How Will We Know "Good" Qualitative Research When We See It? Beginning the Dialogue in Health Services Research

Health Services Research, Dec, 1999 by Kelly J. Devers

2. Only those phenomena that are observable, in the sense of being amenable to the senses, can validly be warranted as knowledge. Phenomena that cannot be observed either directly or indirectly with the aid of instruments have no place.

3. Scientific knowledge is arrived at through the accumulation of verified facts that feed into our theoretical body of knowledge. Such findings are often referred to as "laws," that is, empirically established patterns and regularities.

4. Hypotheses are derived from scientific theories and are submitted to empirical testing. This implies that science is deductive.

5. A particular stance toward values occurs in two senses. The first is that scientists or researchers should be purged of their own values because such values may impair objectivity and undermine the validity of the knowledge produced. The second is that a sharp distinction should be drawn between scientific issues and statements, on the one hand, and normative ones, on the other.

Quantitative research has been heavily influenced by positivist philosophy, particularly by idealized accounts of the scientific method and the desire to mimic the natural sciences. We can discern the impact of this philosophical perspective by examining the methodological preoccupations of quantitative research, many of which are related to the evaluation criteria noted previously (i.e., internal and external validity, reliability, and objectivity). For example, quantitative researchers are absorbed with how to define and measure concepts. The focus on defining concepts and operationalizing measures that can stand for them stems from the positivist philosophy that concepts must be made observable because, if the concept cannot be observed and measured, it does not exist. Further, because concepts and their measurement are so central to quantitative research, the technical requirements of operationalization, specifically validity and reliability, are paramount. Methodological textbooks tend to give equal att ention to both. However, quantitative researchers most frequently report on reliability because validity testing (particularly for internal validity) is highly time-consuming and cannot be fully addressed with quantitative methods and data alone. Other methodological preoccupations of quantitative research that reflect their positivist philosophical roots include causality, generalization, and replication.

The affinity between positivist philosophical beliefs, quantitative research methods, and the criteria for evaluating research is clear. What is less clear is the relationship between the positivist paradigm, qualitative methods, and the criteria for evaluating research given the philosophical and theoretical perspectives traditionally associated with qualitative research. (Please refer to Figure 1, p. 1164, for the discussion that follows.)

Proponents of the philosophical perspectives that underlie qualitative research minimally argued for a modification of the five elements of the positivist paradigm just noted. Qualitative researchers argued that there were fundamental limits to the extent to which the methods and procedures of the natural sciences could be applied to the social world. Underlying this view was the ontological assumption that reality is dynamic, contextual, and socially constructed. Unlike inanimate objects, people think, have feelings, communicate through language, and attribute meaning to their environment, and, at least superficially, have different beliefs and personal characteristics. Moreover, social science theories are unlikely to apply across time and place and cannot be the sole source of hypotheses. Rather, scientific knowledge must be developed through inductive as well as deductive empirical study. As Glaser and Strauss (1967) noted, investigators must not only verify existing theories but they must discover the c oncepts and hypotheses relevant for the areas they wish to research. [7] Finally, because researchers have values and are members of a wider social community, it is impossible to purge themselves and social science more generally of values. As a result of these philosophical differences, proponents of qualitative research argued that the social sciences needed additional theoretical perspectives and methods uniquely suited for studying feelings, subjective experiences, and the meanings that different types of people attribute to events and situations in real-life settings. The investigation of social life using these perspectives and methods is what we now know as qualitative research and methods.