| Course | RES 724 Qualitative Methods and Design (RES/724) |
|---|---|
| Week | 7 |
| Paper type | Doctoral qualitative trustworthiness plan |
| Length | about 1,157 words, 4 double-spaced pages plus title page and references |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | University of Phoenix |
| Program | DBA |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for RES 724 Week 7
Can Readers Trust the Themes? Building Quality Into a Study of Family Business Successors
[Student Name]
University of Phoenix
RES/724: Qualitative Methods and Design
Week 7 Assignment
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The learner, the firms, the successors and the planned study are composites written for a model paper.
Week 6 showed how the composite Des Moines banker will analyze successors' interviews with interpretative phenomenological analysis. Readers, including her committee and family business advisers, will need reasons to trust the resulting themes. This paper plans how quality will be built in from recruitment to reporting.
Comparing Quality Frameworks
The most familiar framework, from naturalistic inquiry, asks whether findings are credible, transferable, dependable and confirmable. It is widely used and well understood, but some of its strategies, such as confirming findings through participants, sit uneasily with interpretive traditions.
Tracy (2010) proposed eight "big-tent" criteria for qualitative quality: a worthy topic, rich rigor, sincerity, credibility, resonance, significant contribution, ethics and meaningful coherence, each achievable through various practices. The framework is broad and includes ethics and contribution as part of quality.
Yardley (2000) proposed four principles for judging qualitative research: sensitivity to context, commitment and rigor, transparency and coherence, and impact and importance. These principles are flexible across methods and are widely used to evaluate IPA studies.
The Chosen Framework
The banker adopts Yardley's principles because they fit IPA's interpretive stance, are familiar to IPA reviewers and leave room for her to describe how strategies serve each principle. She will also show how her plan addresses the naturalistic criteria, since committee members may expect them.
Sensitivity to Context
Sensitivity to context includes awareness of the literature, the setting and participants' perspectives, and care in interaction. The banker's strategies: grounding questions in family business research; knowledge of Iowa manufacturing; interviews that follow successors' lead; and attention in analysis to each successor's particular circumstances, such as firm size and the founder's role. In the naturalistic framework, this supports credibility.
Commitment and Rigor
Commitment means prolonged engagement with the topic and depth in data collection and analysis; rigor means thoroughness. Strategies: two interviews per successor about a month apart; a plant walk-through between interviews; full IPA analysis of each case before moving to the next; and a sample homogeneous enough for meaningful cross-case analysis. A fellow doctoral student will review one transcript and the banker's coding, as in Week 6, to check depth rather than agreement.
Two long interviews with each of ten successors give the analysis room to go deep; one short interview with thirty would not.
Transparency and Coherence
Transparency means a clear account of how the study was done; coherence means a good fit between questions, tradition, methods and findings. Strategies: an audit trail of recruitment, interview dates, analytic sessions, memos and changes to themes; a theme table showing which successors contributed to each group theme, with quotations; and a methods chapter explaining each decision. These address dependability and confirmability in the naturalistic framework.
Impact and Importance
Findings should matter. The banker will share a plain-language summary with the family business center and participants, and she will write the findings so that advisers, families and lenders can recognize successors' experiences. Thick description of the setting and participants will let readers judge whether findings apply to their own contexts, which addresses transferability.
Reconsidering Member Checking
Birt et al. (2016) examined member checking and noted that returning transcripts or interpretations to participants is often presented as validation, yet participants may disagree for many reasons, may have changed their views or may not recognize an interpretation that is nonetheless defensible. They described a synthesized approach that asks participants to engage with interpreted findings and adds their responses as further data. Following that approach, the banker will send each successor a two-page case summary after analysis and invite comments. Responses will be treated as additional data and reported, not as votes on correctness.
Reflexivity and the Insider Position
The banker's position is both an asset and a risk. She understands manufacturing finance and family firms; she also holds assumptions. In a reflexive journal begun in Week 1, she has named three: that founders who stay too involved harm successors; that daughters face more resistance than sons; and that struggling successors lack preparation. She will review the journal before each analytic session and record where findings challenge these assumptions. Monthly debriefs with a peer outside banking will test whether her readings reflect successors' words or her expectations.
Why Not Interrater Reliability?
Some committee members trained in quantitative methods ask for interrater reliability, a statistic showing how often two coders assign the same codes. In IPA, analysis is an interpretive act by a researcher engaged closely with each case, and two analysts would reasonably produce different but defensible readings. Agreement scores would therefore measure the wrong thing. The banker will explain this in her methods chapter and point instead to the colleague's independent reading, which is used to deepen the analysis and catch omissions rather than to compute agreement.
Negative and Divergent Cases
Credibility also depends on reporting experiences that do not fit the main pattern. Week 6 already identified a successor who needed to step back from the shop floor rather than earn it. The banker will look for such cases deliberately, ask in second interviews about experiences that contradict emerging themes and report divergence alongside convergence in each group theme. A theme that every successor shares in exactly the same way would itself prompt a memo asking whether the analysis has flattened differences.
Thick Description in Practice
To support transferability, findings will describe each successor's context in enough detail for readers to compare it with their own: firm size range, industry segment, years since succession, the founder's form of involvement and family structure, all disguised enough to protect identities. Readers in other states or industries can then judge which findings plausibly apply to them.
