00 Plan your study
A qualitative study uses interviews, observation, or open-ended responses, analyzed for themes. It's the right choice when you want to know how people understand or experience something — not how many of them do.
What it looks like
- Shape: question → who you talked to and why → interview guide → coding process → themes with quoted evidence → your own position in the work
- Paper structure: abstract → introduction → methods → findings → discussion → limitations → conclusion → references → appendix
- Common mistake: treating quotes as decoration. Every theme needs evidence, and disconfirming quotes belong in the paper too.
Ask an open “how” or “what” question
Qualitative questions explore experiences, meanings, and processes. Most don't need a hypothesis — you're trying to understand, not to test a prediction.
What percentage of student athletes feel stressed?
How do high school student athletes describe balancing their sport with schoolwork, and what strategies do they use to manage it?
Choose how you'll collect data
| Method | Best for | Student-sized example |
|---|---|---|
| Semi-structured interviews | Personal experiences in depth; the most common choice | 30-minute interviews with ten student athletes |
| Focus groups | How people discuss a topic together, and where they agree or differ | Two groups of five club members discussing a new school schedule |
| Observation | What people actually do in a setting, not just what they say | Field notes from six lunch periods in a school cafeteria |
| Open-ended responses | Reaching more people with less depth | Written reflections from 40 students about a service project |
Choose who to talk to
Qualitative studies don't aim for a random sample. Instead, you choose people who can speak to your question — called purposive sampling — and try to include a range of perspectives.
- Set clear criteria for who can take part (current student athletes, at least one season of experience)
- Seek variety within those criteria — different sports, grades, and genders
- Plan for roughly 8–15 interviews for a student project
- Stop recruiting when new interviews stop raising new ideas — researchers call this saturation
Get ethics right
- Get informed consent, and parental consent for anyone under 18
- Ask permission before recording, and explain how recordings will be stored and when they'll be deleted
- Use pseudonyms and remove identifying details from transcripts and quotes
- Let participants skip any question or stop at any time
- Ask your teacher whether your school requires approval before you begin
- Interview anyone about trauma, abuse, or self-harm without qualified adult oversight
- Record without clear permission
- Share recordings or full transcripts with anyone outside your project
Build a timeline
Weeks 1–2 · Read and plan
- Background reading, research question, participant criteria
Week 3 · Prepare
- Interview guide, consent forms, approval, one or two pilot interviews
Weeks 4–5 · Interview
- Conduct interviews and transcribe each one within a few days
Weeks 6–8 · Analyze and write
- Code transcripts, build themes, draft every section, then revise
01 Build your interview guide
An interview guide is your list of planned questions. In a semi-structured interview, you ask the same core questions to everyone, then follow up on what each person says.
Structure
1. Warm-up (2–3 minutes)
- Easy questions that build comfort: “Tell me about the sport you play.”
2. Core questions (5–8 questions)
- The questions that address your research question, from general to specific
3. Closing
- “Is there anything else you'd like to add that I didn't ask about?”
Write open questions
Is it hard to balance sports and school?
What is it like to balance your sport with schoolwork during the season?
How stressful is it when your coach schedules extra practices?
How do extra practices affect your week, if at all?
How do you manage your time?
Tell me about a recent week when you had a big game and a big test. How did you handle it?
Plan your probes
Probes are short follow-ups that draw out detail. Keep a few ready:
- “Can you tell me more about that?”
- “What did you mean by…?”
- “Can you give me an example?”
- “How did that make you feel?”
Listen far more than you talk. Don't share your own opinions or react with approval or surprise. Allow pauses — people often add the most useful detail after a moment of silence. Write brief notes right after each interview while it's fresh.
02 Title page
APA 7 puts a running head at the top of every page, in capitals, with the page number.
RUNNING HEAD: SHORTENED TITLE OF STUDY 1
- Title of the study
- Your name
Student Athletes
“Always Running Late”: How High School Student Athletes Experience Balancing Sport and School
Qualitative titles often open with a short, striking quote from a participant.
03 Abstract
A one-paragraph summary of the whole study, including your main themes.
The formula
- The topic and why it matters
- Your research question
- Who you talked to, how many, and how
- Your main themes
- What they suggest
High school athletes face heavy demands on their time, but little is known about how they experience balancing sport and school. This study explored that experience through semi-structured interviews with ten student athletes from four sports at one public high school. Thematic analysis identified three themes: constant time pressure, reliance on informal support from teammates, and a sense of identity tied closely to their sport. These findings suggest that schools could support athletes by coordinating test and game schedules and recognizing the role of peer support.
Keywords: student athletes, time management, adolescence, qualitative interviews
- Describing your method without naming your themes
- Using quotes or citations in the abstract
- Writing more than one paragraph, or more than 150–250 words
- Claiming your findings describe all student athletes
Write your abstract last, once every other section is finished.
04 Introduction
Move from broad to narrow: the topic, what research already shows, the gap, and finally your research question.
