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While qualitative methodologies have increased in popularity over the past few decades, they have been criticised because of a lack of transparency in procedures and processes. While much of this criticism has been levied at analytical steps, many published qualitative studies give little information about the characteristics of the study sample or the type of sample employed or techniques used. In this paper, Gina Higginbottom aims to provide an overview of the complexity of sampling in qualitative research, and to provoke reflection and consideration of qualitative methodologies. It is hoped that this will encourage nurse researchers to seek out the primary texts and gain greater insight into the various philosophical underpinnings and sampling techniques in qualitative research
key words
* sampling
* qualitative research
* methodological approaches
* maximum phenomena variation
Introduction
Qualitative methodologies have increased in popularity in nursing research over the past few decades. In the past, qualitative research has been criticised because of lack of transparency in procedures and processes adopted during the progression of the research (Miles and Huberman 1994). While much of this criticism has been levied at analytical steps and processes, many published qualitative studies give little information about the characteristics of the study sample or the type of sample employed or techniques used (Coyne 1997). This paper aims to provide an overview of the complexity of sampling in qualitative research, and provoke reflection and consideration of qualitative methodologies. However, in order to discuss sampling issues it is necessary to give a brief overview of predominant methodological approaches in nursing research.
Qualitative methodologies
Qualitative research in health-related and nursing research in the UK is largely focused on three domains or methodologies: 1) grounded theory, 2) phenomenology, and 3) ethnography - although there are many other forms of qualitative inquiry (see, for example, Murphy et al 1998). In qualitative research the sampling processes is usually determined by the methodology employed, although this is not always evident in published qualitative research papers as many qualitative studies appear not to have a clearly defined methodological approach. Indeed, within pragmatic British health services' research, debate has focused on the need to adopt a flexible rather than rigid approach to application of qualitative methodologies; this approach has been termed 'British pluralism' (Johnson et...