Qualitative methods for healthcare researchers

I recently attended the Townsville Health Research Week 2014 as a keynote speaker and workshop leader. How fantastic to meet such an enthusiastic community of healthcare workers and students engaging research and looking for further opportunities to extend their knowledge about qualitative methods.

I presented a number of take home messages for the delegates and workshop participants. One of these is that “qualitative” research is not a method. It is an umbrella term for multiple methods, some of which have extended complex histories and are made up of many traditions. For example, Grounded Theory is now considered a ‘‘family of methods’’ (Bryant & Charmaz, 2007, p. 11). A researcher using Grounded Theory should know which tradition or theorist they are primarily referencing in applying the techniques of Grounded Theory.  As training is now more widely available, undertaking some training sessions before using these techniques is advisable.

Healthcare researchers have been challenged many times in the wider literature for neglecting to identify the method they used to analyse data in qualitative methods studies, and for the avoidance of reference to the epistemology on which their research is based. As Carter and Little (2007) noted

Epistemology, methodology, and method are fundamental concepts. Any experienced qualitative researcher should have wrestled with each of them during her or his career. However, qualitative research reporting is frequently insufficient in all three areas, and although this might be partly due to word length limitations in some journals, it also suggests a lack of engagement with these important concepts. (Carter & Little, 2007, p. 1319)

People often ask me why this has happened and why it persists. I think some of the reasons might be because qualitative methods in healthcare became quite fashionable relatively quickly through the late 90s to the current day. Allied health courses included qualitative methods taught by the same people who were teaching quantitative methods. Once students learned that “qualitative research” was actually a research method it became embedded in the research culture in healthcare. Journals were criticised for not having enough qualitative studies and responded by publishing some qualitative studies that did not follow standard protocols for quality because the reviewers had no experience or training in these methods. These then became reference points for others’ research processes.  

Epistemology is hard to teach and in my experience students are not interested because it is too complex and bewildering. They just want to move on and interview their participants. One of my goals for the next part of my career is to develop ways of teaching this information that engages students, enables ethics committees and journal committees to make better decisions about qualitative research studies, and helps researchers to feel more competent in using qualitative methods in research. I feel quite sorry for people who were told by their PhD supervisor to take out references to epistemology or to a specific method that they used and to keep their language generic using qualitative instead of a recognised method.

Before the end of the year I will be running a two day workshop on qualitative methods research in healthcare to help healthcare researchers from allied health, nursing, medicine, and any other area related to healthcare to get PhD ready. If you would like to be sent information about this workshop please write to ccpcreative@gmail.com

October 2014

Jane Edwards, PhD

References

Bryant, A., & Charmaz, K. (2007). Introduction. In L. H. Bryant & K. Charmaz (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of grounded theory (pp. 1–28). Los Angeles: SAGE.

Carter, S., & Little, M. (2007). Justifying knowledge, justifying method, taking action: Epistemologies, methodologies, and methods in qualitative research. Qualitative Health Research, 17, 1316–1328.