I agree with Robert and Dean that demographic questions are both optional and potentially useful. You certainly want to pay attention to any features that might be linked to your substantive topic, which means that keeping a good record of the participants' relevant characteristics would be highly advisable.

In addition, qualitative articles often include a first table that describes the participants in terms of several demographic variables. So you might think about whether such a table would be useful for your readers. Also, a lot depends on how many participants you have, for example, a descriptive table for just 10 participants would not be useful in most circumstances.

Not necessary

Madiha Zahid, I think that some demographic information is useful - even if not extra specific. For example, I think that those who read about your research would probably like to know such basic things as how many males versus females were in your sample, and what their (rough) ages were. There might also be demographic variables that are important in relation to your particular research, e.g., how many years your participants had been employed in a particular type of organisation, how long they had been in a particular kind of relationship, how long they had been unemployed for, whether they had a particular kind of disability, etc.

You might need to be careful about how you report the demographic information in order to protect confidentiality of your participants - but providing no demographic information, in my view, would be a major deficiency.

All the best with your research.

Madiha - a very good response from Robert. Demographics are not as 'mandatory' as they are in quantitative research - as there is no required measurement. While the intention of qualitative research is not to generalise, qualitative demographics offer a 'degree' of inference that can be useful in the discussion. For instance, you might be able to state state something like 'it was noted that the majority of female participants said...'. For this to be meaningful, the reader would need to know the gender breakdown of the total participant sample.

Dear Madiha,

Whether qualitative or quantitative, based on demographics only you can compare opinions between different classes or categories or groups of respondents. If you want to have a large sample better incorporate as many demographic variables as possible, depending upon the context. Your study will then become unique or pioneering, because you would be able to make new comparisons which are not yet made by researchers. Good luck.

I agree with Robert and Dean that demographic questions are both optional and potentially useful. You certainly want to pay attention to any features that might be linked to your substantive topic, which means that keeping a good record of the participants' relevant characteristics would be highly advisable.

In addition, qualitative articles often include a first table that describes the participants in terms of several demographic variables. So you might think about whether such a table would be useful for your readers. Also, a lot depends on how many participants you have, for example, a descriptive table for just 10 participants would not be useful in most circumstances.

I've just had a quick check, and I think you are linguistics? There's quite a difference between qualitative methods in different disciplines (in health the answer would be yes -they like knowing ages/ethnicity etc even if age has nothing to do with the study). So the answer to your question depends on your field. I would suggest you find a journal that is core to your field (which you'd think about submitting your research paper too!) and look at the types of data included in the qual papers.

Personally I tend to gather soft demographics at the start of the interview (Can you tell me a bit about your background etc). But this depends on the sampling (if demographics comes into that, then you might need to gather it before qual).

Good luck!

I would like to add something that I hope complements what David Morgan wrote a couple of posts above here, by giving a slightly different perspective.

About 2 years ago, I edited a PhD thesis about women who had been lured from their home countries to another country on the promise of domestic or industrial work that would permit them to earn money to send home to support people there. All participants had been deceived and were forced into sex work. There were only about 10 participants in the research, and a table was provided at the start of the results section in which each participant was given a pseudonym along with information such as her age, country of origin, way in which deception occurred, number and type of people needing to be supported back home, and years engaged in unwanted sex work.

It was handy to have that table at times in order, as a reader, to see the participants' backgrounds juxtaposed with each other and also to have a quick point of reference when reading the transcriptions of interviews with them.

I guess that the nature and extent of demographic information, and how it is presented, will differ from project to project.

No, not necessarily! According to the analysis and assessment of the quality of the published article and its inventiveness, it does not wag. But at the same time, if the author has a desire to advertise himself, either the article takes possession of a certain ingenuity as a patentable idea, then for God's sake let it be. This is not so much an important and welcome argument for wide discussion. Henceforth, I do not want to receive a request for him.

Sincere to you - Prof. Zakir Aliyev

I consider demographics critical in any research. As a researcher, you are able to know the characteristics of your respondents hence easy to ascertain if the sample is a representative of the population or not. Otherwise, you will just find yourself analyzing data without even acknowledging exactly who said some words and direct quoting of words is necessary in some qualitative research. To acknowledge the authority and source, you need to know who gave such response.

As you have read from above answers, I would agree that demographic data is very useful, especially when interrogating the data and using bi or multivariate approaches

Pls forgive me if this sounds dismissive, but I think it's important to be mindful of the questioner having indicated a context of qualitative research. Because of that, if the research follows the lines of conventional qualitative research, there is no need to consider whether the participants represent the (general) population or to anticipate conducting data analyses that fall within the ambit of quantitative statistics - useful as those analyses can be "in their place".

I mention this lest some advice sends the questioner - who confesses to being a novice researcher - off on wild turkey chases.

I agree with Robert Trevethan that "representativeness" is seldom a goal in qualitative research. If nothing else, small sample sizes limit any attempt at assessing generalizability. Instead, it is important to determine your goals in selecting your participants, and if necessary, collect relevant data to ensure that the participants do meet your purposeful sampling criteria.

Demographic information on participants in qualitative studies is of importance, at least in my area that is caring but I think that the same applies to almost all contexts. I consider it important from at least two points of view.

The first is that many qualitative methods strive to get differing views, about the research question. For this it is of importance that the researcher ask him/herself if it is likely that men and women, young and old, persons from the culture of the country and persons from other cultural backgrounds will have the same experinces and views of the thing that is studied. If not a variation in the participants demographics would be appropriate if possible.

The second reason is that the results needs to be understood based on the participating persons.

If I were to perform a study about nurses experiences of caring for persons in end-of-life would I strive to have both nurses with shorter and longer experiences as nurses as participants since it seem likely that it would affect their experiences.

If I read a study like that described above I would be interested in knowing a bit about the nurses and if I could see, from a table like the one porfessor Morgan wrote about, that all participating nurses were young, under 25 years and with a maximum of two years of experience as nurses I would read the results with that in mind. That would be very different from knowing that all nurses were well over 50 years old and that all of them had a work experience of 17-28 years from that kind of work.

If you read a study of experiences of mastectomy related to breastcancer I think that you all can imagine that a study based on interviews with only younger women would be very different from a study with only older men. And yes, men also get breastcancer.

Hej Madiha

It really depends if such information is relevant. It is usually good to keep track of that during qualitative studies to show that your selection included different genders, age groups and education level so in a way representative esp in focus groups unless the topic is only relevant one gender or age group or socioeconomic status.. But you do not need to do statistical analysis.

The demographic data of respondents maybe consider as part of the context of the study. As such, in qualitative research, these data may be useful to gather. However, it should be evident on how these data supported the data analysis and interpretation.