3. Qualitative Research Designs and Traditions

Introduction and Context

Qualitative research designs are not merely procedures for collecting non-numerical data. They are intellectual traditions that express assumptions about reality, knowledge, language, human experience, and the relationship between researcher and participant. In doctoral business research, selecting a design therefore involves more than choosing interviews or observations. It requires an alignment among the research paradigm, research question, unit of analysis, role of the researcher, form of evidence, analytic logic, and intended contribution.

A study investigating how a family-owned firm preserves tacit knowledge, for example, may require an in-depth case study. A study examining the culture of remote software teams may be ethnographic. A study exploring the meaning of executive burnout may be phenomenological, whereas a study seeking to develop a process theory of organizational resilience may use grounded theory. These designs may all employ interviews, but they generate different kinds of knowledge because they ask different questions and interpret evidence through different assumptions.

This chapter examines eight influential traditions: case study, ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory, narrative inquiry, action research, discourse analysis, and participatory approaches. The objective is not to rank them, but to clarify what each makes visible, what it tends to obscure, and when it is defensible in doctoral business research.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, the reader should be able to:

1. Explain the relationship among paradigm, research question, design, methods, and contribution.

2. Compare the assumptions and purposes of eight qualitative research traditions.

3. Select and justify a design for a doctoral business research problem.

4. Distinguish data-collection techniques from methodological designs.

5. Evaluate the quality, ethical implications, and limitations of qualitative designs.

6. Develop an aligned design rationale for an organizational study.

Design Begins with a Question, Not a Technique

A research design is the overall logic that connects a research problem to evidence and interpretation. Interviews, focus groups, documents, observation, digital traces, and visual materials are methods of data generation; they do not, by themselves, constitute a design. The same interview transcript can support phenomenological interpretation, grounded theory, narrative analysis, discourse analysis, or a case study, depending on the question and analytic purpose.

Paradigms and philosophical commitments

A paradigm provides broad assumptions about reality and knowledge. A postpositivist orientation generally treats reality as existing independently of the researcher while acknowledging that it can be known only imperfectly. An interpretivist or constructivist orientation emphasizes the meanings people create in social contexts and views knowledge as produced through interaction between researcher and participants. A critical orientation examines power, inequality, ideology, and the conditions that make particular meanings dominant. Pragmatism focuses on the consequences and usefulness of inquiry, often combining approaches when this serves the research problem.

These categories are not rigid boxes. Many qualitative studies are philosophically eclectic, and researchers may combine interpretive understanding with critical analysis or pragmatic intervention. However, a doctoral researcher must be explicit about the assumptions that govern interpretation. A design becomes weak when a study claims that meanings are socially constructed but analyzes participants’ accounts as if they were transparent, objective reports of an external reality.

Alignment as a quality criterion

Alignment can be represented as a chain:

Paradigm → research question → design tradition → sampling and evidence → analysis → intended contribution.

For example, an interpretivist question such as “How do newly appointed women executives experience legitimacy-making in male-dominated industries?” aligns with phenomenology if the purpose is to understand the lived meaning of that experience. If the purpose is to explain how legitimacy is negotiated through recurring stages, grounded theory may be more appropriate. If the purpose is to examine how the category “legitimate executive” is constructed in corporate talk, discourse analysis would offer a stronger fit.

Misalignment commonly appears in three forms. First, researchers select a fashionable design before clarifying the question. Second, they collect broad interview data but use an analysis incapable of answering the stated question. Third, they promise a contribution—such as a general theory—while producing only a descriptive account of one setting. Design justification should therefore state what the study seeks to know, why the selected tradition is appropriate, what it can legitimately claim, and what it cannot claim.

Case Study: Understanding Phenomena in Context

Case study research investigates a bounded contemporary phenomenon in its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are difficult to separate. The case may be an organization, project, team, decision, partnership, crisis, process, or set of organizations. A case is not simply a convenient location; it is a theoretically or substantively meaningful unit of inquiry.

Case studies may be single or multiple, holistic or embedded. A single case is appropriate when the case is unusual, critical, revelatory, or especially suitable for examining a theoretical issue. Multiple-case designs support comparison across cases, but they require careful replication logic rather than superficial accumulation of examples. Embedded designs examine subunits, such as departments within an organization, while retaining the case as the primary analytical frame.

Evidence may include interviews, observations, internal documents, meeting records, public communications, and digital artifacts. The strength of the design lies in contextualization and triangulation. Its contribution may be an explanation of a process, a refined conceptual framework, or a theoretically informed account of how conditions interact in a particular setting.

