Assignment Paper

Assignment Description
As a counselor, you will regularly use professional literature to inform your work. Many of the important questions that you will have as your career evolves will be answered by researchers conducting qualitative studies. The qualitative designs permit researchers to answer questions that cannot be answered by quantitative designs, by examining people’s subjective worlds as directly as possible, through their own narratives.

For this assignment, you will create a mini research proposal. As you work through the units relevant to qualitative research concepts think through a possible qualitative study. Your work on this assignment will demonstrate that you understand the importance of the alignment of the elements of a study and how they work together. Use the Unit 8 Assignment Template to complete the assessment.

Assignment Instructions and Grading Criteria
In preparation for this assignment, think about a problem in counseling practice that could be researched using a qualitative approach. Create a mini research proposal that addresses the problem that you identified. Your proposal must include the elements listed below the numbered grading so be sure to address each point. You may also want to review the performance level descriptions for each criterion in the Qualitative Mini-Proposal Scoring Guide to see how your work will be assessed:

Synthesize scholarly literature that supports the study of a research problem.
Write a mini-literature review.
Include a review of three recent empirical sources (required) and one non-empirical source (optional).
Create qualitative research questions that are aligned to a research problem.
This specific question should be written in a way that it could be answered through qualitative data; this is the question that will be answered by the proposed study.
Identify research designs for qualitative studies.
Identify the research design for the proposed study.
Choose from case study, ethnography, phenomenology, and grounded theory.
Provide a rationale as to why this particular design is a good fit for your study.
Employ appropriate sampling strategies for qualitative studies.
Describe your proposed sampling method, including a rationale for the sample you chose and how many participants would comprise the sample.
Plan data collection strategies and sources that address a research question.
Identify the data that you would collect in your study.
Explain how you would collect the qualitative data that would answer your research question.
Plan qualitative data analysis strategies.
Explain how you would analyze the data that you collected.
Identify ethical and cultural concerns in qualitative studies.
Identify at least one ethical and at least one cultural concern that may be present in the proposed study.
Describe how mixed methods might be applied to address research problems.
Describe how the problem that you investigated might be addressed by using a mixed-methods approach. Explain whether you believe that would be a stronger approach or not, in this particular situation.
Communicate effectively in appropriate form and style, using APA guidelines for grammar, punctuation, and mechanics.