How do you know?
Hello Qualitative Mind,
I don’t know if I’ve shared this here, but I had a signed contract to teach my first graduate-level qualitative methods course when my daughter was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer. Weirdly (or not-so-weirdly) my teaching commitment was one of the very first things that came to mind when I started dealing with the aftermath of hearing the diagnosis. Needless to say, I didn’t teach the course as planned and instead spent the winter of 2019 either at home or at the hospital on chemo days. Sometimes I feel sad that I missed the opportunity to teach during graduate school, yet I know I was where I needed to be. Plus, it was during that time that I envisioned Quali Q {and what is now Qualitative Research Blueprint (QRB)}.
QRB is not a graduate-level course but it gives me a rather unique opportunity to teach and learn from incredible researchers. I also teach qualitative methods to senior undergraduate nutrition students as a guest lecturer, and this year something special happened. I received a follow-up email from one of the students with a series of questions that I’ll be covering here over the course of the next two months...yes, it was that intense! In the email, the student asked how they would know the authors of a qualitative study did what they were describing in the paper, i.e., thematic vs. content analysis. Isn’t this an intriguing question? I think so, and had to think a moment before answering because I believe the end product, i.e., the results in a publication, may look very similar even though the processes taken to get there were different.
With that being said, I did realize that I look for certain things in a qualitative publication to gauge what the authors did, and how they did it. It’s one of those things I’ve been doing for a long time but had never named and described before, so here it goes.
In no particular order, these are the three things I read closely and take notes on when assessing the description of qualitative methods…
1. The name is congruent with the lines that follow. This basically means that when I read that someone did qualitative content analysis, for example, I expect details that show how authors became familiar with, and stayed close to, the data as they walked through the process that led them to the findings being described in the paper. I still expect a certain level of interpretation but way less in-depth than it would have been had the same authors stated they had done thematic or interpretive phenomenological analysis. In my opinion, the challenge with this type of “assessment” is that the number of words authors have to describe qualitative methods is so limited that many details are left out or only provided to reviewers. YET, there are always clues or crumbs we can follow AND, if it’s of the utmost importance to you to know more, you can reach out to the corresponding author and seek more details.
2. The references included in the methods sections make sense. This is a big one! The more experienced and familiar we get with certain qualitative methods, the more likely it is for us to know the seminal papers in the area, in addition to who wrote them. Because of that, we can look at a reference list and gain some insights into the methodological footsteps the authors of a certain publication tried to follow or the writing style they tried to emulate.
{Writing this third thing could make you think, “Wow! Someone reads that?” Yes, I do.}
3. I read the contributions each author made to the work being published. I try to understand who took the lead with data analysis, whether there was discussion among team members, who wrote the manuscript and whether those involved in the analysis were also the ones involved in the writing. In my opinion, I’m not playing the unnecessary role of nosy-reader-Maira, but rather valuing the relational aspect of qualitative research. I think the interactions between research team members are C-R-U-C-I-A-L to qualitative rigor, so I look for ways to understand how they worked together to answer their research questions.
The “How do you know...” question I got from a student proved to be a very insightful one. It enabled me to reflect and describe things that matter to me, Maira, as a qualitative researcher and writer.
“You don’t really understand your thoughts until you express them in words.”
The practice of naming and describing things in writing is something I want to do more often in 2021. I hope this blog post inspires you to follow along and join me in the quest of being more mindful in my qualitative work.
~ Maira