A note on key research methods topics II: for Housing Studies students 2026

A note on key research methods topics II: for Housing Studies students

 

Highlight 5 main ideas on each of the following research methods topics in the context of Housing Studies:

 

1.    Qualitative research

2.    Quantitative research

3.    Mixed methods research

4.    Primary research

5.    Secondary research

6.    Semi-structured interview

7.    Structured interview

8.    Narrative interview

9.    In-depth interview

10.                    Photovoice

11.                    Structured observation

12.                    Participant observation

13.                    Focus group

14.                    Questionnaire survey

15.                    Content analysis

16.                    Secondary data analysis

 

Below are five core ideas for each method, framed for Housing Studies research (e.g., public housing, private rental, homeownership, homelessness, housing policy, neighbourhood liveability, and estate management).

1. Qualitative research

• Seeks to understand residents’ meanings, lived experiences, and interpretations of housing conditions, neighbourhoods, and housing policies. 
• Uses non-numerical data such as interview transcripts, field notes, photographs, policy documents, and online discussions.
• Typically employs purposive sampling: selecting tenants, homeowners, frontline staff, or officials who can provide rich, relevant insights.
• Analysis commonly involves coding, thematic analysis, narrative analysis, or content analysis to identify recurring housing-related themes.
• Strengths include depth, context, and the ability to capture vulnerable groups’ voices; limitations include smaller samples, researcher interpretation, and limited statistical generalisability.

2. Quantitative research

• Measures housing variables numerically, such as rent burden, overcrowding, satisfaction scores, waiting time for public housing, or housing affordability.
• Often uses structured questionnaires, official statistics, census data, administrative records, or experiments.
• Emphasises representative sampling, valid measurement, reliability, and statistical testing of relationships or differences.
• Enables comparison across districts, housing types, income groups, or time periods, and supports generalisation when the sample is appropriate.
• Useful for policy evaluation—for example, testing whether a rent subsidy is associated with lower housing stress—but may miss the subjective meanings behind the numbers.

3. Mixed methods research

• Combines quantitative and qualitative data within one study to provide both measurement and explanation.
• Common housing design: a resident survey identifies patterns in satisfaction or affordability, followed by interviews or focus groups explaining why those patterns occur.
• Can use convergence (comparing results), complementarity (adding depth), or expansion (using one method to develop the other).
• Requires a clear rationale for integration, sequencing, priority of methods, and how findings will be merged or compared.
• Particularly valuable for complex housing issues such as homelessness, estate redevelopment, tenant participation, and housing–health relationships.

4. Primary research

• Collects original data directly from housing stakeholders, such as tenants, owners, landlords, housing officers, planners, or community groups.
• Allows the researcher to tailor questions to the specific housing problem, location, population, and research objectives.
• Common instruments include questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, observations, and photovoice.
• Provides current, context-specific evidence, but demands time, access, ethical approval, sampling decisions, and resources.
• Examples include surveying public rental housing tenants about estate management or interviewing frontline staff about homelessness services.

5. Secondary research

• Uses existing data or documents created for other purposes, including census data, housing authority statistics, annual reports, policy papers, academic articles, and media materials.
• Is efficient for establishing background, trends, benchmarks, policy context, and gaps in existing housing knowledge.
• Enables large-scale or longitudinal analysis, such as changes in housing prices, homelessness, public housing supply, or tenure patterns.
• Requires critical appraisal of the source’s purpose, definitions, coverage, date, reliability, and comparability with the researcher’s own study.
• Can be combined with primary research—for example, using census and housing department data to contextualise findings from resident interviews.

6. Semi-structured interview

• Uses an interview guide with core questions while allowing flexibility to probe unexpected but relevant issues.
• Balances comparability across respondents with openness to individual housing experiences and interpretations.
• Suitable for exploring tenants’ housing careers, relocation experiences, perceived neighbourhood safety, or service-use barriers.
• Requires rapport, informed consent, skilful probing, recording, transcription, and systematic qualitative analysis.
• Often used with purposive samples of residents, service users, housing managers, or policymakers to obtain depth rather than statistical representativeness.

7. Structured interview

• Follows a fixed sequence of predetermined questions with limited or no deviation between respondents.
• Produces standardised, largely comparable data suitable for quantitative analysis or systematic coding.
• Can be administered face-to-face, by telephone, or using a digital survey format.
• Reduces interviewer variation, but may restrict respondents’ ability to explain complex housing experiences.
• Appropriate for large-scale studies of housing satisfaction, tenure status, housing costs, service usage, or awareness of housing schemes.

