Qualitative Research Design and Analysis: Epistemology, Rigor, and Operationalization (2026 DSS)

About

This intensive one-week course develops the capacities required to conduct high-quality qualitative research at doctoral level in management and related social sciences. It is designed for participants who are currently shaping or refining their dissertation research design and who need to (re)align their qualitative choices with explicit epistemological and methodological justification.
The course is structured around three integrated pillars:
1. Foundations of qualitative inquiry: paradigms, reasoning modes, and what counts as rigor across epistemological frameworks.
2. The qualitative landscape: how to choose a methodology (case study, grounded theory, narrative inquiry, ethnography) and to match it with methods (interviews, observation, documents, visual methods) and analysis approaches.
3. Operationalisation: moving from concepts to indicators, designing robust instruments, developing an auditable analysis strategy.

Course leader

Elda Nasho Ah-Pine, Clermont School of Business, France

Target group

The Doctoral Summer School online courses are aimed at doctoral students, post-docs, academics and professionals from different fields and from all over the world.

Course aim

- Provide participants with an integrated framework to design, justify, and execute rigorous qualitative research in management and organisation studies.
- Help participants make explicit, defensible links between (i) research paradigms and reasoning modes (deduction, induction, abduction), (ii) qualitative methodologies (case study, grounded theory, ethnography, narrative inquiry), and (iii) concrete methods and analytical procedures.
- Train participants to operationalise theoretical concepts into empirically traceable qualitative indicators and to translate these indicators into interview guides and other data-collection instruments.
- Develop participants' competence in qualitative data analysis and transparency using structured approaches (Gioia data structure, grounded theory coding, thematic analysis).

Fee info