Introduction

At the proposal stage and in the early planning and start-up stages of a
qualitative research project, many design decisions get made—some explicitly
and precisely, others implicitly, some unknowingly, and still others by default.
The qualitative researcher begins to focus on the study’s issues, the participants to
be observed, the data to be collected, and how these data will be managed and
analyzed.
This book is about analysis, but we also need to discuss research design. Study
design decisions can, in a real sense, be seen as analytic—a sort of anticipatory
data condensation—because they affect later analysis by ruling out certain
variables and relationships and attending to others; they prefigure your analytic
moves. Some design decisions are mainly conceptual: the conceptual framework
and research questions, sampling, case definition, instrumentation, and the nature
of the data to be collected. Others, though they appear in the guise of management
issues, are equally focusing: how data will be stored, organized, and processed
and what computer software may be used to support the work.
We cannot deal thoroughly here with qualitative research design; see the
Appendix for recommended titles on the subject. In this chapter, we discuss the
analytic issues that arise as a study is focused and organized. We provide specific
examples but want to emphasize that these issues must be dealt with uniquely and
flexibly in any particular study. Someone else’s qualitative research design is not
always replicable by others. And initial design decisions nearly always lead to a
redesign.

Tight Versus Loose Designs: Some Trade-Offs

Prior to fieldwork, how much shape should a qualitative research design have?
Any researcher, no matter how unstructured or inductive, comes to fieldwork with
some orienting ideas. A sociologist may focus on families or organizations and,
through those lenses and filters, will look for data marked by discipline-specific
concepts such as “the 5 rs”: roles, relationships, rules, routines, and rituals. If that
researcher looks at closets or lunchrooms, it is not with the eyes of an architect or
a cook but with an interest in what the room and its contents have to say about the
patterns shared by the people using it. A psychologist would orient differently
toward the same phenomena, focusing perhaps on motivations, anxieties, and
interpersonal communication dynamics.
Some qualitative researchers keep pre-structured designs to a minimum. They
consider social processes to be too complex, too relative, too elusive, or too fluid
to be approached with explicit conceptual frames or standard instruments. They
prefer a more loosely structured, emergent, inductively grounded approach for
gathering data: Their conceptual frameworks will tend to emerge from the field
during the course of the study; the important research questions will become clear
only gradually; meaningful settings and participants will not be selected prior to
fieldwork but only after initial orientation to the field site.
Highly inductive, loosely designed studies make good sense when experienced
researchers have plenty of time and are exploring unfamiliar cultures,
understudied phenomena, or very complex social processes. But if you’re new to
qualitative studies and are looking at a better understood phenomenon within a
familiar culture or subculture, a loose, inductive design may be a waste of time.
Months of fieldwork and voluminous case studies may yield only a few
banalities.
Tighter designs are a wiser course for researchers working with well-
delineated constructs. In fact, we should remember that qualitative research can
be outright confirmatory—that is, can seek to test or further explicate a
conceptualization. Tighter designs also provide clarity and focus for beginning
researchers worried about procedures and overload.
So a case can be made for tight, pre-structured qualitative designs and for
loose, emergent ones. Much of qualitative research lies between these two
extremes. But how pre-structured should a qualitative research design be? It
depends on the time available, how much already is known about the phenomena
under study, the instruments already available, and the analysis that will be made.
 The looser the initial design, the less selective the collection of
data; everything looks important at the outset if you are waiting for
the key concepts or regularities to emerge from the case, and that wait
can take a long time. The researcher, submerged in data, will need
months to sort it out. You may have that kind of time if you’re doing a
dissertation or are funded by a long-term grant, but most projects are
time constrained.
Second, fieldwork may well involve multiple-case research rather
than single-case studies. If different field-workers are operating
inductively, with no common framework or instrumentation, they are
bound to end up with the double dilemma of data overload and lack of
comparability across cases.
Then, too, we should not forget why we are out in the field in the
first place: to describe and analyze a pattern of interrelationships.
Starting with them (deductively) and getting gradually to them
(inductively) are both possible. In the life of a conceptualization, we
need both approaches—and may well need them from several field
researchers—to pull a mass of facts and findings into a wide- ranging,
coherent set of generalizations.
Finally, as researchers, we do have background knowledge. We see
and decipher details, complexities, and subtleties that would elude a
less knowledgeable observer. We know some of the questions to ask,
which incidents to attend to closely, and how our theoretical interests
are embodied in the field. Not to “lead” with your conceptual strength
can be simply self-defeating.
Clearly, trade-offs are involved here. In multiple-case research, for
example, the looser the initial framework, the more each researcher
can be receptive to local idiosyncrasies—but cross-case
comparability will be hard to get, and the costs and the information
load will be colossal. Tightly coordinated designs face the opposite
dilemma: They yield more economical, comparable, and potentially
generalizable findings, but they are less case sensitive and may entail
bending data out of contextual shape to answer a cross-case analytic
question. Whether you choose one end of the continuum or the other for
your particular study must be your decision. But a midway point
between the extremes is yet another position, and perhaps the one most
qualitative researchers take.

