Finding and Defining Your Rigor Criteria

Hello Qualitative Mind,

If you’ve taken QRB or heard me speak about rigor before, you probably know that I use validity, reliability and generalizability to describe rigor in the qualitative research projects I’m closely involved in. I don’t think of the quantitative definitions of these terms when I apply them to qualitative research because I know the epistemologies behind quantitative and qualitative research are greatly different. 

I also understand that my comfort with using validity, reliability and generalizability came, in part, from my mentor Maria who taught me a lot of what I know (and is equally confident in her use of those terms). In fact, Maria is a co-author in a paper that addresses this very topic, “Verification Strategies for Establishing Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research.” 

As comfortable as I am with how I define rigor in my qualitative research, when it comes to my clients’ research, my goal is to support them in finding what works best for them. This applies to how they define rigor.

Recently one of my coaching clients sent me a paper because she really liked the description of rigor it provided. The  paper by Forero and colleagues (2018) is entitled “Application of four-dimension criteria to assess rigor of qualitative research in emergency medicine.” The authors adapted the qualitative criteria developed by Lincoln and Guba – known as credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability – and described it in their article as “the Four-Dimensions Criteria” (FDC). I’m not going to comment on whether or not it was necessary (in my opinion) to call Lincoln and Guba’s well-established trustworthiness something else. That’s not the intent of today’s blog post…maybe another day! 

The intent is actually to encourage you to check Table 1 of Forero et al.’s paper (on page 3) because they did what many qualitative researchers struggle to do. For each dimension of rigor, the authors listed the purpose, e.g., credibility’s purpose is “to establish confidence that the results (from the perspective of the participant) are true, credible and believable” (p. 3). Then, they provided a list of “general strategies” as described in the qualitative literature that help to build credibility, and in the last column of the table added the “strategies applied in our study to achieve rigor.” I know that this last column was what my client really liked in the paper’s FDC, and I agree with her.

The table is well-done and distills concepts that can be rather abstract into practical strategies that were implemented over the course of the project presented in the paper. Because of this, I believe many of you might find this paper and the FDC helpful as well. For those of you who, like me, use other definitions of rigor, I still see value in checking the paper out because, no matter how you define rigor in your research, you need to demonstrate how you attained rigor through practical/real strategies implemented throughout the research process. This is usually the trickiest part! So, the more we read good examples from others, the more attentive we can be to how we’re doing it.

Talk soon,
Maira