Qualitative research examples: 16 real studies and 5 student project ideas

Qualitative research studies meaning rather than frequency: why people act as they do, how they interpret their circumstances, and what patterns hold across their accounts. The 16 examples below show what that looks like in practice, from Goffman's ethnography of self-presentation to a jobs-to-be-done study that explained why people buy milkshakes at 7am. Each one gives the research question, the method used, what the study found, and what made it qualitative rather than quantitative. If you are a student planning your own project, skip to 5 qualitative research examples for student projects, which are small enough to run in a term.

For a broader overview of what qualitative research is and when to use it, see what is qualitative research. For an overview of the different methodological approaches, see qualitative research methods.

All 16 examples at a glance

The first eight are academic studies where the output is theory. The last eight are applied studies where the output is a decision. The methods overlap almost entirely, which is the main thing to take from this list: what separates academic from applied qualitative research is the purpose, not the technique.

Academic qualitative research examples

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1. Sociology: Goffman's dramaturgical study of social interaction

Setting: Social institutions, everyday life Method: Ethnographic observation and theoretical synthesis Research question: How do people manage their self-presentation in social situations?

Erving Goffman's 1959 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life developed dramaturgical analysis: the idea that social interaction resembles theatre, with "front stage" performances (how we present ourselves to others) and "backstage" behaviour (what we do when the audience is absent). Goffman drew on observation of everyday settings, from hotels to medical consultations, to develop his framework.

The study was qualitative because it sought to understand meaning, not measure frequency. Goffman was not counting how many times people adjusted their behaviour in front of others. He was building a conceptual framework that explained the pattern. The empirical basis was rich, detailed observation interpreted through a sociological lens.

This work remains foundational for qualitative researchers studying professional identity, organisational culture, and digital self-presentation.

2. Health: Glaser and Strauss's awareness context study

Setting: Hospital wards for terminally ill patients (San Francisco, 1960s) Method: Grounded theory Research question: How do patients, families, and nurses manage the knowledge that a patient is dying?

Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss spent months observing interactions on hospital wards, conducting unstructured interviews with nurses and patients, and documenting what happened when a patient's prognosis was poor. Their 1965 book Awareness of Dying identified four "awareness contexts": closed (patient unaware), suspected (patient suspects), mutual pretence (everyone knows but pretends otherwise), and open (explicit acknowledgement).

This study is a landmark example of grounded theory methodology. Glaser and Strauss did not begin with a hypothesis; they developed their framework inductively from the data. The result was a conceptual model that changed how hospitals approached end-of-life communication.

The study was qualitative because the phenomenon (the social management of dying) could not be measured on a scale. It required interpretation of social interaction in context.

3. Education: Kezar and Eckel's study of change strategies in universities

Setting: Six US colleges and universities undergoing institution-wide change Method: Multi-site case study with an ethnographic approach (site visits, interviews, documents) Research question: Does institutional culture shape which change strategies work?

Adrianna Kezar and Peter Eckel (2002) followed comprehensive change efforts at six institutions over several years. They identified five core strategies behind successful change: senior administrative support, collaborative leadership, robust design, staff development and visible action. Their more interesting finding was that the same strategies played out differently in different cultures. Leaders who carried out the strategies in ways that fitted their institution's culture made progress, while those who ignored the culture saw their efforts stall.

This is an example of qualitative case study research in the tradition described by Robert Yin. A survey could have recorded which strategies each institution used; it took close study of each site to show why the same strategy worked in one place and failed in another.

4. Psychology: interpretative phenomenological analysis of chronic pain

Setting: Patients attending a UK pain clinic Method: Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) Research question: How does long-term back pain affect a person's sense of self?

Jonathan Smith and Mike Osborn (2007) interviewed six patients living with chronic benign low back pain and analysed the transcripts using IPA. Participants described a "tainted" current self, in harsh terms such as calling themselves a "miserable git" or "this monster", and set it against a truer self from before the pain began. The pain was worse, participants said, in public, where they felt judged by people who could not see what was wrong with them.

