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Full Text
Keywords
Research, Quality, Qualitative techniques
Abstract
This article consists of two parts, starting with a discussion about generally accepted quality concepts in research, criticising
them from the qualitative perspective. The article concludes by suggesting alternative concepts to be used for securing quality when pursuing qualitative research.
Inductive research
The purpose of this article is to highlight relevant matters in the judgement of quality of qualitative research in an organizational setting. The concepts used for evaluation of quantitative research are not generally applicable, although most often used in all kinds of research. Quality concepts being relevant for quantitative research with a purpose of explaining are discussed as if they were relevant even when a qualitative study has the purpose of generating understanding. This use of irrelevant quality concepts leads to unnecessary limitations and to false conclusions of social phenomena.
Our vocabulary steers our minds and leads us to certain actions. Therefore we need to scrutinize the standard concepts and the words that dominate the general vocabulary of quality judgement in research. As a consequence of this, concepts better suited in the inductive context can be used as quality indicators.
Quality concepts in quantitative research
Four generally accepted quality concepts have been chosen to form the basis of the discussion. These are validity, reliability, generalizability and carefulness. These concepts have grown to be generally accepted as having to be solved in order to claim a study as part of proper research. In this article the concepts are looked upon through the eyes of qualitative researchers.
In Stenbacka (1998) certain concepts used in both quantitative and qualitative research are replaced by words that better capture the meaning of the concepts in question. The concept of "informant" replaces respondent, "material" replaces data, and the concept "generating material" replaces gathering, collecting or getting data. I have chosen to let the standard concepts "respondent" and "data" remain in the following text, since they are used by the authors cited in the article.
Validity
The basic validity question is whether "the intended object of measurement actually is measured". When using this basic definition, the validity issue has already proven itself useless, according to Eneroth (1984), simply because the purpose in qualitative research never is to measure anything....