RES 724 Week 1 Qualitative Traditions Example

Choosing a Qualitative Tradition for a Study of Family Business Successors

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

RES/724: Qualitative Methods and Design

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The learner, the firms, the successors and the planned study are composites written for a model paper.

The learner is a composite vice president of commercial lending at a regional bank in Des Moines, Iowa, whose portfolio includes about 40 family-owned manufacturers: machine shops, trailer builders, agricultural equipment makers. Over a decade, she has watched a dozen of them pass from the founder to a son or daughter. Some successors thrived; others struggled badly, and in two cases the family business was sold within three years. What puzzles her is that the struggling successors often ran sound businesses. When they talked to her, they described something harder to name: leading people who had known them as children, deciding while a parent still came to the plant every morning, feeling responsible for a legacy they had not built. She wants her DBA research to understand that experience from the successors' side, in their own words.

What Makes Research Qualitative

Qualitative research studies people's experiences, meanings and actions in their natural settings, usually through words rather than numbers. Creswell and Poth (2018) describe its common features: the researcher as the key instrument of data collection, multiple sources of data, inductive and deductive analysis, attention to participants' meanings, an emergent design and reflexivity about the researcher's influence. Its assumptions are usually that reality is experienced and constructed differently by different people and that understanding comes from close engagement with them. These assumptions suit the banker's question, which concerns how successors experience leadership rather than how often they succeed.

Narrative Research

Connelly and Clandinin (1990) described narrative inquiry as the study of how people experience the world through the stories they live and tell, with researcher and participant working together over time to understand those stories in their temporal, social and place contexts. A narrative study would follow two or three successors through long interviews about their lives, from childhood in the plant to taking over, and would produce richly told stories showing how they came to see themselves as leaders. It would offer great depth on a few lives but less on what successors share.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology looks for the common core of an experience that several people have lived through. A phenomenological study would interview 8 to 12 successors about the experience of leading while a parent remains present and would describe the structure of that experience: what it is like and how it is lived. Its product is a description of the shared core of an experience.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Smith et al. (2009) set out interpretative phenomenological analysis as an approach committed to examining how particular people make sense of major life experiences, combining phenomenology's focus on experience with interpretation, since the researcher is making sense of participants making sense, and with idiography, close attention to each case before looking across cases. An IPA study would interview six to ten successors in depth, analyze each transcript in detail and then identify themes across them while keeping individual differences visible.

Grounded Theory

Grounded theory aims to build a theory of a process from data. A grounded theory study would interview successors, founders and long-serving employees, sampling theoretically as concepts emerge, to explain how authority moves from one generation to the next. Its product would be a model of stages, conditions and strategies. That would interest practitioners, but it shifts attention from successors' experience to the mechanics of transfer.

Ethnography

Ethnography studies a culture through extended immersion. An ethnographer might spend months at one family manufacturer, attending meetings, walking the floor and talking with family members and employees, to understand how the family's culture shapes leadership. The result would be deep but tied to one firm, and the learner's role as the firm's banker would complicate access.

Case Study

A case study examines one or more bounded cases in context using multiple sources. A multiple case study of three recent successions, drawing on interviews, board minutes and financial records, would show how each unfolded and compare them. It would capture organizational context well but could dilute attention to the successor's personal experience.

Each tradition would study a different thing: a life, an experience, a process, a culture or a case.

Comparing the Traditions

The traditions differ in what they treat as the object of study. Narrative research studies lives told as stories; phenomenology and IPA study lived experience; grounded theory studies processes; ethnography studies cultures; case study studies bounded systems. They also differ in sample: a few people for narrative and IPA, more for phenomenology and grounded theory, one setting for ethnography and a few bounded cases for case study.

What Each Tradition Would Tell the Bank

A practical way to compare traditions is to ask what a reader at the bank, or a family business adviser, would take away from each finished study. A narrative study would offer two or three memorable accounts that could be shared with new successors as examples. A phenomenology would describe the core of the experience in a way that advisers could recognize in their clients. A grounded theory would offer a model of how authority shifts, useful for planning transitions. An ethnography would show one family's culture in depth. A case study would compare how particular successions went and why. Each is valuable, but only some speak directly to the successor's own sense of the transition, which is what the banker cannot see from the outside.

Questions the Comparison Raised

Working through the traditions sharpened the research interest. The banker realized she cares less about whether a succession succeeds, which a quantitative study of firm outcomes could address, than about what successors go through. She also realized that the founder's continued presence is central, which suggests sampling successors whose parents still come to the plant.

The Preferred Tradition

The banker's interest centers on how successors make sense of a demanding personal and professional transition. IPA fits best for three reasons. Its focus on sense-making matches her question. Its idiographic commitment respects the differences she has seen among successors, some thriving and some struggling. And its small, fairly homogeneous samples are realistic for a working professional. Phenomenology is a close second, but IPA's explicit acknowledgment of the researcher's interpretation suits a researcher who already knows the field well.

The Researcher's Position

The learner is a lender to several family firms and knows many successors personally. That knowledge will help her understand participants' language and situations, but it creates power issues: successors may present their firms favorably to a banker. She will recruit only successors whose firms bank elsewhere and will keep a reflexive journal from the start of the course.

Conclusion

Imagining the same study in five traditions showed how each would change the question, sample, data and product. For an interest in how successors make sense of leading a family firm in a parent's shadow, interpretative phenomenological analysis offers the best fit. Week 2 will turn that interest into qualitative research questions.

References

Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2-14. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X019005002

Creswell, J. W., & Poth, C. N. (2018). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (4th ed.). Sage.

Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research. Sage.