Take My Liberty BUSI 815 Class

Creswell and Poth are the spine of the course. Their opening chapters, read in week one, cover what qualitative research is, the philosophical assumptions and interpretive frameworks that shape it, and how a study is designed.

Chapters on introducing and focusing a study follow in week two, beside the literature review.

Weeks three to six revisit the chapters that introduce the five approaches and show an example of each, one design per week: narrative research, phenomenology, case study, and grounded theory with ethnography.

Yin joins in week five, defining case study research and its designs, and returns in week eight on analysis.

Chapter ten, on standards of validation and evaluation, is read in week seven; chapters nine and eleven, on analysis and writing a qualitative study, close the term.

Keller and Alsdorf's book on faith and work appears in weeks one and seven, giving the forums a thread on research as part of a calling.

Six forums run beside the readings, two in week one and then one in weeks three, four, seven and eight.

The interview transcript in week six and the data analysis in week eight give students hands-on practice with the methods the designs describe.

BUSI 815 is planned around one business problem chosen in week one, so the literature review, the design assignments and the data analysis build on a single line of inquiry.

Each forum is argued as a methods seminar would expect, leaning on Creswell and Poth, on Yin and on recent methodological articles. A forum on assumptions, for example, might explain how a constructivist view of knowledge leads a researcher to interviews and themes rather than surveys and statistics, and what that means for a study of why small-business owners resist digital tools.

The literature review gathers peer-reviewed studies on the chosen problem and argues that a qualitative approach is needed to answer what remains unknown.

Each design assignment applies that week's design to the problem. The narrative assignment might frame the problem through the career stories of a few founders; the phenomenology assignment through the shared experience of employees who lived through a merger; the case study assignment through one organization bounded in time and place, with multiple data sources; the grounded theory and ethnography assignment through a process to be theorized and a culture to be observed.

The interview is yours: you obtain consent, hold it and record it. The transcript is formatted from your recording, and the data analysis moves from codes to themes to interpretation, documenting each step.

You post every forum and upload every assignment yourself.

Each design assignment arrives with time for you to read it before the next design is introduced.

Your BUSI 815 writer has published or directed interview studies in business, education or health administration.

That experience matters in the design assignments, where instructors look for precise use of each design's vocabulary: restorying in narrative work, bracketing and essence in phenomenology, bounded systems in case study, open and axial coding in grounded theory, and the culture-sharing group in ethnography.

It matters in the data analysis too. A researcher who has coded hundreds of pages knows how to show the move from raw quotes to codes to themes so a reader can follow it.

The writer understands the DBA's applied doctoral project and frames each assignment so it could feed a later study.

Every design piece passes a second qualitative reader; the writer stays the same for all eight weeks.

Only the coordinator knows your identity, and interview participants are never named.

They have defended qualitative designs before skeptical committees, so the reasoning in each assignment anticipates the questions an instructor will ask.

Design confusion is the first difficulty. Narrative research and phenomenology, or grounded theory and case study, look alike to newcomers, and an assignment that blurs them loses points quickly.

Pace is the second: a design assignment in each of weeks three, four, five and six, with forums alongside.

The literature review is the third, due in week two before most students have settled on a problem.

The interview is the fourth. Participants have to be recruited, consent obtained and the conversation recorded and transcribed by week six.

Analysis is the fifth. Many students describe what participants said instead of coding it, and the 150-point assignment rewards visible method.

Sources are another hurdle: doctoral faculty expect methodological literature as well as the course texts, and qualitative methods journals are new territory for most business students.

Two forums are due in week one, so the course is best arranged before it opens.

Expect forum drafts in the first days of a week and each design piece by midweek.

The review lands in week two, the cleaned transcript two days after your audio, and the coding assignment by midweek of week eight.

Design pieces make up most of a BUSI 815 quote; the coding assignment is the biggest single line.

Items can be dropped before you agree, and a late start is priced from that week forward.