SOCA6640 - Ensuring Quality in Qualitative Research: Methods & CERF

This essay provides a detailed analysis of ensuring quality in qualitative research, addressing criticisms and key principles. It emphasizes the importance of openness, foreignness, and communication in research design and data analysis. The role of the researcher in reducing bias, maintaining emphatic neutrality, and practicing reflexivity is discussed. The essay also challenges preconceived notions about the validity of qualitative research, particularly in the context of organizations like CERF, highlighting the need for researchers to defend the quality of their findings. It references scholarly articles to support its arguments and provide a comprehensive overview of quality considerations in qualitative research. This resource is available for students on Desklib.

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Ensuring quality in qualitative research
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Ensuring quality in qualitative research
Introduction
Qualitative research is a social science type of research that collects and works along with
non-numerical data with aims of interpreting these data to determine the social life of a certain
targeted population or place. This research allows the investigations of the meaning of the
people’s attributes towards their behavior, interactions, and actions in relation to others
(Upadhyay and Prakash, 2017, pp.54-61). Quality concerns in qualitative research play an
integral role in all steps and processes of the research ranging from the interception of the
research questions, data collection methods, through the analysis and interpretations of the
findings.
For instance, the method and procedures of data collection may be evaluated according
to the criteria quality, which may be different from that used to judge the data obtained from
these methods and procedures. All these may also turn to be different from the quality criteria
that may be applied to the analysis of these data (Walby and Kevin, 2017, pp.537-553). In the
essay, we will explore a number of quality criteria used in qualitative methods and how some of
them can be maintained by the CERF.
Criticisms of qualitative research
To archive this, we will examine these criteria to determine which one can be used by
CERF more effectively while leaving others to the discretion of other researchers. In the effort of
maintaining the quality of the qualitative research, researchers have encountered criticism at their
final stages of research which include the analysis and presentation of the findings. There are
strong critics about the reliability of the collected data in the research. Reliability in research, as

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defined by scholars, is termed as the level of consistency with which activities get assigned to the
observers (Wilczak et al., 2017, pp.69-79). The issue of consistency has, in most cases, risen
particularly because of the shortage of the spaces that researchers provide to the readers with
little data extracts which could have been very useful in the formulation of their own hunches
about the persuasive subject that had been studied, in essence, the people or place.
Additionally, even though when the participant’s activities may be videotaped or
transcribed, the researches reliability of the transcripts interpretations maybe majorly affected by
the failure of the trivial or crucial pauses, body movements, and the overlaps among others.
Qualitative researchers argue that there is an insignificant difference between social and natural
platforms, with reliable social life being only needed by the group of positivists. They claim that,
once the social reality is treated in a flux, therefore, there should be no concerns about the
accuracy of the measuring instruments (Green and Judith, 2018). Such stands would sideline
systematic research as it would imply that, there can never be assumptions of properties and
attributes of research in qualitative findings.
Another criticism of qualitative analysis is how comprehensive the explanation it offers
are. This is at times termed as a problem which is based on the personal observation, or random
investigations rather than a well-defined systematic scientific evaluation of events and activities.
There is a rampant tendency of anecdotal approach to the use of data in relations to drawn
conclusions or explanations in this research. This questions the validity of the explanations of
qualitative research with no attempts by the researcher to handle those cases that are in
contradiction to their study. In some cases, it has been reported, the extended immersion in the
field of researcher leads to certain biases about the validity of the researcher’s own interpretation
of their organization or tribe of interest (Toews et al., 2017).

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Key principles in ensuring quality in qualitative research
Good practice in qualitative research leads to more accurate findings that would
contribute to the achievement of the organization’s research objectives. I would to give an
overview of such practices considering that they would be helpful to the CERF in contribution to
the state-of-art quality in qualitative research (Mason, 2017). Some of the principles are outlined
below;
The principle of openness, the research should be designed in a way to allow the
participants maintain the traits of their daily life and their personal views should be subjected to
total openness. This applies to the designing and formulating of the research questionnaires,
sampling procedures, and the actual data analysis. The questionnaires should not be based on a
pre-defined hypothesis that would influence the answers of the participants in any way or seem
to have any sort of implications to the participants.
The principle of foreignness, this principle upholds the researcher from pre-mature
interpretations of the respondents or participant’s behavior or any utterances during the research.
The point of view of the participant is to be considered foreign to the relative researcher to avoid
pre-defined judgments from the researcher’s perception of the findings (Levitt et al., 2017, p.2).
The principle of communication, this is to acknowledge that all the pieces of data
collected and assessment totally involves a communicative interactive process between the
participant and the researcher thus contributing to the understanding and analysis of the situation.
However, this implies that the researcher should inevitably be part of the core construction of the
data intended to be collected (Lindlof and Thomas, 2017). The researcher, therefore, should

