Studies using sei-structured interviews typically have an N of 20 or fewer, so that sample size would not be adequate for a statistical analysis.

David L Morgan

Thank you so very much for your response! So, my research question is: How do individuals of Middle Eastern origin conceptualize their sexual minority identity in relation to their cultural identification?

Per past studies, authors have raised the importance of minimizing the degree to which dominant frameworks of sexual minority identity development borrowed from Western culture are imposed upon Middle Eastern individuals.

Given this & the lack of empirical research on sexual minority individuals who are also Middle Eastern, we felt it would be appropriate to employ this kind of qualitative approach in order to explore the unique challenges they face as a whole in one part of the study.

However, I also wanted to follow up on that and have a SECOND part to the study (with higher sample size) and look into the internalized homophobia & lack of disclosure of their sexual identity in comparison to that of the majority (white LGB individuals). I wanted to employ a covariance analysis to see if age, level of education, and resilience would affect these two constructs in Middle Eastern populations LGB vs White LGB populations. So this would be the part of the study that I would run a statistical analysis on.

Sorry if everything is all over the place as of now! As mentioned, it is my first independent undergraduate project, and I can appreciate any advice! Thanks so much in advance for your help :)

It sounds like your overall project could be a mixed methods design that fits into a category known as an exploratory sequential study, which is often summarized as qual --> QUAN. In that case, the initial qualitative study would help you develop the content for a follow-up survey.

David L Morgan Thank you so much for your response! I am actually not familiar with this design, and I wanted some advice. I am submitting a research proposal soon that would need ethics approval from the university and I was wondering would I include the specific quantitative design and the scales it entails from now? Does the quantitative aspect have to be directly based on the results of the qualitative? If so, for my research proposal, can I put an *anticipated* design for my research proposal? That is, something along the lines of "we anticipate that the qualitative research will reveal that Middle Eastern individuals who are also LGB will face unique challenges due to their cultural norms, and hence, we will follow up to see if as a result of these challenges, they will have higher internalized homophobia (measured on the IHP scale) compared to White/ European descent- LGB populations". Please let me know :)

If you already have all the measures you need to test your hypotheses, then you should go ahead and include them. And if after you qualitative study you decide to go beyond that, then you can file what we in the US would call an "amended" application.

But if you have all your hypotheses and measures in place before you do your qualitative study, then that would not be an explanatory sequential design. Instead, you would have two separate studies, one qualitative and one quantitative. In general, that is not considered to be enough for mixed methods research, which requires some integration between the two different sets of results.

David L Morgan Thanks once again for your thorough response! I was wondering when you say "requires some integration," what do you mean? Could you provide any example to clarify? Thanks again so much!!

Rawan Hedata, if I may opine, Prof Morgan has actually explained that a structured interview approach usually has a limited sample size of about 20. This will be for the qualitative aspect of your intended study. But you will require a large sample size for reasonable quantitative part of the study. In effect, you will be dealing with very different questionnaire respondents: about 20 for the first part and a lot more than that for the second part of your project. They will, therefore be different studies. Prof Morgan has already explained it.

My suggestion is that you and your supervisor should be able to devise a research design that can produce a research design that will satisfy the conditions of both qualitative and quantitative analysis without a using a structured questionnaire.

Good luck.

Integration involves a connections between the results, so that rather than just having two separate studies, there is an additional overall increase in what you have learned. So, if you could easily publish either study without even referring to the other one, then there would be no integration.

Harold Chike David L Morgan

Thanks so much for your response! Your advice & support is sincerely appreciated-- I have learned so much just through this thread. I was wondering if I were to change the quantitative part & make it so that the IV is the extent to which they identify with their ethnic group (being Middle Eastern) and the DV is internalized homophobia & disclosure of sexual orientation, would that be a way of integrating the quan & qual (that is, the qual investigates the unique challenges they face being Middle Eastern-identifying & the quan investigates how the extent to which they identify with their ethnicity actually brings about more internalized homophobia?

OR, is this too complicated of a design/doesn't meet the requirements for a mixed-method approach? If so, do you recommend just sticking with the qualitative approach for my current undergrad thesis?

Also, Harold Chike Do you mind clarifying what you mean by one that integrates quan & qual without the use of questionnaires?

Please let me know :) I really appreciate your help!

Rawan Hedefa, your first question concerns integration of two separate studies. As Prof. Morgan had stated, you will need to connect them so that they constitute one study and not two.

That may require a third study that will now utilize the outputs of the two previous studies.

On your second question, what I really meant to suggest was structured interview and not structured questionnaire. Kindly accept my apology for that. As you already know, interviews are usually cumbersome and therefore not adopted in research projects that call for large sample sizes.

Rawan, my suggestion was that since your supervisor wants you to include a quantitative analysis, you should be assisted to do a qualitative cum quantitative study using the same respondents and questionnaire. You may have to do without interviews.

You stated that you are on an undergraduate thesis.

Yes, that is getting rather complicated, and I'm not sure how it would fit with a qual --> QUAN approach, where you first study develops the content for a survey.

But as long as you are open to thinking about major changes, you might want to consider a different model, called a sequential explanatory design, or QUAN --> qual.

In that case, you begin with a survey to test your hypotheses, and then follow-up with a smaller qualitative study to expand on your initial results. If those results are a strong match to original hypotheses, then you can get get more depth and detail about how those processes actually operate. Or if your quantitative results are more complex than you predicted in your hypotheses, then the qualitative follow-up can help you understand how and why this is so.

David L Morgan Harold Chike

Thanks for your response & your support! I am definitely open to major changes as I haven't officially submitted a research proposal. I am thinking of refining my question to "Do LGB individuals of Middle Eastern Origin face unique challenges that man impact their self-acceptance and outness to others?"

I believe that doing both quan & qual here would be valuable. That is, I am thinking of having a Culture & LGB scale employed ( I have attached it), as well as an outness scale & internalized homophobia scale to look at the correlation between conflicts in allegiances and levels of outness as well as sexual orientation concealment (both attached).

In order to answer the "unique challenges" aspect, which I assumed arises as a result of the conflicting identities, I wanted to do interviews in order to further explain WHY these conflicting identities actually lead to less disclosure and more internalized homophobia (that is, get a better sense of underlying factors that a quantitative measure alone cannot tap into).

Would a convergent design be appropriate here? (the variant form being data-validation)?

Let me know what you think?

The problem with "convergent" designs is that it is often difficult to make them converge. This is apparent through the contradiction in the common label "parallel convergent designs" -- since things that are parallel cannot converge and things that converge cannot be parallel.

Of course, what this terminology usually implies is that the qualitative and quantitative components proceed in parallel throughout data collection and analysis until the researcher considers the convergence of the results. But this design doesn't include any concrete techniques for actually accomplishing the convergence, and the result is often only a minimal degree of integration.

David L Morgan That makes sense! Another question then, for sequential explanatory designs, do you always have to build your qualitative questions based on the results derived from the quantitative? Or is it possible you collect separate quantitative and qualitative that BOTH answer the question, with the qualitative following the quantitative but not having to be necessarily built off the quantitative analysis

I guess a more broad question is what design do you recommend that i do to adequately capture the answer to my question? Is there a way to use quan& qual without it being two seperate studies here? Or should I stick with one research method?

please let me know!

Rawan, this issue of integration or convergence has made it difficult to follow the discussions.

My opinion is that for your academic level research project, you should ensure that the conclusions arrived at in the quantitative analysis are supported by your qualitative analysis.

You can reliably enhance the validity of your study by using the same respondents and questionnaire.

This is a common practice in thesis writing as opposed to journal articles.