A case study is weaker when the “case” has no clear boundary, when data are limited to interviews despite claims of contextual depth, or when the researcher generalizes statistically from one organization. Case study knowledge is usually analytic rather than statistical: readers assess whether the concepts or explanations may transfer to comparable settings.

Ethnography: Culture, Practice, and Situated Membership

Ethnography seeks to understand social worlds through sustained engagement with the practices, meanings, routines, language, and relationships of a group. Its central concern is culture—not culture as a list of values, but culture as lived and enacted patterns of sense-making. Organizational ethnography may study a hospital, consultancy, manufacturing plant, professional community, online network, or executive team.

Participant observation is central, although ethnographers also use interviews, documents, artifacts, and digital materials. The researcher’s prolonged presence enables attention to what people do, not only what they say they do. Fieldnotes record scenes, conversations, emotional reactions, material arrangements, contradictions, and emerging interpretations. Reflexivity is essential because the researcher’s access, identity, status, and behavior influence what becomes observable.

Ethnography is appropriate for questions such as: “How is safety culture enacted in high-risk operations?” or “How do distributed teams develop norms of trust?” It can reveal tacit knowledge and informal practices that formal policies conceal. The trade-off is time, access, and ethical complexity. Covert observation is generally difficult to justify, and even overt observation can threaten privacy when workplace interactions are sensitive. Digital ethnography introduces additional concerns regarding platform access, trace data, anonymity, and the distinction between public availability and ethical researchability.

Not every study involving observation is ethnography. Short site visits or occasional observations may contribute to a case study or another design but do not automatically constitute ethnography. The claim of ethnography should be supported by cultural interpretation, sustained engagement, and an appropriate account of the researcher’s field role.

Phenomenology: Investigating Lived Experience

Phenomenology examines how individuals experience and make meaning of a phenomenon. In business research, the phenomenon might be entrepreneurial failure, organizational exclusion, moral distress, strategic uncertainty, or the experience of leading during restructuring. The focus is not primarily on the external event but on what that event means to those who live through it.

Descriptive phenomenological traditions seek to describe the essential structures of experience while attempting to bracket, or consciously hold aside, presuppositions. Interpretive or hermeneutic phenomenology treats interpretation as unavoidable and examines how experience is situated in history, language, embodiment, and relationships. Researchers should identify which philosophical tradition informs their study rather than using “phenomenology” as a general label for interviews about opinions.

Participants are selected because they have directly experienced the phenomenon. Interviews often invite concrete descriptions rather than abstract evaluations: “Tell me about the moment you realized the restructuring had changed your role.” Analysis involves identifying meaning units, developing themes, and composing a textured account of the experience. The outcome is not a frequency count and not a theory of organizational behavior; it is a deeper understanding of the phenomenon’s experiential meaning.

Phenomenology is unsuitable when the main purpose is to map organizational structures, compare institutional performance, or build a process model. It is also vulnerable to shallow interviewing and premature use of generalized themes. The researcher must attend to temporality, embodiment, emotion, relationships, and the context in which experience becomes meaningful.

Grounded Theory: Developing Explanatory Concepts from Data

Grounded theory is designed to generate an explanatory account of a process, action, or interaction grounded systematically in empirical data. It is particularly valuable when existing theories do not adequately explain how actors respond to changing organizational conditions. Questions often begin with “How does…?” “What process explains…?” or “Under what conditions do participants…?”

Classical, Straussian, and constructivist versions differ in their assumptions and procedures. Common practices include theoretical sampling, coding, constant comparison, memo writing, and movement between data collection and analysis. Initial codes remain close to the data; later analysis develops categories, examines relationships among them, and identifies a central process or phenomenon. Theoretical sampling means seeking further participants or situations because they can elaborate or challenge emerging concepts, not merely because they represent a population statistically.

A grounded theory study should produce more than a thematic list. It should explain relationships, conditions, actions, interactions, and consequences. For example, a study of organizational resilience might develop a process model showing how frontline interpretation, leadership authorization, experimentation, and retrospective learning combine under different levels of uncertainty.

Common weaknesses include claiming grounded theory after collecting a fixed sample, using coding mechanically, importing an existing framework without theoretical openness, and stopping at descriptive categories. Researchers must also distinguish data saturation from the mere repetition of familiar responses. In constructivist grounded theory, categories are understood as analytic constructions produced through researcher-participant interaction, not as objective discoveries waiting in the data.

