Part 8 - So how do you know if a piece of qualitative health research is good? In the seven blogposts that have preceded this, I’ve set out a personal critique of some of the problems I see all too often in qualitative research. I read and review dozens of qualitative health research articles each year, and my broader interest in the sociology and philosophy of health means I also get to read a lot of really good stuff too. So I’m claiming that as my mandate to offer some critical comments. So what makes for a good qualitative health research study, and how can you tell if you’ve found a diamond or just a bit of cheap plastic costume jewellery? Well I would say that the first thing … [Read more...] about Qualitative Health Research – A guide for the perplexed
Qualitative Health Research: A guide for the perplexed – Power
Part 4 So far in this weekly series on qualitative health research, I’ve talked about where QHR came from, and the important parts played by criticality and the ‘insider’ or emic perspective. This week I want to look at power. Perhaps one of the most important methodological decisions a qualitative health researcher will make in undertaking a piece of research is exactly how much theydesign, and how much is done with the people they are researching. Perhaps not surprisingly then, attacking the traditional power of the quantitative researcher and the institutions they represent has led to some of the most radical technical developments in QHR and healthcare … [Read more...] about Qualitative Health Research: A guide for the perplexed – Power
Qualitative health research 101
Part 3 Over the last two weeks I’ve been writing about some of the key principles lying beneath qualitative research. A lot of people think that qualitative health research (QHR) is just about asking people about how they feel, and writing lengthy research papers that are ‘simply talking trivialities in high sounding language’ (Cheek 1998). But that’s because qualitative health research is often misunderstood, badly taught, and confusing for practitioners reared on the red meat of clinical trials. (There is an important ‘other’ reason, but we can’t get to that just yet). In the first in the series (here), I explained a bit of the history of QHR, and in last week’s post (here) I … [Read more...] about Qualitative health research 101
Qualitative health research 101
Part 2 - Criticality Last week I offered an all too brief potted history of qualitative health research (QHR), in the hope that what follows makes more sense.There are a lot of misconceptions about QHR. Hopefully these blogposts will help clarify some core principles, and inspire people to see how incredibly powerful and useful good quality QHR can be. Now you could say the first principle I want to tackle today’s is so important that it almost defines the difference between what is true qualitative health research and what is a pale imitation. And that is criticality. More than any other principle, good QHR has always been critical. It has challenged convention; held a mirror held … [Read more...] about Qualitative health research 101
Qualitative Health Research – a guide for the perplexed
Part 1 The changes now taking place in healthcare should provide great material for really thoughtful, well-conduced qualitative health research (QHR). But sadly little of it is being produced, especially in physiotherapy, where the amount and quality of much of the qualitative research we have available is really quite poor. So over the course of the next few weeks, I thought I’d try to tackle some of this in a similar way to the way I hacked at the biomedical model last year (see here). My hope is that in doing this, people will understand more about QHR, and that might, in turn, lead to some new and exciting research. Before I begin, I should acknowledge that there are literally … [Read more...] about Qualitative Health Research – a guide for the perplexed
The value of qualitative research
A couple of weeks ago, an editorial appeared in Physical Therapy that gave a very strong justification for the use of qualitative research by physiotherapists. It’s somewhat surprising, these days, that qualitative research even needs defending, but the authors - Alan Jette, Clare Delany, and Mari Lundberg - gave a very clear and concise overview of some of its principles and virtues, citing authors well known to many of you. As part of the review, Jette, Delany and Lundberg kindly singled out the first critical physiotherapy reader - Manipulating Practices for special attention. Here is what they wrote about the book: If readers of PTJ would like to explore some outstanding … [Read more...] about The value of qualitative research
Going beyond qualitative research
Some people find it hard to believe that qualitative research is a relatively recent invention. Given how ubiquitous it is in healthcare research today, it's hard to imagine that it only really came into existence in the 1980s. Prior to that, most research that was broadly humanistic came under the umbrella of sociology or philosophy. But these approaches tended to be either densely theoretical or quantitative, as in the case of classical sociology. The domain that came to be known as qualitative research emerged largely from critical theory and came into existence as an attempt to codify a set of methodological approaches that could capture the kinds of phenomena that gave it a rapid and … [Read more...] about Going beyond qualitative research