The type of research questions played a significant role in deciding which specific qualitative research methods to use. The “how” questions favour the use of an exploratory case study design.
Yin (2014:64) suggests that qualitative research seeks to explain how a phenomenon occurs and asks about contemporary events over which the investigator has little or no control over. This study has several questions that begin with “how”, which are:
RQ1: How can the ‘one household one hectare’ model inform community sustainability?
RQ3: How does ‘one household one hectare’ programme facilitate or hinder social cohesion of community members?
Hence these questions led the researcher to a qualitative research design and compatible strategies aligned to qualitative methods. These are the case study strategy and the narrative strategy.
On the one hand a case study strategy is, according to Henderson (2015:20) “selected when contemporary events represent the research aim, but this situation cannot or does not affect the research.” Yin (2014:63) contends that all research designs are capable of producing successful case studies. According to Gustafsson (2017:3) choosing between a single and a multiple case studies should be informed by the researchers' decision if it is better to do single or multiple cases,
”for the understanding of the phenomena,” and when there are more than one cases to study. This may likewise apply to multiple units of analysis.
“Although there are different types of research designs (e.g. single-case holistic designs, single- case embedded designs, multiple-case holistic designs, and multiple-case embedded designs), case studies are chosen because the researcher is ultimately interested in insight, discovery, and interpretation,” (Villalobos, 2017:42). Researchers refer to it as “rich thick description” of the case’s embedded units of analyses. The rationale for choosing the multiple-case design is that the evidence from the multiple-cases is according to Yin (2014:57) citing Heriott & Firestone (1993) often compelling and the study is often regarded robust.
On the other hand, Molzahn, et al. (2019:131) suggests that narrative enquiries best suits many narratives and cultural/social discourses that form how people experience stories. A narrative approach provides an opportunity to better understand participants ' lives by listening to their stories (Davies, 2018: 1121). According to Hyvarinen (2019:1), the research of narrative texts
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derives strongly from the sociolinguistic study of narrative and biographical sociology. Atkinson (1997) cited in Brown (2018:2) argue that narrative strategies are generally considered advantageous as narratives provide an insight into the emotions and feelings of the participants, but also give voice to the unheard groups.
In the study, the 1hh1ha programme provides the case context and the projects that implement that programme are the units of analysis. Kumar (2019:70) refers to the unit of analysis as an individual or entity from which data is collected by the researcher. However, the author notes that there is limited literature covering a unit of analysis in detail and there may be more than one layers of units of analysis in any given study (Kumar, 2019:71-72). Hence, units of analysis may be embedded in a case context at different levels.
Here, the 1hh1ha project dimension as a whole is the overarching unit of analysis whilst individual projects on the ground are sub-units of analysis. The interview participants are further embedded in the sub-units of analysis/projects.
A narrative research strategy was carried out in this study using in-depth interviews to examine the perspectives of individuals in four 1hh1ha projects. That narrative strategy is placed in the context of the 1hh1ha programme.
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3.4.1 Secondary data
According to (Johnston, 2014:619) “secondary data is data that was collected by someone else.”
There are many advantages to collecting analysing secondary data include developing an understanding of variables to which a researcher may otherwise not have access (Xu, et al.
2016:137). Alshenqeeti (2014:39) contends that secondary data analysis is powerful in prompting narrative data that permits the inquirer to probe people’s views in-depth. The Researcher surveyed secondary data for analysis. According to (Johnston, 2014:619) the use of secondary data provides an alternative for researchers who have limited resources and time. Documents such as memoranda, policies, minutes of meetings, evaluation reports and other reports were reviewed.
Yin (2014:105) argues that archival records, interviews, direct observations, documentation such as reports, participant-observation are commonly used in case study research. The researcher subsequently triangulated data from the multiple sources mentioned above as shown in Chapter Four, section 4.4. This is supported by Yin’s (2014:120) argument that the “use of multiple sources of evidence in a case study research allows a researcher to address a broader range of historical and behavioural issues, the importance of which is the development of converging lines of inquiry.”
Noble (2018:37) suggests that online searches could be conducted through a series of steps. In this study, the researcher used various academic search engines such as Wiley, Taylor and Francis Online, Google Scholar, Research space and Web of Science to search for keywords such as
‘agriculture’, ‘climate change’, ‘rural development’ and ‘policy implementation.’ The researcher collected policies requested from the DRDLR through the gatekeepers’ letter authored by the Director-General of the Department.