Narrative Inquiry: Experience as Story and Temporality

Narrative inquiry studies how people organize experience through stories. Narratives connect events across time, assign significance, establish identity, and position the narrator in relation to others. In organizational settings, narratives may concern professional identity, career transition, corporate founding, crisis leadership, succession, or organizational change.

Narrative researchers attend to plot, chronology, turning points, genre, voice, audience, silence, and the social resources used to make a life or organizational history intelligible. Data can include interviews, autobiographical materials, diaries, speeches, oral histories, photographs, and organizational texts. The researcher may preserve an individual story, compare narrative forms, or examine how personal and organizational narratives intersect.

Narrative inquiry is especially useful when time and identity are central. It differs from a thematic study that extracts statements and reorganizes them into categories. Removing a statement from its plot may destroy the meaning created by sequence and context. Narrative analysis may therefore examine both the content of a story—what happened—and its form—how the story is told.

The researcher should avoid treating narratives as simple factual transcripts. Stories are situated performances shaped by memory, audience, institutional expectations, and available cultural narratives. This does not make them false; it makes them analytically valuable as accounts of meaning and identity. Ethical issues arise when publication may expose identifiable individuals or alter how a participant is represented.

Action Research: Knowledge Through Intervention

Action research combines systematic inquiry with purposeful action to address a practical problem and generate learning. It is cyclical rather than linear: diagnosing, planning, acting, observing, reflecting, and revising. The process may involve several cycles, with each cycle refining both practice and understanding.

In business settings, action research can support the redesign of performance systems, improvement of inclusion practices, development of service processes, or implementation of sustainable operations. The researcher may be an organizational member, an external facilitator, or a collaborator. The design is appropriate when participants and researchers share an interest in changing the situation rather than merely describing it.

Participatory action research is a related form that places stronger emphasis on shared ownership, marginalized voices, and the redistribution of research authority. Action research faces a productive tension between intervention and inquiry. The researcher must document what changed, why it changed, whose interests were served, and how learning was assessed. A successful intervention is not automatically a successful research contribution. Conversely, an intervention that fails may yield important knowledge if the process is critically examined.

Risks include role conflict, coercion, unrealistic expectations, organizational politics, and compromised confidentiality. Ethical approval must address not only data collection but also the consequences of action. Participants should understand that refusing research participation will not affect their employment or access to organizational resources.

Discourse Analysis: Language, Power, and the Production of Meaning

Discourse analysis examines how language constructs social realities, identities, knowledge, and power relations. It asks not only what people mean but what particular ways of speaking make possible, normal, legitimate, or difficult to say. A discourse-analytic study might investigate how firms construct “innovation,” how leaders frame layoffs as “transformation,” or how sustainability reports position responsibility and risk.

Approaches vary. Some examine interactional details such as turn-taking, rhetorical devices, and category work. Critical discourse approaches connect language with ideology, institutions, and unequal power. Foucauldian approaches examine regimes of truth, subject positions, and the relationship between knowledge and governance. The researcher must specify the tradition because discourse analysis is not a single standardized procedure.

Data may include interviews, policy documents, websites, annual reports, speeches, media coverage, meeting transcripts, and social media. Interviews are treated as discourse rather than transparent windows into private beliefs. Analysis considers recurring terms, metaphors, binary oppositions, absences, assumptions, audience, institutional context, and effects. The contribution is often an account of how organizational realities are made intelligible and how certain actions or identities become authorized.

Discourse analysis is not simply thematic coding of language. It requires attention to the social work performed by discourse. Nor should it be reduced to accusations that participants are consciously manipulating language. Discourses can constrain and enable actors even when no individual intends their broader effects.

Participatory Approaches: Research with, Rather Than on, People

Participatory approaches treat participants as contributors to the research process rather than solely as sources of data. They may help define the problem, develop questions, collect materials, interpret findings, and decide how knowledge will be used. Participatory design is particularly relevant when research concerns communities whose knowledge has been historically marginalized or when practical ownership is essential.

Methods may include collaborative workshops, community mapping, photovoice, co-analysis, democratic dialogue, and shared dissemination. Participation exists on a continuum. Consultation, collaboration, co-production, and participant control are not equivalent, and researchers should state the level of decision-making power actually shared.