Building a Conceptual Framework

Description and Rationale
A conceptual framework explains, either graphically or in narrative
form, the main things to be studied—the key factors, variables, or
constructs—and the presumed interrelationships among them.
Frameworks can be simple or elaborate, commonsensical or theory
driven, descriptive or causal.
Conceptual frameworks are simply the current version of the
researcher’s map of the territory being investigated. As the explorer’s
knowledge of the terrain improves, the map becomes correspondingly
more differentiated and integrated. Thus, conceptual frameworks are
developed at the beginning of a study and evolve as the study
progresses.
A conceptual framework forces you to be selective—to decide
which variables are most important, which relationships are likely to
be most meaningful, and, as a consequence, what information should
be collected and analyzed—at least at the outset. If multiple
researchers are involved, the framework helps them study the same
phenomenon in ways that will permit an eventual cross-case analysis.
Theory building relies on a few general constructs that subsume a
mountain of particulars. Constructs such as culture, social
intelligence, and identity are the labels we put on intellectual “bins”
containing many discrete actions, states, variables, categories,
processes, and events. Any researcher, no matter how inductive in
approach, knows which bins are likely to be in play in the study and
what is likely to be in them. Bins come from theory, from personal
experience, and (often) from the general objectives of the study
envisioned. Setting out bins, naming them, and getting clearer about
their interrelationships help lead you toward a conceptual framework.
Examples
A conceptual framework first specifies who and what will (and will
not) be studied. Display 2.1 is a first-cut, first-draft attempt at listing,
in graphic form, the myriad influences on a single classroom teacher.
This illustration identifies the people (State School Superintendent,
District Reading Specialists, etc.) and the “things” or official
documents/policies (State Mandated Textbooks, District Standards and
Curriculum, etc.) the researcher identified as influential on a
classroom teacher’s instructional practices with her students. There is
a general clustering of whos and whats by level, state, district, and
local, and an implied hierarchy of supervision/authority and
distribution of power from top to bottom.
We see here the focusing function of a conceptual framework. Some,
not all, social actors in this long list are going to be studied, along
with some, not all, aspects of their activity. For example, the
researcher may be unable, due to accessibility, to directly interview the
State School Superintendent or State School Board Members. But he
can certainly access public documents and records of their official
business from published minutes of state school board meetings. Once
all permissions have been obtained, the Language Arts Teacher herself
will be interviewed several times and observed teaching in several of
her classrooms. Documents such as her lesson plans and samples of
graded student work will be reviewed. Only some relationships in this
conceptual framework will be explored, certain kinds of processes
documented, and certain analyses made—at least at the outset.
Now for a slightly more complex (read “messy”) conceptual
framework using some of the same aspects of this study as they
evolved.
Display 2.2 includes the exact same bins and labels as Display 2.1,
but their arrangement and the arrows of influence are different. There
is less symmetry (support that the network reflects the
“asymmetrical” social world we live in), a new hierarchy, and a
different set of interrelationships.
The researcher got to this display after spending some time
observing and interviewing the Language Arts Teacher. State
Standards and Testing were the primary factors that influenced both
her practice and the students’ classroom experiences. Of all the players
from Display 2.1 that were hierarchically listed, some were actually
quite peripheral according to the perspective of the Language Arts
Teacher; these are listed at the bottom of the display, with dashed
arrows toward the major bins suggesting minimal influence.
The other three major factors the researcher learned and interpreted
as most salient were the teacher’s School Principal, and her
“obsession” with raising the school’s standardized test scores; the
District In-Service Teacher Education Workshops (which the teacher
praised and found “extremely useful for me and my kids”); and the
State Mandated Textbooks (which heavily emphasized writing over
literature appreciation for language arts).

