Qualitative Research Design
Introduction
Phenomenology refers to subjective experiences and the study of these subjective experiences. It relies on qualitative research design in conducting empirical observations whose recorded observations can be analyzed for results and hypothesis testing.
Research on-“Lived Experiences of the Time Preceding Burnout”.
This research case applied a qualitative research design that interviewed a sample of eight patients suffering from burn out. The research drew a good hypothesis about the anticipated correlation because burn-out is psychologically connected to the state of mind and life experiences that affect the state of the mind. As I read through the article, I anticipated a positive correlation between burn-out and stressful life that preceded the burn-out (Fabergerg, 2005). However, I felt the research method used was not effective for research, and thus; the results were not very convincing. This is because the design of the research as read under the methodology could not give convincing results. This is due to the inherent weaknesses in the research design that was used. What looked glaringly faulty with the article’s content was the fact that the research sampled a very small section of the population. This small sample could not effectively give a clear picture of the wider population.
This is because the environment of the sampled interviewees that could have played a role in their pre-burn-out lives was most probably similar. This in turn, could give erroneous results because the small sample used could not offer a substantial statistical inference. The article elicits the re-design of the methodology used in conducting the research. A re-design is necessary so as to give credibility to the statistical inferences that shall be made from the collected data. The research problem was meant to establish the correlation between lived experiences in the pre-burn-out stage and the occurrence of burn-out in an individual (Fabergerg, 2005). The chosen research design makes use of a single, small sample. However, we know that burn-out causes related to pre-burn-out times could vary amongst individuals depending on their environment, age, gender-just to mention but a few. Therefore, the choice of the used method narrows the research to a small niche in that it would be hard to draw a statistical inference that can be universally applicable or at least plausible for a greater number of situations.In order to achieve plausible results, the researchers should have opted to use a cross-sectional qualitative study.
According to Shuttleworth (2005) this method emphasizes wider sampling conducted along the population’s strata with varying gender, age, ethnicities and varying social backgrounds. This method offers many samples that can be viewed and analyzed in terms of other multivariate influential aspects that may affect the occurrence of burn-out.The choice and use of this supposed method (cross-sectional qualitative study) would have made the results’ statistical inference widely applicable to the wider population. This is because the wider the samplings’ scope of coverage the more likely it is for it to be a true representation of the general case (Shuttleworth, 2009). The study’s results would then have shown the inferred statistical analysis could not give a generalized, blanket inference that is the same for all groups of people in the population. This would have been the case because of other variations that would have occurred within the wider samples used. The influencing variables would have included environmental variations (geographically), age and gender of the sampled individuals (Som, 1996).
References
Fabergerg, M. E. (2005). Lived Experiences of the Time Preceding Burnout. Journal of Advanced Nursing, volume 49, issue 1, pp 59–67.
Shuttleworth, M. (2009). Research Design: Cross-sectional Study. Retrieved from, http://www.experiment-resources.com/cross-sectional-study.html, viewed on 2ndJune
2010.
Som, K. R. (1996). Practical Sampling Techniques, second edition. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
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