The approach can improve relevance, surface experiential knowledge, and support organizational change. Yet participation does not automatically eliminate power. Differences in status, language, expertise, employment security, and access to resources may shape whose views prevail. Researchers must make decision rights explicit, compensate contributions fairly where appropriate, protect dissent, and avoid representing token involvement as partnership.

Participatory approaches may be combined with case study, action research, ethnography, or narrative inquiry. The combination is defensible when the researcher explains how each tradition contributes to the overall logic rather than presenting a list of methods without integration.

Comparing Designs Through Intended Contribution

The most useful comparison asks what kind of knowledge each design is built to produce.

| Tradition | Central concern | Typical contribution |

|---|---|---|

| Case study | A bounded phenomenon in context | Contextual explanation or theoretical refinement |

| Ethnography | Culture, practice, and situated meaning | Thick account of a social world |

| Phenomenology | Lived experience | Interpretation of the meaning and structure of experience |

| Grounded theory | Social process and interaction | Emergent conceptual or process theory |

| Narrative inquiry | Story, identity, and temporality | Understanding of experience through narrative form |

| Action research | Change and learning through intervention | Practice improvement plus situated knowledge |

| Discourse analysis | Language, power, and construction of reality | Explanation of meaning-making and subject positions |

| Participatory approaches | Shared inquiry and knowledge authority | Co-produced knowledge and often collective action |

The boundaries are permeable, but they should not be ignored. A case study can contain ethnographic elements; an action research project can use grounded theory coding; a participatory study can be organized as a case. The design label should communicate the dominant logic of inquiry.

An Alignment Framework for Doctoral Researchers

A defensible proposal can be developed through six questions:

1. What is the phenomenon and why is it theoretically or practically important?

2. What kind of answer is required—contextual explanation, lived meaning, process theory, cultural interpretation, narrative understanding, critique, or change?

3. What assumptions about reality, knowledge, and power support that answer?

4. What design tradition best organizes the inquiry?

5. What evidence and analytic practices follow from the design?

6. What contribution can reasonably be claimed?

The final question is crucial. Qualitative research can contribute concepts, interpretations, process explanations, practical changes, critiques of dominant categories, or transfer-oriented insights. It generally does not claim population estimates unless combined with an appropriate quantitative design. Quality is established through credibility, reflexivity, transparency, coherence, ethical integrity, and the plausibility of the interpretation. Depending on the tradition, researchers may use triangulation, member reflection, negative-case analysis, audit trails, thick description, peer debriefing, or collaborative validation. These are not universal rituals; their value depends on epistemological fit.

Illustrative Case: Selecting a Design for Digital Transformation Research

Background

The following fictional case concerns Meridian Components, a mid-sized manufacturer implementing an enterprise resource planning system across production, procurement, and sales. Senior leaders describe the project as a technical modernization, but implementation has produced workarounds, conflict, and uneven adoption.

Situation and problem

A doctoral researcher initially proposes the question: “What are the critical success factors of ERP implementation?” The proposed method is a one-time survey of employees supplemented by several interviews. During preliminary engagement, the researcher observes that employees interpret the system differently: managers describe resistance, production workers describe protection of operational knowledge, and analysts describe data-quality problems.

Analysis of design options

A multiple-case study could compare implementation practices across plants. An ethnography could examine how work practices and informal norms develop around the system. Phenomenology could investigate employees’ lived experience of technological disruption. Grounded theory could explain the process through which users move from compliance to adaptation or avoidance. Discourse analysis could examine how “resistance” is constructed in managerial communications. Participatory action research could involve employees in redesigning workflows.

The appropriate choice depends on the intended contribution. Suppose the researcher wants to explain how employees collectively negotiate the meaning and use of the new system over time. A longitudinal organizational ethnography, informed by an interpretive paradigm, is defensible. If the researcher instead wants to develop a process model of adoption under competing interpretations, constructivist grounded theory may be stronger.

Selected approach

The researcher selects an embedded longitudinal case study with ethnographic engagement. The organization is the bounded case; production, procurement, and sales are embedded units. Data include observations of implementation meetings and daily work, interviews, system-training materials, help-desk records, and internal communications. Analysis proceeds through within-unit interpretation followed by cross-unit comparison. Reflexive fieldnotes document the researcher’s changing access and relationships.

Outcome and contribution

The resulting account shows that adoption is not a simple individual acceptance decision. It is a collective process in which employees translate system requirements into local practices, defend professional competence, and negotiate which forms of data count as authoritative. The study does not claim that all ERP implementations follow this pattern. It offers a contextual process explanation and concepts that may be examined in other settings.