Display 2.1
A First-Draft Conceptual Framework for a Case Study Teacher and
the Influences on Her Practice
 A display such as this might be considered partly confirmatory if
the researcher is able to visit other Language Arts teachers within the
same school and within other schools outside the district to determine
if their spheres of influence also include the same factors. A working
hypothesis for field testing that the researcher developed after studying
and analyzing this display is this: The mandates of education
manifest themselves primarily as prescriptive products imposed on
educators and their students. Overall, what Display 2.2 illustrates is
that conceptual frameworks evolve as a study continues and the bigger
picture becomes clearer.
On our continuum from exploratory to confirmatory designs,
Display 2.1 is closer to the exploratory end and Display 2.2 to the
more confirmatory one. Let’s have a look at an entirely new study with
a conceptual framework about midway between the exploratory–
confirmatory continuum (see Display 2.3).
This framework is of particular interest in that it lays out the
“school improvement study”1 from which we (Miles and Huberman)
draw many of our subsequent displays (see also Huberman & Miles,
1983, 1984). Take some time to review the display to see how all the
pieces fit together and to see what leads to what as we’ve laid out the
directional arrows. This is our initial conceptual framework of how
we felt an educational program innovation was going to unfold
throughout a number of school sites across time.
Rather than bins of people and documents, we labeled our bins as
events (e.g., “Prior history with innovations”), settings (e.g.,
“Community, district office”), processes (e.g., “Changes in user
perceptions and practices”), and theoretical constructs (e.g.,
“Organizational rules, norms . . .”). Some of the outcomes are
hypothesized (“Degree of institutionalization”), but most are open-
ended (“Perceived gains and losses”). The directional arrows follow
the time flow, but some bets still are being made that most assistance
comes early and that reciprocal changes will occur among the
innovation, its users, and the
organization.

Display 2.2
Major Influences on a Language Arts

Teacher’s Practice

Display 2.3
Conceptual Framework for a Multicase “School Improvement” Field
Study, Initial Version
Source: Huberman, A. M., & Miles, M. B. (1984). Innovation up close: How school
improvement works. New York: Plenum.

This is a very general brief. It is also a brief that can change

en route, as this conceptual
framework did. As qualitative researchers collect data, they revise
their frameworks—make them more precise, replace empirically weak
bins with more meaningful ones, and reconfigure relationships.
The conceptual framework, then, is your first analytic display. It is a
visual representation of your main conceptual ideas about a study and
how they interact and interplay with each other. We do not feel that
there are any prescriptive differences between an ethnography’s and a
phenomenology’s mapping of people and processes, for example. But
always remember that conceptual frameworks tell a story of some
kind. They are evolving, one-page representations of your research in
progress, comparable to the storyboards of filmmakers, who first draw
on paper what they will eventually document on digital video.
Advice
Here are some suggestions that summarize and extend what has
been reviewed in this section:

