BMJ has a series of articles about reading, understanding, and appraising qualitative research - a good set for the teaching file. BMJ has a complex online <-> print publishing system which I don't exactly understand and I can't exactly tell which issue these are from (the were all grouped together in a recent table of contents announcement from BMJ) - so here are the individual articles:
- An introduction to reading and appraising qualitative research.
- Grounded theory, mixed-methods, and action research.
- Discourse analysis.
- Why use theories in qualitative research?
- Ethnography (from the text: "ethnography is the study of social interactions, behaviours, and perceptions that occur within groups, teams, organisations, and communities").
- Critically appraising qualitative research.
3 comments:
Interesting collection of articles. As a qualitative researcher, it's nice to see not only a greater acceptance of qualitative work (particularly as more than ground work for later quantitative work), but also efforts to educate readers about the methods.
I was glad to see discussion of action research, or what is more commonly around these parts called CBPR - community based participatory research. I'm also seeing a lot more ethnographies, but I was surprised to see a whole article dedicated to discourse analysis, and the list of mid-range theories seemed a bit obscure -- more common to see things like stress-process (particularly for informal caregivers), role theory, uncertainty in illness (a theory that palliative medicine providers would do well to have an understanding of), systems theory, self-efficacy, human ecology...
Also surprised that they kept referring to "interactionism" and then social interactionism. Symbolic Interactionism, originally developed by Blummer was the breeding ground for grounded theory. Besides having the intent of developing theory, another common focus of GT is how people create meaning.
One piece of critique I didn't see but feel is important is that there seems to be a need, at least among some researchers to declare that they used X methodology, and then see no evidence that they actually did -- in a number of cases it may be that they used qualitative descriptive, but they felt a need to define a specific qualitative methodology. A good read about this is:
Sandelowski, M. (2000) Whatever happened to qualitative description? Research in Nursing & Health, 23(4)334 - 340.
Actually, anything by Sandelowski is great. Here's another article that might prove helpful:
Sandelowski, M. & Barroso, J. (2002). Reading qualitative studies. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1 (1), Article 5. Retrieved DATE from http://www.ualberta.ca/~ijqm/
Which can be found at http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/1_1Final/html/sandeleng.html
I can't, off the top of my head, suggest a good basic reference for explaining grounded theory, but a worthwhile book to have in your library is Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods by Michael Quinn Patton. It's good because it is very readable, it talks about both research and QA, it has great cartoons and examples from his own work.
Hmm, sounding a bit like a PhD student aren't I? Well hopefully some of this will be useful
Here is the link marachne mentioned above in clickable format.
Thanks for all the great insight into qualitative research. Majoring in Antrhopology in college helped a bit in understanding some qualitative research, but I find with some of the descriptions of the methods, is that you undersatnd it when you actually are involved with it. Kind of a see one, do one, teach one for qualitative research.
It would be great to have a session on this at the AAHPM/HPNA meeting.
I never thought about it for a session at the annual meeting, but you have a point -- as a young science, there's a lot of qualitative work being done around EOL issues. Providers (and reviewers!) coming from other backgrounds who are stuck on the "RCT are the gold standard, anything less is suspect" mindset would probably benefit from such an overview.
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