Learning points

The case demonstrates that the same substantive topic—digital transformation—can support several designs. The correct choice follows from the question and intended contribution. It also shows why design decisions may develop during field engagement without becoming arbitrary: adaptation is legitimate when documented, theoretically justified, and ethically managed.

Challenges, Ethics, and Contemporary Practice

Qualitative designs face recurring challenges. Access may be controlled by organizational gatekeepers, producing overly positive accounts. Participants may fear professional consequences, particularly when discussing misconduct or leadership failure. Researchers may overidentify with a field site, overlook contradictory evidence, or treat polished corporate narratives as neutral descriptions. Large volumes of digital data can create an illusion of comprehensiveness while obscuring context and consent.

Confidentiality is more difficult in small organizations where roles and events are recognizable. Pseudonyms alone may not protect identity; composite cases, altered details, restricted quotations, or negotiated reporting may be necessary. Researchers should not promise absolute anonymity when it cannot be guaranteed. Data governance must address storage, access, retention, encryption, and destruction, particularly when transcripts contain commercially sensitive information.

Artificial intelligence can assist with transcription, search, preliminary organization, and pattern visualization, but it does not replace interpretive responsibility. Researchers must verify automated transcripts, assess bias, protect confidential data from unauthorized platforms, and disclose substantive computational assistance. Automated coding can obscure ambiguity, irony, silence, and context. It should support—not determine—the analytic argument.

Current qualitative practice increasingly addresses hybrid workplaces, platform labor, algorithmic management, climate transition, responsible innovation, and digitally mediated communities. These topics require methodological creativity, but novelty should not be confused with rigor. The fundamental requirement remains alignment among question, design, evidence, interpretation, and contribution.

Best Practices for Design Justification

A strong doctoral design rationale should:

• define the phenomenon and boundaries clearly;
• identify the paradigm or philosophical assumptions;
• explain why alternative designs are less suitable;
• distinguish design from data-collection techniques;
• specify the unit of analysis and sampling logic;
• show how analysis will answer the research question;
• anticipate ethical and power-related issues;
• describe reflexivity and quality procedures;
• limit claims to what the evidence supports; and
• explain the study’s conceptual, empirical, methodological, or practical contribution.

The strongest qualitative studies do not merely report what participants said. They make a disciplined interpretive argument about how social, organizational, and experiential realities are produced, sustained, challenged, or transformed.

Chapter Summary

Qualitative research designs are traditions of inquiry grounded in assumptions about reality, knowledge, language, and power. Case study emphasizes bounded phenomena in context; ethnography examines culture and practice; phenomenology interprets lived experience; grounded theory develops explanatory concepts about processes; narrative inquiry studies stories, identity, and time; action research connects inquiry with intervention; discourse analysis investigates language and power; and participatory approaches share research authority with participants. These traditions may overlap, but each implies a distinctive form of evidence and contribution. Doctoral researchers should select a design by beginning with the research question and intended knowledge claim, then aligning paradigm, sampling, data generation, analysis, ethics, and quality criteria. Reflexivity, transparency, contextual sensitivity, and disciplined claims are central to credible qualitative scholarship.

Key Terms

Paradigm: A set of assumptions about reality, knowledge, and appropriate inquiry.

Interpretivism: An orientation emphasizing socially constructed meanings and situated understanding.

Research design: The overall logic connecting a research problem with evidence, analysis, and contribution.

Case study: In-depth investigation of a bounded contemporary phenomenon in context.

Ethnography: Study of culture and social practice through sustained engagement with a group or setting.

Phenomenology: Inquiry into the meaning and structure of lived experience.

Grounded theory: A design for developing explanatory concepts and process theory from systematically analyzed data.

Narrative inquiry: Study of experience as organized and communicated through stories.

Action research: Cyclical inquiry combining investigation with purposeful change.

Participatory research: Inquiry conducted with participants as collaborators in defining, producing, or using knowledge.

Discourse analysis: Analysis of how language constructs meaning, identity, knowledge, and power.

Reflexivity: Critical examination of how the researcher influences and is influenced by the research.

Theoretical sampling: Selecting additional data sources to develop or challenge emerging concepts.

Triangulation: Use of multiple sources, perspectives, or methods to deepen interpretation.

Thick description: Detailed contextual account enabling readers to assess meaning and transferability.

Analytic generalization: Extending concepts or explanations to theory rather than estimating population frequencies.