1. Conceptual frameworks are best done graphically rather than

in text. Having to get the entire framework on a single page
obliges you to specify the bins that hold the discrete
phenomena, map likely interrelationships, divide variables
that are conceptually or functionally distinct, and work with
all of the information at once.
2. Expect to do several versions, right from the outset. There are
probably as many ways of representing the main variables as
there are variables to represent, but some—typically, later
cuts—are more elegant than others.
3. If your study has more than one researcher, have each field
researcher do a cut at a framework early on and then compare
the several versions. This procedure will show, literally, where
everyone’s head is. It usually leads to an explication of
contentious or foggy areas that otherwise would have surfaced
later on.
4. Avoid the no-risk framework—that is, one that defines
variables at a very global level and has two-directional arrows
everywhere. This avoidance amounts essentially to making no
focusing decisions and is little better than the strategy of going
indiscriminately into the field to see what the site has to tell.
However, you can begin with an omnibus or generic
framework as a way of getting to a more selective and specific
one.
5. Prior theorizing and empirical research are, of course,
important inputs. It helps to lay out your own orienting frame
and then map onto it the variables and relationships from the
literature available, to see where the overlaps, contradictions,
qualifications, and refinements are.

For an extended discussion of conceptual frameworks and how

they influence and affect all aspects of research, see Ravitch and
Riggan (2012).

Formulating Research Questions

Description and Rationale
Research questions represent the facets of inquiry that the
researcher most wants to explore. Research questions may be general
or particular, descriptive or explanatory. The formulation of research
questions may precede, follow, or happen concurrently with the
development of a conceptual framework. They also may be formulated
at the outset or later on and may be refined or reformulated during the
course of fieldwork.
It is a direct step from conceptual framework to research questions.
If I have a bin labeled “State Mandated Textbooks,” as in Display 2.1,
with an arrow from that bin directed toward “The Language Arts
Teacher,” I am implicitly asking myself some questions about how
textbooks influence a teacher’s practice (e.g., In what ways do state-
mandated language arts textbooks shape the language arts teacher’s
curriculum? ). If I have a two-way arrow between “The Language
Arts
Teacher” and “Students,” as in Display 2.2, my question has to do
with the reciprocal interrelationship between them and the
interpersonal dynamics of education (e.g., What kinds of teaching–
learning methods best prepare students for state-mandated testing in
language arts?).
If my conceptual framework is more constrained, so are my
questions. In Display 2.2, the “District School Board” has little, if any,
influence and affect on the teacher. There may be one research
question about the Board to verify its inconsequential impact, but not
much time or effort will be spent in pursuing this minimal factor.
What do these questions do for me? They tell me what I want to
know most or first; my collection of data will be more focused. I am
also beginning to make some implicit sampling decisions. I will look
only at some actors in some contexts dealing with some issues. The
questions also begin to point me toward data-gathering devices—
observations, interviews, document collection, or even questionnaires.
Finally, the research questions begin to operationalize the conceptual
framework and make the initial theoretical assumptions even more
explicit.
As another example, take the problem of understanding police work
(van Maanen, 1979). If you use an inductive approach, you explore
open-endedly all facets of police work. But there are so many that you
can’t look at them all. And where will you study them? You can’t look
everywhere. And when? If you delay that decision for a few months
until you’ve spent some time, say at the precinct station, that simply
reflects two tacit sampling decisions (start at the precinct house, then
recheck after a while).
Suppose the implicit research question was “How do arrests and
bookings work?” That choice immediately excludes many other
issues and leads to sampling and instrumentation choices (e.g., using
observation rather than official documents; selection of different
kinds of suspects, crimes, styles of apprehending suspects, and types
of officers). These sampling and instrumentation decisions, often
inexplicit, are actually focusing the settings, actors, processes, and
events to be studied. In sum, the research questions, implicit or
explicit, also suggest the possible types of analyses.
A conceptual framework’s display shows researchers’ preferred
bins and relational arrows as they map and carve up social
phenomena. They use these explicitly or implicitly to decide which
questions are most important and how they should get the answers.
We believe that better research happens when you make your
framework (and associated choices of research questions, cases,
sampling, and instrumentation) explicit, rather than claiming
inductive purity.

