My research topic
2015 Nepal earthquake: Vulnerable families and role of social workers in disaster recovery
Research questions,
1. What causes vulnerable families to become more vulnerable in 2015 Nepal earthquake?
2. what are the existing problems in the family?
3. And how social worker can work with vulnerable families in post-disaster recovery process?
Generally speaking, qualitative research does not have rules about sample size. Instead, my recommendation would be to search on the web for the phrases "purposive sampling" and "purposeful sampling" to gain some insight into how qualitative research select their samples.
Also, will you be interviewing family members or social workers or both?
Concerning the research topic I would find qualitative data more significant than quantative ones. Numbers usually do not respond to many inter-related issues and especially not how social worker can work in the situation you intend to research. Sometimes, even good case studies may be enough for qualitative researche. So, regardless the number of subject you cover, the most important is to have a good indicators to discover the answers on questions you placed. You don't have to proove obvious by the statistics: e.g., exact number of families who got affected by earthquake and then became more vulnerable. It would be enough to reach that number of families that would bring you to discoveries in your research that respond to the issues you want to explore.
Respected David L Morgan sir thank you for your answer. i will follow the idea you have given and regarding your question, i will try to locate the role of socila workers to answer ques no 3 from social work disaster literature. in fact disaster research in social work are very few i may also do FGD with social workers after the data collection has been done with families. Purpose of my third research question is to produce a journal paper.
You can follow saturation principle in determining the size of your sample. There are some papers on pros and cons of this principle:
http://qrj.sagepub.com/content/8/1/137.abstract
http://qrj.sagepub.com/content/13/2/190.abstract
Marshall, B., Cardon, P., Poddar, A., & Fontenot, R. (2013). Does sample size matter in qualitative interviews in IS research? Journal of Computer Information Systems, 54, 11–22.
The key point is this: Our qualitative sample must be big enough to assure that we are likely to hear most or all of the perceptions that might be important. If the team wants to be more conservative and reduce the risk of missing the one-in-10 subgroup to less than 2 percent then a sample of nearly 100 would be needed.
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