If you choose to conduct a qualitative study, you will be required to formulate an original research question, choose between a number of available qualitative research methods (for example, interviews, discourse analysis, a case study, etc.), collect the data (e.g. by carrying out interviews or searching out relevant documents), and analyse and critically reflect on the data you gathered in the light of previous research and your own assumptions. Unlike in the quantitative projects, you are not required to formulate a hypothesis, but you must nonetheless perform a thorough literature search and clearly specify your core assumptions before you proceed with data collection and analysis.
The qualitative assignment should follow a specific format. The 3500-word assignment should consist of 5 self-contained sections:
1. Introduction
In the introduction, you will be expected to introduce your research question and discuss its importance. You will describe the main assumptions you made based on the literature review, outline the key contributions of your research project to wider literature, and summarize your key findings. You will also briefly outline the structure of the project.
2. Literature review
In the literature review section, you will summarize and critically evaluate previous research on your topic. How did other people attempt to answer your question? What were their findings? Do you agree with them? How is your approach improving our knowledge of the subject? What new developments are you offering? How is your work original? How is it informed by what others did in the past?
3. Methods
In this section, you will discuss the following issues:
a) Why are you using a qualitative approach to answer your research question?
b) Why is it the most appropriate approach to answer your research question?
c) What are the limitations of your method?
d) Why did you not use an alternative approach (i.e. survey research instead of interviews or discourse analysis)?
Additionally:
Interviews – what type of interview structure did you adopt and why? What are the limitations of this approach? What problems did you encounter? Could you have done things differently? Were there any ethical considerations you needed to bear in mind? How did you deal with this?
Discourse analysis What sources did you use? Why not other sources? What criteria did you use to categorise your data? For example, if you used newspaper articles, did you divide them for analysis (e.g. left-leaning papers and right-leaning papers)? On what basis? What literature/sources did you use to help you with this task?
The comparative method Are you using a case study or a small-n analysis? How have you decided to choose your country / countries? What design did you use? What theory are you testing / developing? What problems did you encounter? Were there any alternative cases / countries you could have studied?
4. Data analysis
This section is dedicated to analysing the data you collected or processed for your assignment. In this part of your work, you need to interpret the information in the light of your research question and the literature review, and critically reflect on the interpretation of the data. You might want to divided your data by themes that emerge as you sort through it. You can allow the data to guide you a little bit. Did your data analysis confirm your assumptions? How does it correspond to previous research? Why did you choose to interpret the data in this, and not another way? Did you encounter any surprising or contradictory results?
5. Conclusion
In the conclusions section, you should remind the reader the main purpose of the assignment, and how the research and its findings fit within the broader literature on the subject. This is also where you might want to reiterate the limitations of your work and make suggestions about any further work that could be done to help answer your research question.
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