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World Conference on Qualitative Research (WCQR) is an annual gathering that brings scholars from around the world. The conference continues to uphold the highest standards of freedom, ethical integrity, and transparency in the unwavering commitment to improve the quality in qualitative scholarship across national borders. The articles that comprise this issue navigate methodological challenges in qualitative research and seek to bring clarity when exploring and explaining truths of social phenomena. The proposed approaches to data collection and analysis demonstrate excellence in creative synthesis of techniques to decern questions of methodology, contributing to enhancements in trustworthiness of qualitative studies.
World Conference on Qualitative Research (WCQR) is an annual gathering that brings scholars from around the world. The conference continues to uphold the highest standards of freedom, ethical integrity, and transparency in the unwavering commitment to improve the quality in qualitative scholarship across national borders. The articles that comprise this issue navigate methodological challenges in qualitative research and seek to bring clarity when exploring and explaining truths of social phenomena. The proposed approaches to data collection and analysis demonstrate excellence in creative synthesis of techniques to decern questions of methodology, contributing to enhancements in trustworthiness of qualitative studies.
Keywords: content analysis, narrative analysis, grounded theory, participatory action research, GenAI
Introduction
Evaluations of quality in qualitative scholarships have long been characterized by a critical examination of its unique challenges. Questions of rigor, trustworthiness, and generalizability rightly push the boundaries of scholarly practices, filling the on-site and virtual meeting rooms of research conferences with inspiring presentations, informative workshops, and fertile discussions. Reporting on the 9th World Conference on Qualitative Research (WCQR) held in January 2025 at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and on-line, there are significant aspects in qualitative methodology to be improved and refined within the broader academic landscape. It is, however, equally important to recognize and celebrate the tangible advancements being made. In this issue of The Qualitative Report, you are invited to read a set of articles that present an ongoing aspiration and efforts of international scholars to study methodology, defining research frontiers and leading innovation. Development of qualitative analytic approaches and tuning of research methods is not merely an academic exercise, because methodological improvements bring a wide array of significant benefits to the entire body of knowledge discovered and articulated via qualitative work. The articles that comprise this issue navigate methodological challenges in qualitative research and seek to bring clarity when exploring and explaining truths of social phenomena.
A persistent manifestation of methodological reductionism is examined by King (2025) who raises an existential question, which is at the heart of qualitative inquiry: when a phenomenon is inherently nuanced and subjective, such as living one's calling, can a reliance on measurement truly capture its essence? She observes that although widely recognized as personal and contextually shaped, "calling" has been predominantly researched through quantitative methods in the past decades. Her critique of the quantitative methodological boundaries uses qualitative content analysis to explore how the heuristic of calling has been constructed and conceptualized across recent empirical literature. Humanistically informed, her analysis describes not only trends in study designs but also deeper assumptions about what calling is, how it can be known, and which voices are prioritized in research of this phenomenon. Understanding calling qualitatively, that is by focusing on a lived, value-driven experience that can speak for itself instead of a variable to be predicted or optimized, surfaces as a theme in this article.
Truthfulness of narrative inquiry is attested in Wacławik's (2025) qualitative work. In this compelling study, the author describes and reflects on the process of conducting and analyzing autobiographical narrative interviews. Her research centers on experiences during World War II, when Japanese Canadian and Japanese American communities were displaced and incarcerated following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the face of recalling such traumatic events during data collection, a challenge arises to understand how participants convey these memories. To explore the links between the memory of wartime experiences and ethnic identity, the empirical material is analyzed using a combination of the narrative interview method and the concepts of mediated memories and personal cultural memory. The resulting approach moves beyond spoken words, examining how interviewees integrate memory media to convey their autobiographical stories not only through words but also with the help of family artifacts, photos, art, and other documents. The findings reveal how cultural memory supports narrators in overcoming a trajectory of suffering and advocate for a more mindful and open approach to analyzing narratives, particularly when engaging with sensitive human experiences and inquiring into traumatic historical events.
In addition to the challenge of capturing nuanced data, qualitative researchers often face significant hurdles in accessing hard-to-reach populations or discussing sensitive topics. An innovative approach, presented by Kubiciel-Lodzińska and Maj (2025), addresses this call by exploring the engagement of entrepreneurs employing migrant workers through communitycentered social initiatives in Poland. Embracing diversity and inclusion as core values, the sample recruitment strategy is embedded within a social research project. Aimed to foster participation in qualitative research by integrating respondents into a broader, socially meaningful context, this approach leverages the dual function of facilitating access to hard-toreach respondents and encouraging them to share detailed insights, even on sensitive issues. Diverse stakeholders - employers, students, and regional institutions - are brought together in the creation of a dynamic "space between" to encourage collective action and shared responsibility in tackling migration-related issues. The concept of "in-betweenness" is validated insomuch as it continues to productively capture complex interplay of knowledge, power, and status differences, moving beyond the simplistic insider-outsider dichotomy in migrant experience.