8. Narrative interview

• Invites participants to tell their own housing story over time, such as moving from private rental to public housing, experiencing eviction, or becoming homeless.
• Prioritises the sequence, meaning, and personal interpretation of events rather than fixed questionnaire responses.
• Helps reveal turning points, constraints, agency, and social context in housing pathways.
• Analysis may identify narrative structure, key events, recurring metaphors, identity changes, and policy implications.
• Especially useful for sensitive or longitudinal housing topics, but requires careful ethics, trust-building, and attention to memory limitations. 

9. In-depth interview

• Is a long, detailed one-to-one conversation designed to explore a housing issue comprehensively.
• Uses open questions, prompts, and follow-up probes to uncover experiences, motivations, constraints, and meanings.
• Is appropriate for complex topics such as housing deprivation, domestic violence and housing insecurity, informal housing, or redevelopment displacement.
• Usually relies on small, purposive samples and continues until thematic saturation or sufficient depth is achieved.
• Produces rich qualitative evidence, but findings are context-bound and require transparent sampling, analysis, and ethical safeguards.

10. Photovoice

• Is a participatory method in which participants take photographs representing their housing or neighbourhood experiences, then discuss their meanings.
• Gives residents greater voice, particularly where literacy, language, or power differences may limit conventional interviews.
• Can reveal everyday housing realities such as overcrowding, poor maintenance, inaccessible design, safety risks, community facilities, or social isolation.
• Typically combines photographs with group discussion or interviews, followed by thematic analysis and possible advocacy or policy communication.
• Requires clear ethical protocols on consent, privacy, image use, and protection of identifiable people or locations.

11. Structured observation

• Uses predefined categories, checklists, or rating scales to systematically record observable housing or neighbourhood features.
• Can measure building condition, cleanliness, crowding indicators, accessibility, green space, vandalism, or use of communal facilities.
• Improves consistency and comparability across sites, observers, or time periods.  
• Is useful for complementing residents’ perceptions with independently recorded physical or behavioural evidence.
• Limitations include observer bias, difficulty capturing meanings or motives, and the need for clear operational definitions and observer training.

12. Participant observation

• Involves the researcher spending time within a housing setting—such as an estate, shelter, community group, or residents’ meeting—while observing and sometimes participating in activities.
• Captures everyday practices, social interactions, power relations, and informal rules that surveys may miss.
• Can illuminate tenant participation, estate management practices, homelessness service delivery, or neighbourhood conflict.
• Requires prolonged engagement, detailed field notes, reflexivity, and careful management of the researcher’s role and relationships.
• Ethical issues include informed consent, confidentiality, intrusion into private or vulnerable settings, and the influence of the researcher’s presence.

13. Focus group

• Brings a small group of housing stakeholders together for a facilitated discussion on a shared topic.
• Encourages interaction, debate, shared experiences, and collective interpretation rather than merely answering questions individually.
• Useful for exploring group norms, community concerns, service experiences, policy perceptions, and priorities for housing improvement.
• Requires a skilled moderator, a clear topic guide, careful group composition, and management of dominant or silent participants.
• Common applications include tenant views on estate redevelopment, residents’ perceptions of safety, or providers’ views on supported-housing models.

14. Questionnaire survey

• Collects standardised self-reported data through written, online, telephone, or face-to-face questionnaires.
• Can reach relatively large samples of residents, owners, renters, or service users efficiently.
• Should use clear operational definitions and validated scales for concepts such as housing satisfaction, affordability stress, overcrowding, or perceived neighbourhood quality.
• Supports descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations, correlations, regression, and comparison across housing tenures or districts.
• Design issues include question wording, response options, sampling, non-response bias, translation, privacy, and the distinction between reported attitudes and actual behaviour.

15. Content analysis

• Systematically examines the content of texts, images, documents, or media to identify themes, categories, patterns, or frequencies.
• In Housing Studies, it can analyse housing policy documents, consultation papers, newspaper coverage, social media posts, planning reports, or tenant complaints.
• Can be quantitative, by counting coded items such as references to “affordability” or “safety,” or qualitative, by interpreting underlying meanings and framings.
• Requires a coding framework, clear units of analysis, coding rules, reliability checks, and transparent handling of context.
• Useful for studying how housing problems are represented, how policies frame responsibility, or how residents and authorities communicate about housing issues.

16. Secondary data analysis

• Re-analyses existing datasets or records to answer a new housing research question.
• Sources include census and population data, housing authority records, rent registers, homelessness statistics, planning data, and prior survey datasets.
• Enables analysis of large populations, trends over time, and comparisons across districts or housing tenures.
• Researchers must assess data quality, definitions, coverage, missing values, time period, and whether original variables adequately operationalise the study concepts.
• It is cost-effective and non-intrusive, but the researcher cannot control how the original data were collected and may face mismatch between available indicators and the research question.