Qualitative research planner
Whom do you need to hear from?
Choose interviews, focus groups, or both. Plan the audiences, session time, and recruitment effort, with a clear point to review what you have learned before adding more fieldwork.
Start with the question and audiences
The example budgets for interviews with current and former customers. Change the assumptions to match your study. Counts are editable planning commitments; qualitative adequacy must be assessed from the material collected.
Plan updated: Individual interviews. Review each audience before additional fieldwork.
Your editable fieldwork plan
Individual interviews
12–20interviews
Initial commitment → budget ceiling. These are your entered counts. Neither endpoint establishes data adequacy or guarantees saturation.
Review before further fieldwork
- Current customersAfter 4 interviews
- Former customersAfter 4 interviews
Analyze each audience as it reaches its review point. Add targeted sessions, revise recruitment, or stop based on the evidence and the decision.
| Audience | Interviews | Separate comparison |
|---|---|---|
| Current customers | 6–10 | Required |
| Former customers | 6–10 | Required |
12–20 planned participation slots. Group discussions and individual interviews provide different evidence. No margin of error or statistical power is calculated.
Recruitment and session effort
- Confirmed interview appointments
- 16–26
- Participant contact
- 12–20 h
- Moderator fieldwork
- 12–20 h
- Total planned staff time
- 57–87 h
Interview appointments are rounded up within each audience: planned completions ÷ show rate. This is an expected-yield budget, not a probability of filling the study. Hours use planned completed sessions and target seated attendees.
Workload breakdown and guide pressure
- Session administration
- 3–5 h
- Additional note-taker
- 12–20 h
- Coding
- 18–30 h
- Preparation
- 4 h
- Synthesis/reporting
- 8 h
Excludes recruitment labor, travel, transcription, and no-show or rescheduled slots. Coding is separate from synthesis.
Interviews: 8.0 minutes per topic. Pilot the guide to check whether this allows sufficient probing.
Equal time is a planning illustration. Conversation quality and actual speaking time have not been measured.
What to assess at the review point
- Are additional sessions adding issues or important dimensions? Record how this was assessed; recurrence alone does not establish depth.
- Can each required audience be described with relevant, substantive evidence?
- Do known issues have enough explanation, context, and variation?
- Have contradictory or atypical experiences been examined?
- Are recruitment gaps or weak conversations leaving important questions unanswered?
- What targeted additional fieldwork could change the decision? Record the reason to continue, revise, or stop.
Why the plan may need to change
- A narrow aim helps focus each conversation.
- People with directly relevant experience can contribute more focused accounts.
- With little prior evidence, allow time to revise the guide as you learn.
- Rich dialogue supports depth; pilot the guide to check this assumption.
- Similar experiences may make focused coverage easier; actively seek exceptions.
- Review each comparison audience separately. A pooled total cannot establish audience-specific adequacy.
Reassess the allocation when the aim, audiences, analysis or quality of dialogue changes. These considerations do not automatically change your budget.
Consent and reporting checklist
- Explain the purpose, activities, duration, voluntary participation and withdrawal arrangements before recruitment.
Record recruitment sources, selection/exclusions, achieved counts and no-shows, dates, languages, moderator role, guide revisions, analysis method and limitations.
Your research brief
Includes audience labels. Review the exported text before sharing. Download it before leaving; the planner does not save your entries.
Need help selecting or reviewing the design? Talk to a qualitative researcher. Read the sources and calculation policy.
Using the plan
Decide what would justify another session.
A larger total cannot repair missing audiences, superficial conversations, or a method that does not fit the question. Reserve time for analysis during fieldwork so the next conversations address what remains unclear.
Discuss your qualitative studyHow many interviews or groups should we start with?
A review of empirical studies found recurring ranges of 9–17 interviews and 4–8 focus groups, mainly for focused questions and relatively homogeneous populations. Most studies assessed whether new issues were still appearing. Those ranges do not establish how much depth or audience comparison your study needs. Read the review.
The planner's default of 6–10 interviews per example audience is a budgeting illustration, not a range derived from that review. Edit the allocation after considering who must be heard separately and the analysis you intend to conduct.
What makes the method-fit suggestion change?
Individual accounts favor interviews. When participant interaction is evidence in its own right, groups may help. If both are required, the planner suggests a combined design with distinct purposes for its two components.
Privacy, status differences, and difficult schedules need explicit review. A sensitive topic does not automatically rule out groups, but sharing arrangements and group composition require care. You can override the suggested format. Practical qualitative guidance.
Does hearing the same issues mean we can stop?
Recognizing the range of issues is different from understanding their meaning, context, and variation. Examine the material within each required audience and seek experiences that challenge the emerging account. Code and meaning evidence.
Stopping criteria must fit the analysis. Reflexive thematic analysis uses interpretive richness and fit to the question rather than information redundancy. Theory development needs iterative sampling informed by emerging explanations. The planner changes its review prompts accordingly. Analysis-specific guidance.
What do the attendance percentages mean?
The optional binomial model treats each confirmed recruit as an independent attendance event with the same show probability. It calculates too few, acceptable, and too many arrivals for one group. The show-rate alternatives are assumptions you can investigate, not confidence intervals.
Shared disruptions can make the model inappropriate. It does not model recruitment eligibility, standby arrangements, guaranteed completion, or the probability that all study groups fill. Binomial model.
How are effort and participation calculated?
Moderator time is interviews × interview duration plus groups × group duration. Participant time also multiplies each group by its target seated attendees. Staff time adds the entered preparation, administration, note-taking, coding, and synthesis allowances.
Recruitment labor, travel, transcription, and missed appointments are excluded. In a combined design, participation slots may include the same person twice. The planner does not infer a unique participant total or treat a group as a set of independent interviews.
Methods and sources
Study-specific judgment, with explicit assumptions.
Sources reviewed September 29, 2026. The research informs method choice and review prompts. Entered counts, review points, and effort allowances are planning assumptions; no score or formula establishes the required qualitative sample. No standard or certification is awarded by this tool.
- Malterud, Siersma & Guassora (2016). Information power.
Aim, sample specificity, prior theory, dialogue, and analysis guide judgment. They do not form a validated numerical score.
- Hennink & Kaiser (2022). Review of empirical saturation studies.
Often 9–17 interviews or 4–8 groups in focused studies with relatively homogeneous populations, mostly assessing code coverage. These are contextual benchmarks, not per-audience quotas.
- Hennink, Kaiser & Marconi (2017). Code versus meaning saturation.
Recognizing issues and understanding their detail took different amounts of interviewing in this study. Recurring topics alone do not establish depth.
- Braun & Clarke. Resources for thematic analysis.
Reflexive thematic analysis uses an interpretive account of themes; information redundancy is not its stopping rule.
- CDC. Collecting and analyzing qualitative data.
Practical guidance on individual conversations, group interaction and groups of six to eight. Format must fit the question and participants.
- NIST. Binomial distribution.
The optional attendance model assumes independent attendance with a common probability for each confirmed recruit.
- Insights Association. Code of standards and ethics.
Participant care and informed permission inform the preparation prompts. The planner does not certify compliance.
- AAPOR. Disclosure standards.
Record participant selection, mode, session length, dates, and achieved sample when reporting the research.