Qualitative Research

Qualitative research explores meaning, experience and process through non-numerical data — interviews, focus groups, observation, documents and open-ended responses. It is grounded in an interpretivist position, treating reality as socially constructed and best understood from the participant's perspective.

Its strength is depth and context. Where a survey establishes that a relationship exists, qualitative work explains the mechanism behind it, surfaces factors the researcher never thought to ask about, and captures the language participants use themselves — which is why it is often used to build theory rather than test it.

Rigour is demonstrated differently from quantitative work. Instead of reliability and validity, the criteria are credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability, supported by techniques such as member checking, triangulation, audit trails, thick description and reflexivity about the researcher's own influence on the data.