With short timelines and small budgets, you need to maximize each session or interaction with a participant in every qualitative study you run. A session is a general term and could mean an hour-long interview, visiting a coffee shop, or traveling to someone’s home. In each session, you have a chance to collect meaningful qualitative data.

To make the most of each session, let's review some ideas and strategies you can use in your qualitative studies. One of the first decisions when designing a qualitative study is figure out when to stop collecting qualitative data.

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Saturation: When to Stop a Qualitative Study

One of the goals of qualitative research is to reach saturation. Saturation is the point where any additional qualitative data strengthens what you already know, but it doesn’t add any new information or meaning. From an everyday perspective, this is when you start thinking, “Okay, I’m starting to hear the same thing over and over again.” Saturation is often used as the only signal on when you could stop collecting qualitative data.

While you might’ve heard of saturation, what’s less known is there are different levels of saturation.

It’s impossible to reach theoretical saturation. You’ll likely never know if you’ve heard every possible theme for the qualitative research questions you set out to study. It’s impossible for the same reason you don’t study your entire population: you don’t have enough resources to study everyone, and even if you did, it’d take way too long for it to be a fruitful task.

You recognize saturation after you start collecting data, not before.

Data and thematic saturation, the other two levels, are possible to reach in your qualitative studies. However, it’s impossible to predict how many participants you’ll need in a qualitative study to reach them. You recognize saturation after you start collecting data, not before. Qualitative sample sizes are covered more in-depth in this Handbook.

Factors that can affect when you reach data or thematic saturation are listed below:

Factors that Affect How Quickly You’ll Reach Saturation

• The diversity of your population-of-interest
• How complex or abstract are the research questions
• Your experience, comfort, and knowledge about the research questions and participants
• How descriptive and voluminous your notes and collected data are
• Your time spent (in context or with participants) collecting data

Saturation is the goal but in practice, it can be challenging to reach. Oftentimes, you might be forced to stop a qualitative study before you reach any level of saturation. Short timelines, lack of resources, and constantly changing stakeholder needs can make it near impossible to reach saturation. Sadly, there isn’t a universally accepted definition of what saturation explicitly is across qualitative studies.

There isn’t a universally accepted definition of what saturation explicitly is across qualitative studies.

Did you reach saturation when you hear three participants say essentially the same thing or when you hear ten participants say it?  Every qualitative study you design and run will be different, This means, once again, you’ll have to practice reflexive thinking on when and why you’re stopping collecting data or analyzing it.

A practical way for recognizing saturation during a qualitative session is when more than 80% of what a participant says or does has already been recognized and documented in your notes. If you ask ten questions and your participant provides eight answers you've heard or captured already, you might be approaching saturation. This is a general rule and there are always situations that'll break it, but you need to be honest about when and how you know data and thematic saturation have been reached.

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Reactivity

Reactivity is when people change or alter their behavior, responses, and body language when they know they’re being studied. How you study something can affect or impact the data you collect. Also known as the observer effect, the fact that anyone is observing and studying someone at all can influence or change them. The more reactive someone is, the less likely you’re to collect accurate or honest qualitative data.

Reactivity is sometimes referred to as the “Hawthorne Effect”, named after the Hawthorne Light study. However, this is problematic because the original Hawthorne study was riddled with bias. Check out this 2017 paper that explains the biased study design further.

If you’re practicing ethical research, your participants walk into any session knowing they’re going to be asked questions and have their answers probed and clarified. Every participant in a qualitative study starts off somewhat reactive. However, while you can never remove reactivity, you can look to manage it.

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Rapport

Building rapport is possibly the most important thing you can do to lower reactivity. Rapport is hard to define, but you can think about being in sync, at ease, or “on the same page” as a participant. Your qualitative session stops being somewhat awkward and possibly scary to something more comfortable, disarming, and relaxed. Or put another away, when you’ve built rapport with a participant, a session feels more like a conversation and less like an interrogation.

Building rapport means the qualitative session is more conversation and less interrogation.

This doesn’t mean that you’re too chatty or too friendly. It does mean the participant starts to see you as someone they’re just talking with, instead of someone who’s trying to extract data from them. If you’re too friendly, talkative, or social, you’re losing your objective sense as a researcher, further biasing your participant and the data you collect.

You have budget time during every qualitative session to build rapport. Without building rapport, it’s similar to running a race without warming up — you might run an okay race, but you’re artificially hindering how well you could’ve done. Try to budget at least 5-10% of the time in a qualitative session to build rapport (about three to six minutes during a 60-minute interview).

Strategies for building rapport are listed below, alongside when to try them.