Example
Our (Miles and Huberman’s) school improvement study shows how
a conceptual framework hooks up with the formulation of research
questions. Look back at Display 2.3, where the main variable sets of
the study were laid out. Look at the third column, labeled “Adoption
Decision.” Its component parts are listed inside the bin: the decision to
adopt, the plan for implementation, and support for the implementation.
The task, then, is to decide what you want to find out about these
topics. The procedure we used was to cluster specific research
questions under more general ones, as shown in Display 2.4.
Notice the choices being made within each topical area. For
example, in the first two areas, the main things we want to know about
the decision to adopt are who was involved, how the decision was
actually made, and how important this project was relative to others.
All of the questions seem to be functional rather than theoretical or
descriptive—they have to do with getting something done.

Display 2.4
General and Special Research Questions Relating to the Adoption
Decision (School Improvement Study)
How was the adoption decision
made?
Who was involved (e.g., principal, users, central office people,
school board, outside agencies)? How was the decision made (top-
down, persuasive, consultative, collegial-participative, or delegated
styles)?

How much priority and centrality did the new program have at the
time of the adoption decision?
How much support and commitment was there from administrators?
How important was it for teachers, seen in relation to their routine,
“ordinary” activities, and any other innovations that were being
contemplated or attempted?
Realistically, how large did it
loom in the scheme of things?
Was it a one-time event or
one of a series?

What were the components of the original plan for implementation?

Thesse might have included front-end training, monitoring
and debugging/troubleshooting unexpected problems,
and ongoing support.
How precise
and elaborate
was this plan?
Were people
satisfied with it
at the time?
Did it deal with all of the problems
anticipated?

Were the requisite conditions for implementation ensured before it

began?
These might have included commitment, understanding, materials
 and equipment, skills, time allocation, and organizational backup.
Were any important conditions seen as missing? Which were most
missing?
Source: Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded
sourcebook (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Also notice that, conceptually, more is afoot than we saw in the

conceptual framework. The “requisite conditions” in the fourth
section of questions indicate that the researchers have some a priori
(determined beforehand) notions about which factors make for the
greatest preparedness.
When such a research question gets operationalized, an attempt will
be made to determine whether these conditions were present or absent
at the various field sites and whether that made any difference in the
execution of the project. This is an example of how research questions
feed directly into data collection. Of course, field researchers will be
attentive to other, as yet undreamed of, requisite conditions, and the
idea of requisite conditions may not be retained throughout the study.

Advice
1. Even if you are in a highly inductive mode, it is a good idea
to start with some general research questions. They allow you
to get clear about what, in the general domain, is of most
interest. They make the implicit explicit, without necessarily
freezing or limiting your vision.
2. If you are foggy about your priorities or about the ways they
can be framed, begin with a foggy research question and then
try to defog it. Most research questions do not come out right
on the first cut, no matter how experienced the researcher or
how clear the domain of study.
3. Formulating more than a dozen or so general research
questions is looking for trouble. You can easily lose the forest
for the trees and fragment the collection of data. Having a large
number of questions makes it harder to see emergent links
 across different parts of the database and to integrate findings.
As we saw in Display 2.4, a solution to research question
proliferation is the use of major questions, each with
subquestions, for clarity and specificity. It also helps to
consider whether there is a key question, the “thing you really
want to know.”
4. It is sometimes easier to generate a conceptual framework after
you’ve made a list of research questions. You look at the list for
common themes, common constructs, implicit or explicit
 relationships, and so on, and then begin to map out the
underlying framework joining these pieces. Some researchers
operate best in this mode.
5. In a multiple-case study, be sure all field-workers understand
each question and see its importance. Multiple-case studies
have to be more explicit, so that several researchers can be
aligned as they collect information in the field. Unclear
questions or different understandings can make for
noncomparable data across cases.
6. Once the list of research questions is generated and honed,
look it over to ensure that each question is, in fact,
researchable. Delete those questions that you or your
participants have no real means of answering, or you of
measuring (qualitatively or quantitatively).
7. Keep the research questions in hand, and review them during
fieldwork. This closeness will focus data collection; you
will think twice before noting down what participants have
for lunch or where they park their cars. Unless something has
an obvious, direct, or potentially important link to a research
question, it should not fatten your field notes.

