Phenomenological research usually pursues topics that are highly meaningful to the lived experience of the participants. In doing so it, typically collects in-depth interviews from a small number of participants who are strongly affected by the issues in question.

I personally don't think that is a very good match for your subject, and that a standard approach to semi-structured interviewing using open-ended questionnaires would be a better fit. I would characterize such as study as exploratory rather than descriptive.

Thanks for asking this question. I think it provides a good opportunity to consider "lived experience" versus "experiencing living." I think based on the phrasing of the question that Professor Morgan's response is accurate. I also agree that if your only methods option is free response survey items, this creates particular constraints on your aim to get deep, reflective data - in part because there is no probing or follow up when you use an asynchronous survey process.

The notion of "efficient teaching methods" definitely points to descriptive research, and there is nothing wrong with descriptive qualitative research! (See Sandelowski, 2000 "Whatever happened to qualitative description?" published in Research in Nursing & Health). Asking people to talk about something they do, how they do it, etc., is what I mean by "experiencing living."

I personally think of "lived experience" /phenomenological approaches as more appropriate with a bounded or boundable experience - something you might imagine putting a box around and separating out, or that might be associated with a pre and post or a pre and during period, such as illness, or injury, or a profound activity like what it feels like to free climb. Others disagree that lived experiences have to be bounded, and I have stretched this notion myself by writing about the experience of hygiene/being clean in health care, or the experience of becoming physically active at middle age. I also was involved in a work on an eating disorder, which to me felt more "bounded." For any of those studies, my aim was to have participants talk about their physical sensations and emotional states - what it feels like to be in that experience. I am trying as a researcher to understand what it is like to "walk in their shoes" - which is the way another researcher once described interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

So, in summary, I think the two areas of misfit with phenomenology are the purpose itself and the data collection method. If, on the other hand you wanted to have people describe their particular experiences, sensations, and feelings in a deep way about online teaching - and probably in comparison with live teaching - and you could conduct one or more one-on-one interviews, guided by a specific phenomenological research resource (Giorgi, Moustakas, Van Manen or Smith, Flowers and Larkin for IPA), this might be interesting for people who want to have information about how instructors describe what they feel when teaching online. But if you want to provide useful information about strategies, a descriptive approach seems much more appropriate. However even for a descriptive approach, use of a survey - even with free response items - is likely to yield pretty thin data. If this is the method you need to begin with, then, at the very least I would aim for the largest possible sample size, and also suggest you add an item to ask if participants would be available to describe things in more detail via web, phone, or even email interview. If you can have a real back and forth exchange, even with some delays, then an email or chat interview can be fairly effective and is almost always likely to yield more data than a survey item.

David L Morgan Just read your answer and I saw ' semi-structured interviewing using open-ended questionnaires ' and I wondered if maybe there was a typo in there?

I think the answer depends on what you know already about how to increase efficiency for online instruction. If your institution or department has tried to implement ways to increase efficiency and you want to evaluate those ways, then a quantitative survey would work best.

If you are primarily looking for ways that faculty who teach online have used to increase efficiency, then an interview with them using qualitative research would be best. You can do taped interviews over the phone or through Zoom or Facetime or similar approaches. If there's a way to select faculty who are efficient, for example, their grades are in early, students say their papers are returned quickly, whatever you have to make that call, that might help the selection of participants.

If both these situations exist, you can use a mixed-method approach.

Good luck

Ingrid Holme No, I don't find any typo. I meant that one could construct a questionnaire entirely from semi-structured, open-ended questions.

It might be perceived as mixed method

Hi David L Morgan, Interesting. Could you give an example of a question in a semi-structured questionnaire and how it impacts the structure of the following questions? The only examples I've come across are structured questionnaires that use open-ended questions.

Ingrid Holme semi-structured interviews are the most common method used in qualitative interviewing. You can find good discussions of how to create semi-structured interviews in a variety of textbooks, such as Rubin & Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data.

David L Morgan Ah, yes. I guess I was just wondering about how we conceptualise the difference between a semi-structured interview and a semi-structured questionnaire. While at an undergraduate level we teach qual = gathering words and qant = gathering numbers, this are of course more completed! The question for me, is what tools we use to assess if the question (in an interview or in a questionnaire) is ‘good’. In a questionnaire, even if the specific question is what a stats person would call an “qualitative element”, the overall tool and the data would be assessed in terms of quant sampling, validity, reliability etc.

Ingrid Holme Yes, there are clearer standards for how questions perform in a survey, and quite a few techniques for assessing this (e.g., cognitive interviewing). For better or worse, assessing the effectiveness of the questions in qualitative interviewing is less well formulated.