Table 1.

Comparison of qualitative research approaches

	Phenomenology	Ethnography	Grounded Theory	Case Study	Discourse Analysis	Content Analysis
Essence	To understand the meaning of participants’ experiences within their own “life world”	Immersion of researcher in setting to understand the ways of life of a cultural or social group	Set of data collection and analysis methods that assure that the meaning of a concept is discovered in the words and actions of participants from the ground up—not from application of a priori theory or concepts	To yield a full description or explanation of a phenomenon within a real life setting, e.g., an Alzheimer’s unit	To describe how and why social interactions are routinely enacted using analysis of naturally occurring talk and texts (e.g., subject–physician interaction)	Researcher codes and abstracts into meaning units observational notes or transcripts of interviews, avoiding specific verbatim reports. Often uses prior theory frequency counts to describe prominent themes in text
Sampling	Few participants, usually ≤6, who have experienced the phenomenon	Key informants; observation of events; possibly participant observation	Progressive, as theory is built; number of participants depends on saturation; theoretical sampling	A case embedded in a single social setting but sampling of events, key actors, etc. occurs (purposeful sampling)	Random sampling of text, encounters, or sampling of social interactions	Observations or interviews
Data Collection	In-depth conversations in which interviewer brackets his/her own experiences from those of interviewee	In-depth and/or focus group interviews; observation	In-depth interviews with 20-30 participants, depends on homogeneity of participants; data collection continues until saturation achieved	Observations, archival data, interviews	Observation or recording of clinical interviews	Textual data from transcripts of interviews with participants, focus groups, or published documents
Data Analysis	Phenomenological reduction and structural synthesis; researcher identifies essence of phenomenon and clusters data around themes	Description, analysis, and interpretation of the social or cultural group; analysis may proceed in a number of ways including building taxonomies and making comparisons; often draws connections between the description of the group and broader extant theoretical frameworks.	Coding, sorting, and integrating data from verbatim report, and inductively building a conceptual framework to explain a phenomenon. Iterative process whereby further data collection is prompted by researcher’s analytic interpretation; uses constant comparison method. Data collection stops when saturation of concepts achieved.	Reading through data ― a transcript, notes, documents, objects; make margin notes and form initial codes; describe case and context; aggregate categories and discover patterns of categories; interprets and makes sense of findings	Transcripts analyzed with attention to minutia that might otherwise be considered “noise,” e.g., hesitations, words such as “dunno,” etc.; data are analyzed inductively and events and talk are seen as socially constructed through the interaction	Data usually coded into abstract codes and developed through the interpretative eyes of researcher; codes, concepts, or themes counted in terms of relative importance as seen by researcher
Results	Description of the phenomenon is often presented as narrative	Rich narrative description of cultural or social group, i.e., story with characters and a plot	A conceptual or theoretical model that describes concepts or categories and their relationships; usually presented as a visual graphic	Narrative augmented by tables, figures, and sketches	Description and explication of actions in everyday and institutional settings through analysis of talk or speech acts	Frequency counts of themes and descriptive quotes for a code