Defining the Case

Description and Rationale
Qualitative researchers often struggle with the questions of “what
my case is” and “where my case leaves off.” Abstractly, we can define
a case as a phenomenon of some sort occurring in a bounded context.
The case is, in effect, your unit of analysis. Studies may be of just one
case or of several. Display 2.5 shows this graphically: There is a
focus or “heart” of the study, and a somewhat indeterminate boundary
defines the edge of the case: what will not be studied.

Examples
What are some examples of cases? Sometimes the “phenomenon”
may be an individual in a defined context, as suggested by Displays
2.1 and 2.2: a Language Arts teacher and her series of classes with
junior-level high school students during an 18-week spring semester
—the same semester her students will take a state-mandated
standardized “high-stakes” test in language arts. Note that the “heart”
here is the teacher. The boundary defines her students and school site
as the major contexts. The researcher will not, for example, interview
the teacher’s mother or visit the child care facility where the teacher
leaves her own child during workdays. The bounding is also by time:
No information will be gathered after the spring semester ends in 18
weeks and the standardized test scores have been reported.

Display 2.5
The Case as the Unit of Analysis

Source: Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded
sourcebook (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

We can also expect that the boundary will be defined further by

sampling operations, which we’ll
discuss later. For example, this researcher will not be interviewing the
school guidance counselor, only the principal and, if pertinent, other
language arts teachers.
A case may also be defined by

• a role (school principal, CEO, nurse supervisor),

• a small group (African American men in an inner-city
neighborhood, a college-level rock band, a breast cancer
survivor support group),
• an organization (a nursery school, a computer chip
manufacturing company, the American Sociological
Association),
• space and environment (a mall for adolescents to “hang out,” visitors
at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Mall in Washington D.C.,
nighttime foot traffic along the Las Vegas Strip),
• a community or settlement (the French Quarter of New Orleans,
a village in Tanzania, the Tenderloin District of San Francisco),
• episodes or encounters (voting for the first time, a “one night stand,”
bullying incidents on an elementary school playground),
• an event (a search committee meeting, a high school graduation
ceremony, New Year’s Eve in New York City’s Time Square),
• a period of time (a day in the life of a fire fighter, spring break, how
customers use their time between ordering food from a server and
having it delivered to their table),
• a process (grocery shopping and meal preparation, organizing and
managing an international conference, the adoption and
implementation of an innovational education program in a school
district),
• a culture or subculture (female African Americans in academia,
Los Angeles drag queens, “skater dudes”), or
• a nation (Greece during the period of its 21st-century economic
crisis, America during the 2012 presidential election cycle).

Single cases are the stuff of much qualitative research and can be very
vivid and illuminating, especially if they are chosen to be “critical,”
extreme or unique, or “revelatory,” as Yin (2009) suggests. But the cases
may not be monolithic. Yin further points out that cases may have subcases
embedded within them. A case study of a school may contain cases of
specific classrooms; a case study of a hospital ward may have cases of
specific doctor–patient relationships within it.
We suggest that multiple cases offer the researcher an even deeper
understanding of the processes and outcomes of cases, the chance to test (not
just develop) hypotheses, and a good picture of locally grounded causation.
The question of just which cases to include in a sample is discussed below.
A comment on notation: We sometimes prefer—and use here and there in
this book—the word site because it reminds us that a “case” always occurs
in a specified social and physical setting; we cannot study individual cases
devoid of their context in the way a quantitative researcher often does.

Advice
1. Start intuitively, but remember the focus and build outward. Think of
who and what you will
not be studying as a way to firm up
the boundaries.
2. Define the case as early as you can during a study. Given a starting
conceptual framework and research questions, it pays to get a bit
stern about who and what you are defining as a case; that will help
clarify further both the framework and the questions.
3. Remember that sampling will define the case(s) further.
4. Attend to several dimensions of the case: its conceptual nature, its
social size, its physical
location, and its temporal extent.