The study is a textbook example of why IPA uses very small, purposive samples (typically 3 to 10 participants): the aim is depth of analysis per participant rather than coverage of a population. For more on this methodology, see the IPA guide.

5. Management: Pettigrew's longitudinal case study of ICI

Setting: Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), UK Method: Longitudinal case study with documents, interviews, and observation Research question: How does strategic change happen in a large organisation over time?

Andrew Pettigrew's 1985 study of ICI followed the company over more than a decade, combining archival documents, interviews with executives and managers, and direct observation. His analysis produced a contextual model of strategic change that emphasised the interaction between content (what changed), process (how it changed), and context (the organisational and environmental conditions).

This study is often cited as a model of qualitative rigour in management research. Pettigrew's approach to triangulating across data sources and tracking change longitudinally set the template for processual research in strategy and organisation studies.

6. Applied linguistics: Tannen's study of conversational style

Setting: Naturally occurring conversations across professional and social settings Method: Discourse analysis Research question: How do different conversational styles create (mis)understanding?

Deborah Tannen's research on "rapport talk" and "report talk" drew on recordings and transcripts of real conversations to show how different conversational conventions (turn-taking, interruption, indirectness, silence) are interpreted differently by different speakers. This work became the basis for her influential books on gender and communication.

Discourse analysis is qualitative research on language itself: not counting words, but interpreting how language is used to construct meaning, negotiate relationships, and exercise power.

7. Public health: focus group study of vaccine hesitancy

Setting: Community health settings Method: Focus groups Research question: How do people talk about vaccine risk when discussing it with peers?

Focus group research on vaccine hesitancy typically runs groups of 6 to 10 participants drawn from similar communities, on the reasoning that attitudes to vaccination are formed socially rather than privately. Studies in this tradition consistently find that participants moderate their stated position as the discussion develops: an initially firm objection softens when a peer describes a family member's illness, or hardens when another participant voices distrust of health authorities.

That movement is the finding. A survey would have captured a fixed position per respondent; the focus group captures how the position is negotiated and defended in company. This is why focus groups suit research on norms, stigma, and contested topics, and why they are a poor choice when social desirability would suppress candid individual accounts. See focus groups versus individual interviews for how to choose between them.

8. Education: narrative inquiry into teacher identity

Setting: Schools, longitudinal Method: Narrative inquiry Research question: How do teachers construct a professional identity across a career?

Narrative inquiry treats the story itself as the unit of analysis rather than breaking accounts into codes. Researchers in this tradition collect extended life-history interviews, often over several sittings, and analyse how participants structure their own account: what they place at the beginning, what they treat as a turning point, what they leave out.

Studies of teacher identity using this method have shown that teachers often organise their careers around a small number of pivotal incidents, and that the meaning attached to those incidents is revised over time. The study is qualitative because the object of analysis is the structure of meaning-making, not the frequency of any event.

Every one of these studies began with a pile of transcripts, field notes or documents that someone had to read, code and organise into themes before any finding appeared. That step is where most of the time goes. Skimle does the first pass of that work, coding every document and linking each theme back to the quotes behind it, so the researcher spends their time interpreting rather than sorting. See how it fits academic research and market and customer research.

Business qualitative research examples

9. Product design: IDEO's shopping cart ethnography

Setting: US supermarkets and retail environments Method: Ethnographic observation and user interviews Research question: What actually goes wrong for shoppers, and how could a shopping cart be redesigned?

IDEO's 1999 redesign of the supermarket shopping cart, documented in an ABC Nightline segment, became a classic case study in design thinking. The team spent time observing shoppers in supermarkets, interviewing staff and customers, and shadowing people as they shopped. They discovered that most existing carts were used and abused in ways the design had never anticipated: small children left unsupervised in seats, baskets left at the end of aisles while shoppers browsed, carts abandoned in car parks.