When qualitative studies expand across linguistic contexts, new methodological challenges arise in data analysis. Literature on using constructivist grounded theory in such cross-cultural research remains limited, asking for discussion of potential pitfalls and possible solutions. Li et al. (2025) present one illuminating doctoral research experience, where interviews were conducted in Chinese while the target language of analysis and findings is English and propose a three-phase language conversion strategy to minimize data loss and avoid superficial analysis. To balance analytical depth with linguistic accuracy, this strategy insists on keeping transcripts in the original language for initial coding to preserve implicit cultural meanings. A bilingual model is subsequently deployed in the focused coding stage, culminating in a written analysis in the target language. The authors reflect on the importance of bilingual researchers, who, as cultural insiders, can enhance research depth and validity as well as guard against cultural biases in collaboration with target-language researchers.
In response to continuous challenges to improve methodological preparation of doctoral students and novice researchers, Gusak and Lyutykh (2025) follow a path of descriptive turns into a narrative research journey. In their methodological article, the authors use narratives collected from academic entrepreneurs in executive positions to document the role of an analytic framework in the broadening and restorying phases in the analysis of narratives. To fully consider, explain, and illustrate the function of frameworks as bordering concepts and heavy-lifting devices, the authors drew philosophical and theoretical insights from several key scholars in narrative research. Temporal certainty of the applied conceptual boundaries facilitates themeing of the results to not only reveal a collective story of academic entrepreneurship but also map an auditable pathway through narrative inquiry, enhancing trustworthiness. Resulting integration of the entrepreneurial guiding principles into the analytic framework magnifies the narrative meanings of entrepreneurial culture in for-profit vocational schools in the USA.
Finally, in the rapidly evolving Generative AI (GenAI) era, there is lack of examinations on how to leverage newly available technology in research. In the pioneering work, Costa et al. (2025) report on an innovative project that introduces a competence framework for social researchers integrating GenAI for improving the quality of methodological literature reviews. The proposed mixed-methods approach (quant-QUAL) is a detailed analytical model that triangulates evidence from both quantitative and qualitative data analyses of literature. In integrating bibliometric analysis of Scopus publications with qualitative analysis of selected papers, the authors describe steps that can be followed for initial reviews literature. In this ground-breaking research, the authors evaluate the use of GenAI in different stages of the methodological literature review and provide an innovative example to demonstrate how thoughtful integration of cutting-edge tools can significantly enhance the rigor and efficiency of qualitative scholarship.
Towards Freedom and Enhanced Quality
Freedom is an indispensable value in the development and exchange of methodological ideas and approaches that lead to scientific discoveries. Articles selected for this issue face the methodological challenges and embrace the ambiguities of freedom in qualitative scholarship. The highlighted approaches to data collection and analysis demonstrate excellence in creative synthesis of techniques to decern questions of methodology on the paths to truth. We strive to uphold the highest standards of freedom, ethical integrity, and transparency in the unwavering commitment of the conference to improve the quality in qualitative scholarship across national borders.
The organizing team at the World Conference on Qualitative Research extends sincere gratitude to everyone who contributed to the advancement of qualitative research before, during, and after the conference. The invaluable review and editorial work undertaken by dedicated colleagues is deeply appreciated, acknowledging the substantial effort and time commitment in the meticulous process of reviewing abstracts and manuscripts. And we are immensely grateful for the logistical and technical support provided at the conference and in the publication process.
The 10th World Conference on Qualitative Research will offer both in-person and online attendance options. Join the conference January 20-22, 2026, at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, or virtually from February 02-05, 2026. Information about conference participation and abstract submission can be found here: https://wcqr.ludomedia.org/
References
Costa, A. P., Burneo, P., & Kasperiuniene, J. (2025). Mixed-methods & AI for methodological literature reviews. The Qualitative Report, 30(10). https://doi.org/10.46743/2160- 3715/2025.8434
Gusak, O., & Lyutykh, E. (2025). A story within stories: Using an analytic framework to move from individual to collective storying in the analysis of academic entrepreneurship narratives. The Qualitative Report, 30(10). https://doi.org/10.46743/2160- 3715/2025.8432
King, J. (2025). Qualitative insights into the complexity of calling: Moving beyond quantitative boundaries. The Qualitative Report, 30(10). https://doi.org/10.46743/2160- 3715/2025.8433
Kubiciel-Lodzińska, S., & Maj, J. (2025). Engaging entrepreneurs in sensitive research: The "social project-embedded method". The Qualitative Report, 30(10). https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2025.8431
Li, W., Elliott O'Dare, C., & Conlon, C. (2025). Bridging language barriers in data analysis for constructivist grounded theory research: A case study in Chinese context. The Qualitative Report, 30(10). https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2025.8429
Wacławik, M. P. (2025). Personal cultural memory as part of life stories: Insights from biographical research on Japanese Canadian and Japanese American wartime experiences. The Qualitative Report, 30(10). https://doi.org/10.46743/2160- 3715/2025.8430
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