Limits of These Strategies
None of these strategies guarantees trustworthy findings. Peer review depends on the peer's knowledge; member reflections depend on participants' time and willingness; reflexive journals depend on honesty. The banker will report how each strategy was carried out and what it changed, so readers can judge for themselves.
Ethics as Part of Quality
Tracy's inclusion of ethics as a quality criterion fits this study. Protecting successors in a small business community, disguising identifying details and avoiding any banking role during interviews are not only ethical duties but also conditions for honest accounts. Successors who fear exposure will offer polished stories rather than the experiences the study seeks.
A Timeline for Quality
Before fieldwork: reflexive journal, pilot interviews, peer debriefer recruited. During fieldwork: two interviews per successor, walk-throughs, field notes and memos. During analysis: case-by-case IPA, peer review of one transcript, monthly debriefs, audit trail entries. After analysis: member reflections on case summaries, theme table with quotations and a plain-language summary for participants.
Conclusion
Adopting Yardley's principles, mapped to the naturalistic criteria, and turning each into specific actions gives the banker's study a coherent quality plan suited to IPA. Member reflections replace validation-style member checks, and a reflexive journal and peer debriefing address her insider position. Week 8 assembles the full qualitative design.
References
Birt, L., Scott, S., Cavers, D., Campbell, C., & Walter, F. (2016). Member checking: A tool to enhance trustworthiness or merely a nod to validation? Qualitative Health Research, 26(13), 1802-1811. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732316654870
Tracy, S. J. (2010). Qualitative quality: Eight "big-tent" criteria for excellent qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(10), 837-851. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800410383121
Yardley, L. (2000). Dilemmas in qualitative health research. Psychology & Health, 15(2), 215-228. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870440008400302
What the RES 724 Week 7 instructions ask
In Week 7, RES 724 learners at the doctoral level plan for trustworthiness in qualitative research. Learners usually explain criteria such as credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability or alternative frameworks, select strategies for each, such as prolonged engagement, triangulation, member checking, peer debriefing, thick description, audit trails and reflexive journals, and explain how the researcher's position will be managed. Some versions ask learners to critique the trustworthiness of a published study or to compare two quality frameworks. Apply criteria that fit the learner's tradition, explain why each strategy suits the design, cite methodological sources in APA and be specific about when and how each strategy will be carried out.
How this RES 724 Week 7 example is built
Our worked paper compares three quality frameworks: the four naturalistic criteria, a set of eight broad criteria for qualitative quality and the four principles widely used with IPA, namely sensitivity to context, commitment and rigor, transparency and coherence, and impact and importance. It adopts the IPA principles and maps each to actions: knowledge of the setting and careful interviewing; two interviews per successor and case-by-case analysis; an audit trail and a theme table with quotations; and findings useful to advisers and families. Research questioning whether member checking validates interpretations leads the banker to use member reflections on case summaries instead. A reflexive journal and peer debriefing address her insider position as a banker who knows many successors' world from the outside.
RES 724 Week 7 grading rubric: where the points go
Doctoral graders reward trustworthiness plans that fit the tradition and are specific. Strong papers explain quality criteria accurately, choose a framework with reasons and map each criterion to concrete strategies with timing. Credit goes to critical use of member checking, to reflexivity that names the researcher's assumptions and position, to thick description that supports transferability and to an audit trail others could follow. Graders also value acknowledging the limits of each strategy, a timeline showing when each happens and a clear link between the chosen criteria and the claims the findings will make. Methods sources cited in APA anchor the plan.
RES 724 Week 7 help: mistakes to avoid
Trustworthiness papers often list every strategy from a textbook without showing how any will be done. Choose fewer and describe them in detail. Another frequent gap is applying quantitative ideas, such as interrater reliability scores, to traditions like IPA where they do not fit. Learners also treat member checking as proof that findings are correct; participants may disagree with interpretations that are still defensible. Some papers mention reflexivity without naming any assumption the researcher holds. Name yours. Finally, explain when each strategy happens, since many must be built in from the start. Report what each strategy actually changed. A tutor can help you choose quality criteria that fit your tradition.
Related RES 724 sample papers
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- RES 724 Week 1: Qualitative Traditions
- RES 724 Week 2: Qualitative Research Questions
- RES 724 Week 3: Sampling and Access
- RES 724 Week 4: Interviewing
- RES 724 Week 5: Observation and Documents
- RES 724 Week 6: Coding and Analysis
- RES 724 Week 8: Qualitative Design
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RES 724 Week 7 questions, answered
What does RES 724 Week 7 usually cover?
It usually covers trustworthiness in qualitative research: credibility, transferability, dependability, confirmability, alternative criteria and strategies such as reflexivity and audit trails.
Where can I find a free RES 724 Week 7 sample paper?
Read the full RES 724 Week 7 trustworthiness plan for successors' accounts above, at no charge.
What is member checking?
Returning data, summaries or interpretations to participants for comment; it can enrich findings but does not prove interpretations correct.
What is reflexivity?
The researcher's ongoing, explicit examination of how their background, assumptions and relationships shape the research.
What quality criteria are used with IPA?
Many IPA studies use four principles: sensitivity to context, commitment and rigor, transparency and coherence, and impact and importance.
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