The resulting design addressed these observed behaviours: modular baskets that could be detached, a child seat that could be swapped out, and a design that was harder to steal. None of this came from a survey. It came from watching what people actually did.

10. Market research: Christensen's milkshake study

Setting: US fast food restaurants Method: Jobs-to-be-done interviews and contextual observation Research question: Why do people buy milkshakes in the morning?

Clayton Christensen's jobs-to-be-done methodology begins with qualitative research. In a well-known study of a fast food chain's milkshake programme, researchers first tried standard survey methods: asking customers what would make the milkshake better. The answers were conventional (more chocolate, more fruit, lower price).

A researcher then spent 18 hours in a restaurant observing who bought milkshakes and when. They found that nearly half of all milkshakes were sold before 8am, mostly to commuters buying nothing else. Follow-up interviews revealed that commuters were not thinking about milkshakes; they were hiring something to do during a long, boring commute. The milkshake was thick (lasted a long time), filling (reduced hunger), and easy to eat while driving.

This insight could not have come from a quantitative survey. It required observation and conversation with real people about their actual circumstances. For more on this method, see the JTBD interviews guide.

11. HR and people research: exit interview programmes

Setting: Corporate organisations across sectors Method: Semi-structured interviews coded thematically Research question: Why are people leaving, and what patterns explain attrition?

Exit interview programmes are one of the most common forms of applied qualitative research in organisations. A well-run programme conducts structured interviews with departing employees, codes responses into departure reasons (management quality, growth opportunities, compensation, culture, role fit), and tracks these themes over time and by segment.

The value over a standard exit survey is depth: an interview captures the specific circumstances, the last straw, and the comparison to competitors that a Likert scale cannot. For more on how to run and analyse these, see exit interview analysis.

12. Competitive intelligence: expert network interview analysis

Setting: Strategy consulting and PE/VC due diligence Method: Semi-structured interviews with industry experts, thematically coded Research question: What do people who know this market really think about the opportunity?

Expert network interviews (via GLG, AlphaSights, Guidepoint) are standard in commercial due diligence. A research team conducts 20-40 interviews with industry experts, former executives, and customers, then synthesises findings into a market view.

This is qualitative research applied commercially. The coding is typically deductive (structured around pre-defined due diligence questions), but the value comes from the qualitative richness: the expert who says "I watched three competitors try that and fail, and here's exactly why" is providing insight that no database contains. For more on this, see how to run primary research in a consulting project.

13. Customer research: voice of customer programmes

Setting: B2B and B2C organisations Method: Interviews, NPS verbatim analysis, customer advisory boards Research question: What do customers actually experience with our product, and why?

Voice of customer (VoC) programmes use multiple qualitative data sources: interviews, NPS open-text feedback, customer advisory boards, support ticket analysis. The aim is to understand customer experience from the customer's perspective, not from internal metrics.

A well-run VoC programme does not just report themes; it tracks them over time, cross-tabulates by customer segment, and connects qualitative findings to quantitative outcomes (renewal rate, expansion revenue, NPS score). For more on designing and running a VoC programme, see voice of customer research guide.

14. Policy research: EU Digital Omnibus consultation analysis

Setting: European Union regulatory consultation process Method: Systematic document analysis and thematic coding Research question: What did respondents to the EU Digital Omnibus consultation actually say, and what patterns emerge across respondent types?

Skimle's own use case: a structured analysis of several hundred submissions to the EU Digital Omnibus call for evidence, coded thematically by the regulatory proposals being addressed and cross-tabulated by respondent type (industry associations, civil society, individual companies, academic and research institutions). The analysis surfaced consistent patterns around SME proportionality, the "Brussels effect" concern, and the tension between regulatory harmonisation and national implementation.

For public sector and policy teams, this kind of structured analysis of consultation responses is one of the most high-value applications of qualitative methods. You can read the full case study at Skimle in action: EU Digital Omnibus consultation.

15. UX research: diary study of mobile app onboarding

Setting: Participants' own homes and commutes, over two weeks Method: Diary study with follow-up interviews Research question: Where does a new user quietly give up during their first fortnight?

