You should consider your final deliverable a “mini academic paper”. Even though you will be working with more limited data than a thesis, let alone an academic article, the goal is to mimic the process. Please use the following guide for your final paper. It should consist 4 main sections. See the reading from Gopaldas (2015), related to lecture 11.

The frontend

You can change the order if you like, but qualitative research articles are in general written in this order.

  • Title of your paper: The title should encapsulate what the paper is about, and possibly introduce your novel theoretical concept, if you have one
  • Introduction: Begin your article with a brief description of domain, field or phenomenon that you’re investigating. Explain also why it is important to study.
  • Literature review: Conduct a literature review on the phenomenon.
  • Theoretical problem: By elaborating on literature review, explain what literature overlooks and what the gaps are. (“Here’s what we know; here’s what we don’t know”)
  • Research question: Restate the theoretical problem as a research question, so your research focus becomes very clear to your readers.
  • Research motivation: Explain why your research is important in terms of theoretical and practical reasons.
  • (If applicable) Theoretical perspective: Explain your perspective that you use to examine your theoretical problem. Why did you choose this lens for analysis?

Context and methods

 This section is very important for this assignment and course overall! Here please describe in detail how your research project unfolded and how you interpreted your data. We’re particularly interested to see how your data collection & analysis journey has evolved from the individual coding to taking it to the group level and comparing codes across data sources and developing them into themes!

  • Research context: Describe context or real-world setting of your research and how your theoretical problem contains within this context.
    • Bring some historical perspective or contemporary market relevance!
    • Restate why this context is ideal for your particular theoretical interest
  • Data collection: Explain how and why you collected your data. Be true to the chronology of how things unfolded! Remember to state how informants were selected, who they are, how they were interviewed, the average length of interviews and transcripts. Evaluate the representativeness of the sample vis-à-vis the context! (Are these people similar or do you have heterogeneity here, like with gender or contextual involvement?)
  • Data analysis: Write up how you analyzed data and explain how your data analysis moved from early analysis to theme building and theorization.
    • How did the themes emerge?
    • How did you develop them?
    • How did your theme developing relate to your interviewee sample? Can you account for commonality vs. variability?
    • How did you “test” them and explore boundary conditions?


The findings

Theorizing: Introduce your themes and state your theoretical claims. The themes should be robust and clearly supported by quotes from interviews that are sufficiently unpacked and interpreted. The themes should be robust. Finally, elaborate on how your assumptions, data and interpretations justify your claim.


The backend

Theoretical contributions: Summarize how your insights developed or contributed to the theory while answering your research question. 

  • How do your findings relate to prior studies? 
  • Do the align with, extend, or contradict prior findings?
  • What is the novelty of your findings, and your theorization?

Practical implications: Think about potential stakeholders (marketers, policy makers etc.) who could take action depending on your results and write up your recommendations for them.

Limitations & opportunities: Describe alternative research contexts, informant samples or theoretical perspectives that can be considered for further research.

Conclusion: Write key takeaways of your research.

The assignment is 25% is overall grade.

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