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reflect critically their responsibilities and roles in the process of research and interpret the
utterances and behavior of the participant as co-constructed.
The roles of the researcher and the concept of flexibility and emphatic neutrality
In quantitative research, the researcher is the core tool in ensuring the accomplishment of
the research objectives is effectively fulfilled. Among many roles, the researcher is mandated to
monitor and reduce bias which is mostly a source of errors during research. They should ensure
that their prior knowledge about the topic of research does not affect the outcome of the
participant’s response or distract the entire process thus monitoring and reducing bias is a core
responsibility of the researcher (Ormston et al., 2014, pp.1-26). They are also obligated with the
task of developing competence in the research methods which entails explaining the study to the
participants without bias, interpreting and analyzing data according to the design, selecting the
artifacts, journal portions among others appropriately, conducting field interviews according to
the design, and making field observations appropriately.
Another role of the research is collecting and analyzing data appropriately with the
application of required and safe precautions entailing collection of data in different
environments. In addition, the researcher is also obligated to presenting the findings to the
relevant parties after the entire research period or during the partial completion of the research.
Presentations could be done either in writing, in posters, or oral presentations depending on the
choice and prevalence of the researcher and the audience to be presented to (Padgett, 2016).
In the process of administering these roles during the research period, the research is also
expected to keep a strong sense of emphatic neutrality in all the steps, processes, and procedures
at all stages of the research. Reflexivity is an important attribute the researcher is expected to

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observe is it is an attitude of systematically attending to the context of knowledge construction,
more so, to the effect of the researcher at every stage of the research process (Schwandt, 2015).
These are meant to ensure the researcher sticks to the research objectives during the entire
research with a clearly defined structure under which the research is designed to take place.
Critical reflection challenging the pre-conceived notions of qualitative research
The major issue surrounding the nature of qualitative analysis over the notion of validity
of the research is very controversial to the actual scenario. Validity is should not be regarded as a
single or universal concept but should rather be regarded as a contingent construct which is
inescapably grounded in the intentions and processes of a particular methodology of research and
projects especially the qualitative research. Organizations, for instance, CERF, experience
setbacks in conducting qualitative research due to such notion that brings about the anxiety of
failure of performing a quality research even before the research is done (Thorne, 2016). This is
usually based on past experience that may not have resulted in the intended results.
The notions greatly affect the confidence in the methods of data collection, analysis, and
type of data collected. The researchers have had to experience pre-experimental failures from the
criticisms even before the actual results have been presented. This calls for a strong perception
and understanding of the researcher to convince their audience of the validity of the findings of
the qualitative research undertaken. Also, there is the notion on biases of the qualitative research
whereby it is assumed that any form of the non-numerical data presented is basically centered on
a certain attribute that manipulated the final outcome of the data collected.
Moreover, qualitative researchers have to fight through these notions to ensure that the work
presented is of the high degree of quality.

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References
Green, N. and Judith, T., 2018. Qualitative methods for health research. s.l.:Sage.
Levitt, J., Heidi, M., Sue, W., Fredrick,M., and Susan, P., 2017. Recommendations for designing
and reviewing qualitative research in psychology: Promoting methodological integrity.
Qualitative psychology, 4(1), p. 2.
Lindlof, B. and Thomas, T., 2017. Qualitative communication research methods. s.l.:Sage
publications.
Mason, J., 2017. Qualitative researching. s.l.:Sage.
Ormston, D., Rachel, S., Liz, B., and Matt, S., 2014. he foundations of qualitative research.
Qualitative research practice: A guide for social science students and researchers, pp. 1-26.
Padgett, D., 2016. Qualitative methods in social work research. s.l.:Sage Publications.
Schwandt, T., 2015. The Sage dictionary of qualitative inquiry. s.l.:Sage Publications.
Thorne, S., 2016. Interpretive description: Qualitative research for applied practice.
s.l.:Routledge.
Toews, J., Booth, I., Berg, A., Lewin, R., Glenton, S., Munthe-Kaas, C. and Noyes, H., 2017.
Dissemination Bias in Qualitative Research: conceptual considerations. Journal of Clinical
Epidemiology.
Upadhyay, K. and Prakash, K., 2017. Qualitative Researches In Social Sciences. Janapriya
Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Volume 3, pp. 54-61.
Walby, A. and Kevin, L., 2017. Criteria for quality in qualitative research and use of freedom of
information requests in the social sciences. Qualitative Research, 17(5), pp. 537-553.

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Wilczak, Y., Cynthia, M., Valentina, P., Doris,V., and Sebastien, H., 2017. Training and
interobserver reliability in qualitative scoring of skeletal samples. Journal of Archaeological
Science: Reports, Volume 11, pp. 69-79.