Member reflection: Inviting participants to respond to interpretations or representations of their accounts.

Researcher positionality: The social, professional, and intellectual location from which inquiry is conducted.

Transferability: The extent to which insights may be relevant in other sufficiently similar contexts.

Review Questions

Short Answer Questions

1. Why are interviews considered a data-collection method rather than a qualitative research design?

2. What distinguishes analytic generalization from statistical generalization?

3. What is the central purpose of phenomenological inquiry?

4. Explain theoretical sampling in grounded theory.

5. Why is reflexivity important in ethnographic research?

Long Answer Questions

1. Compare case study, ethnography, and phenomenology in terms of research questions, evidence, analysis, and intended contribution.

2. Explain how paradigm, research question, design, and contribution should be aligned in a doctoral qualitative study.

3. Discuss the major similarities and differences between grounded theory and narrative inquiry.

4. Examine the ethical and methodological tensions involved in action research.

5. Explain how discourse analysis differs from thematic analysis and why the distinction matters in organizational research.

Analytical / Application Questions

1. A researcher wants to understand how employees experience moral distress during corporate downsizing. Which design would you recommend, and what alternative design might be appropriate for a different intended contribution? Justify your answer.

2. An organization asks a researcher to investigate why a digital platform has not been adopted. Develop an aligned design rationale using either ethnography, grounded theory, or participatory action research.

3. A doctoral proposal claims to use ethnography but relies on six interviews conducted during two site visits and offers a list of themes. Critically evaluate the proposal and recommend improvements.

22. Multiple Choice Questions with Answers

Question 1

A doctoral researcher wants to explain the stages through which employees collectively adapt to a new organizational technology. Which design is most directly aligned with this purpose?

A. Phenomenology

B. Grounded theory

C. Narrative inquiry

D. Discourse analysis

Correct Answer: B. Grounded theory

Question 2

What primarily distinguishes a case study from a general qualitative interview study?

A. A case study must use quantitative data

B. A case study investigates a bounded phenomenon in context

C. A case study excludes organizational documents

D. A case study cannot include multiple sites

Correct Answer: B. A case study investigates a bounded phenomenon in context

Question 3

A researcher studies how employees enact informal safety practices through prolonged observation and participation. Which tradition is most appropriate?

A. Ethnography

B. Phenomenology

C. Narrative inquiry

D. Survey research

Correct Answer: A. Ethnography

Question 4

Which research question best fits phenomenology?

A. What factors predict employee turnover?

B. How do managers construct the term innovation in annual reports?

C. What is the lived meaning of executive burnout?

D. How can employees redesign a workflow?

Correct Answer: C. What is the lived meaning of executive burnout?

Question 5

In grounded theory, theoretical sampling means selecting participants primarily because they:

A. Statistically represent the entire population

B. Are easiest for the researcher to access

C. Can develop or challenge emerging concepts

D. Have identical demographic characteristics

Correct Answer: C. Can develop or challenge emerging concepts

Question 6

A discourse analyst examining corporate sustainability reports would be most concerned with:

A. The statistical reliability of reported emissions

B. How language constructs responsibility and legitimacy

C. The average employee’s lived experience

D. The chronological accuracy of executive biographies

Correct Answer: B. How language constructs responsibility and legitimacy

Question 7

Which feature is most characteristic of action research?

A. Separation of research from organizational change

B. A cyclical relationship between inquiry, action, and reflection

C. Exclusive reliance on historical documents

D. A requirement to avoid participant collaboration

Correct Answer: B. A cyclical relationship between inquiry, action, and reflection

Question 8

A participatory approach is most ethically consistent when the researcher:

A. Keeps all interpretive authority

B. Treats participants only as data sources

C. Makes decision rights and forms of collaboration explicit

D. Avoids discussing power differences

Correct Answer: C. Makes decision rights and forms of collaboration explicit

Question 9

Which statement best describes analytic generalization?

A. It estimates the percentage of a population with a characteristic

B. It extends concepts or explanations to relevant theory or contexts

C. It requires a randomly selected sample

D. It eliminates the need for contextual description

Correct Answer: B. It extends concepts or explanations to relevant theory or contexts

Question 10

A study claims to be ethnographic but consists only of six interviews and two short site visits. The most important concern is that the study:

A. Uses too many types of data

B. May lack sustained engagement and cultural interpretation

C. Cannot ethically interview employees

D. Must use experimental methods instead

Correct Answer: B. May lack sustained engagement and cultural interpretation