Hello! I'm a second-year master's student studying how women adjust (or don't) their paid work upon becoming mothers. There is much quantitative data out there about the "motherhood penalty" and the various ways mothers work differently (and are discriminated against) but far less data on the subjective experiences of the mothers "on the ground," and which factors play the most salient role in their decision-making.
I am proposing a descriptive ("what is") study that begins with interviewing or focus-grouping mothers who followed various paths (kept working in same job, "opted out" for some period of time, scaled back or changed positions to better accommodate family needs, etc.). I will then conduct thematic analysis of the interviews to reveal various factors that supported and constrained the mothers in their attempts to find a balance between working and mothering, as well as how they feel about the arrangements they've ended up with. While that would probably suffice to fulfill the requirements of my master's degree, I am also interested in following the interview process with what I can only think to call a "qualitative survey." (See here for some background: Article The Logic of Qualitative Survey Research and its Position in...
). I make the QUAL survey distinction because I don't intend to make causal statements or conduct statistical analysis of the survey data but rather thought I could translate some of the themes/salient factors from the interviews into survey questions (including open-ended options to capture what the interviews might have missed). I hoped these survey responses could serves as additional pieces of feedback from a wide swath of the population of mothers that would either corroborate the story from the interviews and/or to uncover additional themes. I know that this survey would fail to meet the rigor of a true quantitative survey but if I adequately address all of the things the survey ISN'T, then would you agree that such survey responses could serve as additional data points that could then be analyzed in a qualitative fashion (with some descriptive stats thrown in)?My logic is as follows: this is a largely unexplored area of the research on the "motherhood penalty," so interviews feel crucial to uncovering broad themes that are as-yet unidentified. However, because there is so much diversity among mothers and the work paths they follow, even if I make efforts to interview a diverse group, I might still be limited by time/resources to conduct a sufficient number of interviews to capture all the variables involved. I hoped the QUAL survey portion would allow for more data points and fine-tuning of the themes, with a potential to create a true QUAN survey as I embark on a PhD down the road. But I am relatively new to this and am wondering what other issues I should consider?
Appreciate immensely any feedback or suggestions you might have. These forums have been a godsend to me as I begin to wrap my mind around the research part of this process!
I am not sure why you want to do two rounds of qualitative interviewing, especially for a masters-degree project. Qualitative research (and especially the analysis of qualitative data) can be a very demanding process, so it seems to me that the first set of interviews would provide a rich set of data that would be more than enough for your purposes.
Thank you for responding, David. You raise a good point. My initial inclination was to use my familiarity with the existing research (as well as personal experiences with the myriad of mothers I know) to create a qualitative-style survey that essentially asked women which factors (from the lit) were most salient in their personal decision making but also asked some "what else" questions such as, "are there supports of constraints that would have led you to consider a different path?" etc. The members of my committee, however, are of the mindset that interviews should generally precede survey development, so I proposed the two-step process to alleviate their concerns (thinking the interviews would be brief and the bulk of the data would come from the survey). But they are also unfamiliar with surveys of this more qualitative-style. (And I can't seem to find much about this approach either, which makes me worry it might be methodologically unsound?)
My overall goal is to show that there is much more nuance behind the decisions mothers make about continuing or adjusting their paid work to accommodate motherhood than the research has previously acknowledged. I thought that the survey method would allow for greater diversity of responses than would be feasible with just interviews (which I know are incredibly time consuming!). I fear that interviews might only be able to scratch the surface of the how and under-what-circumstances women adjust work question because they do so in so many different ways and to such varying degrees. Can you tell I'm a little eager, and ambitious? :) But now I'm back to thinking that focusing on interviews exclusively might make the most sense. Thanks again for sharing your perspective!
The usual reason for starting with open-ended interviews is to take a more exploratory approach. That way, if the ideas covered in the literature covered are indeed inadequate, then you will have more than your own anecdotal evidence to demonstrate that.
Also, I agree that the Qualitative Survey approach is not well known, but the original article does have over 400 citations on Google Scholar, so it appears that someone is using it.
I believe for master degree using the qualitative interviews is much more than consuming time unless you have time to do the analysis. If your committee is supporting the use of interviews then you may do just two focus groups and analyse the data for this degree. You will get more than enough and rich data. Then you may find you have to do individual interviews and quant survey for the PhD building on your focus group interviews results. Wish you all the best
Hi Sarah,
I agree with what David suggested. The most feasible and perhaps most effective way is to focus on qualitative interviews.
I do believe that only interviews alone would be strong enough to answer your questions.
If you think that it is still not enough, it could be better to do a second round of qualitative interviews. You could do:
- Repetitive interviews: to dig deeper into each case of respondents, answering the questions emerging from thematic analysis.
- New interviews: to diversity the responses. To do so, I think that you might like to categorise your sample. Some sampling strategies might help to you diversify your data is "maximum variation sampling", "stratified purposeful sampling", "extreme case sampling". For more information, refer to Patton (1990) Qualitative evaluation and research methods.
For me, the diversity of data is dependent much more on the ways you sample rather than the nature of each research method itself. Quantitative survey actually does not help to diversify your data, it only helps you measure data within your framework (a system of closed-ended questions).
Hope it helps a bit.
Best regards,
Thanks, all. This is great feedback and it helped me step back and realize that I truly was biting off more than I could chew (or needed to chew). I think I will focus my efforts on interviews for the master's round of research. Taking Kien's advice I will double-down my efforts to obtain a diverse sample and then hone in on identifying themes so that I'll be poised to design and implement a survey for the PhD round of research. Really appreciate the advice!
- Badges
- Science topic