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Introduction
This current article considers the seldom-written-about-but-much-questioned issue of sample size in qualitative research. This paper is inspired and informed by the author's experiences in commercial marketing research, academic management research and as an editor for qualitative academic papers. Further, as an author of such papers and in the role of editor, the views of many reviewers have been read over the past 31 years in research, and these have also inspired this current paper. Reviewers clearly need guidance in this area, and researchers could also benefit from this discussion as they struggle to design qualitative research in terms of sample size.
Furthermore, qualitative research has recently come under criticism for its lack of rigour in terms of there being little or no justifications given for the sample sizes that are actually used in research (Marshall et al. , 2013). Marshall, Cardon, Poddar and Fontenot considered 81 qualitative studies and concluded that scant attention was paid to estimating or justifying sample sizes.
The question of what sample size is needed for qualitative research is frequently asked by individual researchers (Dworkin, 2012) but not frequently discussed in the literature (Onwuegbuzie and Leech, 2005). Few studies approach this issue, and as much qualitative research does not involve the making of statistical generalisations, many qualitative researchers report that sample size is not an issue in qualitative research (Onwuegbuzie and Leech, 2005). However, for reviewers it clearly is an issue as described below.
Furthermore, the related issue of what sample size is needed for qualitative research findings to have some validity is also one which many paper reviewers are concerned about enough for them to mention in their reviews. Reviewers typically, nonetheless, do not definitively answer their own questions regarding what size a sample should be. Comments from reviewers are usually to do with the sample size (whatever size it is), being too small, and they commonly state that this should be noted in the limitations sections of an academic research paper. This current paper reviews some of the sparse literature on this subject, investigates a case study from the physical sciences and one from management and comes to some tentative conclusions.
The concept of data saturation, which is the point at which no new information or themes are...