What Does Money Enable in Qualitative Health Research?
Hello Qualitative Mind,
On March 9th, 2021 enrollment to Qualitative Research Blueprint (QRB) opens (“class” starts on March 22nd), and we’ll kick it off with a FREE 1-hour webinar entitled 3 Keys to Impactful Qualitative Health Research. Learn more and register for the webinar here. For those of you who are on the QRB waitlist and/or attend the webinar live on March 9th, you’ll have a chance to get our super practical (and revamped) Budget Estimation Guide. On that note, let’s take this opportunity to talk about budgeting and what money enables in qualitative health research.
Last year, when we launched QRB for the first time during a webinar, I shared that underestimating the cost of qualitative research could be a mistake that leads to unpublishable qualitative health research. How that would happen is what we’ll discuss next. Sometimes (note that I’m not saying always) as we’re starting to embrace qualitative research and methods, we make the mistake of thinking it’s easy and simple to do. We tend to underestimate the role qualitative researchers play in evaluating the role of theory and abstraction in qualitative inquiry.
At first, we might not fully grasp that in qualitative health research, people are the greatest asset we have. It's people's time and that costs money. It's not usually fancy equipment or a state of the art facility that are our greatest asset, it's people and people need to be valued accordingly.
The cost associated with people’s time could be for the research team, participants or reviewers.
We might need resources (i.e., funds) for graduate students, staff training and research activities, as well as participants’ incentives (such as gift cards). When conducting patient-engaged research or community-based participatory research, we might compensate an organization or a group of patients/stakeholders with salaries or a certain amount of money throughout the research process. This is becoming more and more common in Canada, and recognizes community and patient partners as decision makers with valuable time and insights.
Before COVID, we also had expenses for snacks and travel for both researchers and participants. I believe that one day these items will be back in our budgets!
Another “standard” cost in qualitative research is the cost of transcription. If you are someone like me {who has an accent when speaking English or another language} keep it in mind that artificial intelligence might not be super friendly to you…at least not yet. I can now happily report that Otter.ai is getting used to my accent, but until last year I always paid for human transcription to avoid hours of verifying transcripts. If you’re a native speaker of English and also conducting qualitative research with native speakers, you can probably choose from an array of transcription software that are currently available on the market. And let’s not forget license fees for data analysis software!
How about reviewer cost? What is that about? This can be the cost associated with member checking, audit trail review and/or journal fees. If it’s a priority to the research team to publish in an open access journal, the estimated publishing fee needs to be accounted for.
Lastly, I often get questions from professors asking how can they ensure their students are collecting data correctly and asking the “right” questions. One of the ways you can build more qualitative research capacity among trainees and, as a result, more robust qualitative projects is by adding a person to debrief with them, to encourage reflexivity, to discuss themes and interpretations, and to support their writing into the budget. Altogether, these might lead to a bigger publication impact.
My candid advice to wrap up this blog post is that we all start shifting the thought of "people being costly and adding more work" to “people being enablers of qualitative health research” that can really make an impact in our fields of study and work.
Now, one last question- what budgeting mistakes have you made in your qualitative research? If they weren't mentioned above, I’m certain they’re included in Quali Q’s Budget Estimation Guide. Join the QRB waitlist {or show up live to the 3 Keys to Impactful Qualitative Health Research webinar on March 9th, 2021} and you’ll have a chance to get our Budget Estimation Guide. We’ve made it easier for you to get your research $$$ right, and we can’t wait to share that with you!
Talk soon,
Maira