Strategies to Build Rapport – Before the session

• Contact and chat with participants before their session (like giving driving directions, answering any questions they might have, explaining the topics, etc.) so they feel comfortable talking to you
• Get introduced to others in the observational area by someone from that community or space (If doing fieldwork or participant observations)
• Provide a general outline for how the session will go and what you’ll be talking about

Strategies to Build Rapport – Starting the session

• Learn and confirm the proper pronunciation of someone’s name
• Sit at a respectable but slightly intimate distance (ask the participant about what’s comfortable for them)
• Keep your camera/video on (if remote)
• Wear normal or appropriate clothes for the context (don’t stand out)
• Use disarming, social words and phrases (ex: "casual conversation", “talk about”, “learn about”, "thanks for sharing", “excited to learn about…”)
• Confirm/explain the general structure of the session
• Look for common ground (do you have anything in common?)
• Explain that your job is to listen, not to judge or code/design/sell, etc.
• Ask for consent/agreement to record
• Use humor appropriately to help participants relax

Strategies to Build Rapport – Language

• Avoid using complex or abstract research, design, or product jargon
• Mirror the language someone uses (“mobile” instead of “smartphone”)
• Familiarize yourself with the language used by participants (such as slang or acronyms)
• Define any acronyms or phrases that might be unfamiliar to a participant

Strategies to Build Rapport – During the Session

• Smile lightly
• Nod your head slightly when appropriate
• Don’t interrupt when a participant is talking
• Practice neutrality
• Don’t constantly type but maintain regular eye contact
• Explore a few, limited tangents (when relevant to the topic)
• Laugh at jokes when appropriate
• Provide breaks for longer sessions (ex: for 75, 90, 0r 120 minute sessions)
• Repeat questions or comments when asked
• Paraphrase and clarify what you’re hearing regularly

Building rapport – like many ideas in research – isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. You have to try to connect with each participant. You might need to talk slightly more in one session and less in another. Having multiple participants (or non-researchers observing a live session) is even harder for building rapport because everyone feels comfortable in a different way.

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Rich, Thick Descriptions

Qualitative research is inherently subjective because interpretations are based on someone’s unique lens of the world. But that doesn’t mean collecting subjective data. You want to collect a blend of what’s explicitly happening, how it happened, and what it means.

When you use more detail to describe what’s happening in a session, you’re collecting rich descriptions. The term rich or thick descriptions was popularized by anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Gilbert Ryles. Read their 1937 paper here.

Capturing rich, thick descriptions include details not only about what someone said, but how they said it (such as getting louder, getting animated, or thinking for long periods of time before responding) and how you interpreted what was said. When you collect lots of rich details across participants, then you’re collecting rich, thick descriptions (“rich” is for diversity & depth, while “thick” is for volume or quantity).

Characteristics of Rich, Thick Descriptions

• Descriptions contain the context where the research happened (along with how the context, if at all, affected the research study)
• Descriptions contain the observable emotions, behaviors, and pauses that come with any spoken response
• Descriptions contain motivations, intentions, or rationale (either inferred or collected from a participant) for any observed behaviors or spoken responses
• Descriptions, when read, feel like a firsthand account of what it was like to be in the session

If you’re collecting only subjective notes with very few details, you’re recording thin descriptions. Your thin descriptions either don’t capture enough detail or someone reviewing your collected qualitative data will have to make big leaps or inferences beyond what they can read (affecting the dependability and confirmability of your study — see Topic 3 for more). Taking thin descriptions is a form of researcher bias because so much detail is being willfully lost from every session.

You can also record entire sessions and take rich, descriptive notes afterward. However, with short timelines, it might be more effective to take rich, descriptive notes during every session. Some fantastic tips for taking better notes during a qualitative session can be found in this tweet from Sam Ladner (author of "Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research"). And check out this PDF to get a quick, downloadable reference guide for capturing rich, thick descriptions.

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Memos (or Voice Summaries)

One final way to collect fruitful qualitative data covered here is using memos. In qualitative research, it’s common to write a memo to yourself after every session. This memo contains ideas about what stood out in a session, things to change or update for the next session, or quick interpretations of what someone meant.

You want to leave these memos as quickly as possible after a session. The “freshness” of the session will quickly decay (think about rereading your notes ten minutes after a session ends versus reading those notes ten days later). These memos not only capture those fleeting thoughts, but they can help you see early patterns as you collect data. You can consider your memos and early interpretations as the first round of your qualitative data analysis.

Try leaving voice memos or summaries instead of forcing yourself to write more after taking notes in a qualitative session. Rather than typing and getting fatigued, you can record a short voice note, giving yourself a chance to rest and capture those fleeting thoughts in a simple, repeatable, and sharable way.

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Handbook Closing Thoughts

While qualitative research can’t be easily described with numbers and statistics, you gain the power and utility of nuance, subtlety, and recognition. Use qualitative research often and you’ll find your stakeholders expand how they look at any problem or solution. Understanding the world from your participant’s perspective means noticing hidden opportunities and innovation. And that’ll interest any research-resistant stakeholder.

But what if your stakeholders only care about cold, hard numbers? How do you help them understand the relationship between people and product using quantitative research? in the next handbook, let’s focus on one clear goal: demystifying what quantitative research even is.