and contrasted five popular types of qualitative designs, highlighting the procedures involved in actually conducting qualitative studies. This discussion extends the prior analysis but organizes the information to fit counseling psychologists' research needs. We will discuss the process of selecting, contrasting, and implementing five qualitative designs: narrative research, case studies, grounded theory, phenom-enology, and participatory action research (PAR). In counseling, the two most widely used qualitative designs appear to be case study and grounded theory, followed distantly by phenomenology. Counselor researchers have used these three designs to make important contributions to the field and to …