TY  - JOUR
T1  - Users' guides to the medical literature: Xxiii. qualitative research in health care a. are the results of the study valid?
AU  - Giacomini MK, Cook DJ, for the Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group
Y1  - 2000/07/19
N1  - 10.1001/jama.284.3.357
JO  - JAMA
SP  - 357
EP  - 362
VL  - 284
IS  - 3
N2  - Quantitative research is designed to test well-specified hypotheses,
determine whether an intervention did more harm than good, and find out how
much a risk factor predisposes persons to disease. Equally important, qualitative
research offers insight into emotional and experiential phenomena in health
care to determine what, how, and why. There are 4 essential aspects of qualitative
analysis. First, the participant selection must be well reasoned and their
inclusion must be relevant to the research question. Second, the data collection
methods must be appropriate for the research objectives and setting. Third,
the data collection process, which includes field observation, interviews,
and document analysis, must be comprehensive enough to support rich and robust
descriptions of the observed events. Fourth, the data must be appropriately
analyzed and the findings adequately corroborated by using multiple sources
of information, more than 1 investigator to collect and analyze the raw data,
member checking to establish whether the participants' viewpoints were adequately
interpreted, or by comparison with existing social science theories. Qualitative
studies offer an alternative when insight into the research is not well established
or when conventional theories seem inadequate.
SN  - 0098-7484
M3  - doi: 10.1001/jama.284.3.357
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.284.3.357
ER  -