Criteria for Judging the quality of research designs

Criteria for Judging the quality of research designs

Four tests have been commonly used to establish the quality of any empirical social research:

Construct validity: identifying correct operational measures for the concepts being studied;

Internal validity: (for explanatory or causal studies only and not for descriptive or exploratory studies): seeking to establish a causal relationship, whereby certain conditions are believed to lead to other conditions, as distinguished from spurious relationships;

External validity: defining the domain to which a study’s findings can be generalized;

Reliability: demonstrating that the operations of a study—such as the data collection procedures—can be repeated, with the same results

Construct validity-

Three tactics are available to increase construct validity when doing case studies.

The first is the use of multiple sources of evidence in a manner encouraging

convergent lines of inquiry, and this tactic is relavant during data collection.

The second tactic is to establish a chain of evidence, also relevant during data collection.

The third tactic is to have the draft case study report reviewed by key informants.

Internal validity-

Internal validity is mainly a concern for explanatory case studies, when an

investigation is trying to explain how and why event x led to event y.

Tactics: pattern matching, explanation building, addressing rival explainations, and

using logic models.

External Validity-

Case studies (as with experiments) rely on analytic generalization. In analytical generalization, investigator is striving to generalize a particular set of results to some broader theory.

Reliability-

The objective is to be sure that, if a later investigator followed the same procedures as described by an earlier investigator and conducted the same case study all over again.

Document the procedures followed in the earlier case.

The use of a case study protocol to deal with the documentation problem in detail

and the development of a case study database