Diary studies ask participants to record their own experience at the moment it happens, usually through short prompted entries, rather than reconstructing it later in an interview. Product teams use them because the abandonment that matters most is rarely remembered accurately: users do not recall the specific evening they stopped opening an app, and in a later interview they will invent a tidy reason.

Entries are then coded for the friction described at each point, and a follow-up interview probes the moments the diary flagged. The method is qualitative because it captures the texture and sequence of an experience over time. It is also the clearest example in this list of a method chosen to defeat recall bias rather than to add depth.

16. Brand research: netnography of an online community

Setting: Public forums, subreddits, and review threads Method: Netnography (ethnographic analysis of online community discourse)

Research question: How do enthusiasts of a product category talk about brands when no researcher is in the room?

Netnography applies ethnographic method to naturally occurring online discussion. The researcher does not recruit or prompt anyone; they observe how a community already talks, then analyse the vocabulary, the status hierarchies, and the recurring arguments.

Its distinctive value is the absence of an interviewer effect: participants are not performing for a researcher, because they do not know one is present. Its distinctive risk is that online communities are unrepresentative of a category's buyers, skewing heavily towards the most engaged. Findings describe the enthusiast fringe unless triangulated against other data. The ethical position also requires care, since public visibility is not the same as consent to be studied.

5 qualitative research examples for student projects

The classic studies above took months or years. A student project usually has a term, no budget and a supervisor who wants a defensible method. These five designs are small enough to finish and still produce a real finding. Each is ordinary qualitative research, scaled down.

1. An interview study. The most common student design. Recruit 8 to 12 participants through purposive sampling, use a short interview guide of 6 to 8 open questions, and analyse the transcripts with reflexive thematic analysis. The usual mistake is asking participants for opinions ("do you think…") rather than accounts ("tell me about the first week…"), which produces thin data.

2. A document analysis. No recruitment and no ethics delays involving participants, which makes it attractive when time is short. The documents are the data: you code what each policy permits, forbids and assumes, and compare how institutions frame the same question. The finding is in the framing, not in a count of how many policies mention AI.

3. An observation study. Watch, take structured field notes, and resist interpreting on the spot. Check with your supervisor whether the setting needs consent or signage. The value is seeing what people do rather than what they say they do, as the IDEO and milkshake examples above show.

4. An open-ended survey. Many students already run a survey; adding two or three open questions turns it into a mixed-methods study. Short answers support descriptive themes rather than deep interpretation, so keep the claims modest. See our guide to open-ended questions for how to write and analyse them.

5. An online content study. Public reviews and forum threads are naturally occurring data, the same logic as the netnography example above. Quote carefully: a public post is still written by a person who did not consent to being studied, so paraphrase or anonymise where a quote could be traced back.

All five produce a pile of text that needs coding. If you want to see what a finished analysis looks like before starting your own, the Skimle home page lets you open a demo dataset as a ready-made project, with no sign-up.

What does a qualitative research paper look like?

Most qualitative research papers, including student dissertations, follow the same six-part structure. What differs from a quantitative paper is the methods section, which has to justify choices rather than report a procedure, and the findings, which are argued through quotes rather than tables.

The findings section is where most drafts fall short: themes named as topics ("Work-life balance") instead of claims, and quotes standing in for analysis. Our guide on how to write a thematic analysis results section shows worked examples, and how many interviews you need covers how to justify the sample in the methods section.

What these examples have in common

If you are choosing software to run a study like these, our comparison of qualitative analysis tools covers what each one costs and what it automates.

Looking across all 16 examples, several patterns stand out:

The research question was not answerable with numbers. In each case, the researchers wanted to understand a phenomenon, process, or experience in depth. Counting or measuring would not have captured what they needed.

The data was text, observation, or spoken language. Transcripts, field notes, documents, and recordings are the raw material of qualitative research. Analysis transforms that raw material into structured themes and patterns.