Funnel structure
1. The big picture
- Introduce the topic and why it matters
- Name the real-world issue your research speaks to
2. What we already know
- Summarize and compare the key studies, organized by theme
3. The gap
- What numbers and surveys can't show — the experiences, meanings, or processes behind them
- How your study builds on what came before
4. This study
- Your research question and a sentence on how you explored it
- Any limits on scope
5. Roadmap
- One or two sentences on how the rest of the paper is organized
Surveys show that student athletes report higher stress during their competitive season (Smith et al., 2022). However, these studies say little about how athletes themselves experience and manage that pressure day to day. Interviews can capture the strategies and meanings behind the numbers.
Theoretical framework
Define your key concepts and name any theory that shaped your questions or analysis. In qualitative work, a framework is a lens for interpreting what people say — not a prediction to test.
Use APA 7 for references and in-text citations, and cite every piece of information you take from a source.
05 Methods
Describe exactly what you did, in the past tense, so readers can judge how trustworthy your findings are.
Approach and rationale
Say that you used a qualitative design, which method, and why it suits your question better than a survey or experiment.
Participants and recruitment
Your selection criteria, how you recruited people, how many took part, and the range of perspectives they represent. Use pseudonyms throughout.
Ten student athletes (five girls and five boys, grades 10–12) were recruited through coaches of four varsity teams. Participants were eligible if they had completed at least one full competitive season. All participants and their parents gave written consent, and pseudonyms are used throughout.
Data collection
How, where, and when interviews took place, how long they lasted, how they were recorded and transcribed, and a summary of your interview guide (with the full guide in an appendix).
Analysis
Most student projects use thematic analysis. Describe each step you took:
- Familiarize — read every transcript at least twice
- Code — label meaningful sections with short descriptive tags (“late-night homework,” “teammate help”)
- Group — cluster related codes into possible themes
- Review — check each theme against the full data, and split, merge, or drop themes that don't hold up
- Name — give each theme a clear name and definition
A spreadsheet works well: one row per quote, with columns for participant, code, and theme. Free tools like Taguette also let you highlight and code transcripts directly.
Your position
In qualitative research, you are part of the instrument. Briefly describe your relationship to the topic and participants — researchers call this positionality — and how you guarded against your own assumptions shaping the findings.
As a student athlete at the same school, the researcher shared many participants' experiences. To limit this influence, interview questions were reviewed by a teacher for neutrality, and codes were checked against transcripts for evidence that contradicted the researcher's expectations.
06 Findings
Present each theme with the evidence behind it. Quotes are your data — use them to support claims, not to decorate them.
For each theme
Athletes were stressed. “It's a lot,” said one student.
Most participants described their time as never fully their own. Maya, a swimmer, explained: “I do homework in the car, at lunch, before practice — there's no part of the day that's just school.” Like Maya, seven of ten participants described fitting schoolwork into gaps between athletic commitments rather than setting aside dedicated time.
- Long quotes with no explanation
- Building a theme on a single participant
- Leaving out participants whose experiences didn't fit the theme
- Details that could identify a participant
Include disconfirming evidence. Noting that “two participants described the opposite experience” makes your findings more convincing, not less.
07 Discussion
Step back from the themes. What do they tell us together, and why does it matter?
Answer these, in order
- What's the answer to your question? Pull your themes together into one clear picture.
- How does it compare to previous research? Where do your themes confirm, add to, or complicate earlier findings?
- What does it mean for the theory? Connect your themes to your theoretical framework.
- What else could explain it? Consider alternative interpretations of what participants said.
- Why does it matter? Practical implications and recommendations for people in similar situations.
Qualitative findings describe the experiences of the people you talked to. They can suggest patterns worth studying more widely, but they can't tell you how common something is.
08 Limitations
Name your study's limits honestly — it makes your findings more credible.
Consider
- Who you heard from — whose perspectives were missing, and why
- Setting — how your school, community, or time frame might shape what people said
- Your influence — whether your relationship to participants affected their answers
- Self-presentation — people may describe themselves in a positive light in interviews
The sample was small.
Because participants were recruited through coaches, athletes who were struggling academically or considering quitting may have been less likely to volunteer, so their experiences may be underrepresented.
09 Conclusion
Bring the paper full circle. Remind the reader what you set out to understand, then show what you learned.
Four steps
- Restate your aim and research question.
- Answer it. Summarize your main themes.
- State your contribution. What your study adds, including any recommendations.
- Point forward. What future research could explore — including questions a survey could now test at a larger scale.
- Introducing new quotes or themes
- Repeating the introduction or abstract word for word
- Claiming your findings apply to everyone like your participants
10 References & appendix
References in APA 7, followed by your interview guide.
References
- Only include sources you actually cited
- Your own interviews are not listed as references — they're described in your methods
Keegan, J. (1999). The First World War. Alfred A. Knopf.
Appendix: your interview guide
Include your full interview guide — every core question and planned probe, in order — and a blank copy of your consent form. Never include full transcripts.
11 Checklist
Run through this before your first interview, and again before you submit. Your ticks are saved in this browser.
Before you interview
The paper
The document