The findings were specific, not generic. The milkshake study did not conclude "customers have varied needs." It found that morning commuters were hiring milkshakes to do a specific job that most breakfast foods did not do. Specificity is the mark of good qualitative research.

Context mattered. Every example above was shaped by where it happened, who was involved, and when. Qualitative research takes context seriously rather than abstracting it away.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most common type of qualitative research in academic settings?

Thematic analysis is the most widely used qualitative method in academic research across disciplines, particularly in social science, psychology, health, and education. Grounded theory and IPA are common in fields where the goal is to build new theory or understand lived experience in depth.

What qualitative research methods are used in business settings?

The most common business applications are semi-structured interviews coded thematically, focus groups for consumer and brand research, ethnographic observation for product and service design, and document analysis for competitive intelligence and due diligence. These are rarely labelled with the methodological names used in academic research; in business, the label is often "customer research," "primary research," or "qualitative research" without further specification.

Can qualitative research be used as evidence in business decisions?

Yes, and it is most effective when presented alongside quantitative evidence. Qualitative findings explain the "why" that metrics cannot, and direct quotes carry persuasive weight with senior stakeholders in ways that charts do not. The challenge is presenting qualitative evidence in a form that sceptical audiences will trust: see presenting qualitative research findings to executives for practical guidance.

What is an example of a qualitative research question?

Qualitative research questions usually start with "how" or "what" and ask about experience, meaning or process rather than amount. Examples from the studies above: "How do patients, families and nurses manage the knowledge that a patient is dying?" (Glaser and Strauss), "How does long-term back pain affect a person's sense of self?" (Smith and Osborn), and "Why do people buy milkshakes in the morning?" (Christensen). A question that starts "how many" or "how much" is usually a quantitative question.

How many participants do you need for qualitative research?

Sample sizes in qualitative research are much smaller than in quantitative research and are set by the depth the research question needs rather than by statistical power. Saturation is one common justification, but not every method uses it: reflexive thematic analysis and IPA justify sample size by depth instead. For academic studies, 15-25 semi-structured interviews is a common range. For business research, it depends on the purpose: 8-12 in-depth customer discovery interviews may be sufficient to identify the key themes; 40+ expert interviews are typical for commercial due diligence. See qualitative research sample size for more detailed guidance.

Want to see what a finished qualitative analysis looks like? Open a demo dataset on the Skimle home page with no sign-up, or create a free account and upload your own interviews, field notes or documents. Every theme stays linked to the quotes behind it.

Related reading:

• Qualitative data examples: 12 types with real excerpts
• Reflexive thematic analysis: Braun and Clarke's updated approach
• How to write a thematic analysis results section
• Qualitative research methods: 5 main approaches and when to use each
• Strengths and weaknesses of qualitative research

About the authors

Henri Schildt is a Professor of Strategy at Aalto University School of Business and co-founder of Skimle. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles using qualitative methods, including work in Academy of Management Journal, Organisation Science, and Strategic Management Journal. His research focuses on organisational strategy, innovation, and qualitative methodology. Google Scholar profile

Olli Salo is a former Partner at McKinsey & Company where he spent 18 years helping clients understand the markets and themselves, develop winning strategies and improve their operating models. He has done over 1000 client interviews and published over 10 articles on McKinsey.com and beyond. LinkedIn profile

Sources

• Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
• Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1965). Awareness of dying. Aldine.
• Kezar, A., & Eckel, P. D. (2002). The effect of institutional culture on change strategies in higher education. The Journal of Higher Education, 73(4), 435-460
• Smith, J. A., & Osborn, M. (2007). Pain as an assault on the self: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the psychological impact of chronic benign low back pain. Psychology & Health, 22(5), 517-534
• Pettigrew, A. M. (1985). The awakening giant: Continuity and change in Imperial Chemical Industries. Blackwell.
• Christensen, C. M., Hall, T., Dillon, K., & Duncan, D. S. (2016). Know your customers' "jobs to be done". Harvard Business Review