Reply To: Block 4

[Andrew McCowan]

Shenton ACID

Agree: I agree with the sense that qualitative research has an an iterative, almost organic quality in that it can shift and evolve in focus while it is underway. This provides real challenges for the researcher, but being aware of this dynamic and accounting for it in the research design is the way to manage these considerations.

Confusing: the role of “member checks” cited as ‘the single most important provision that can be made to bolster a study’s credibility’. Really? It makes sense that the member check process can help with accuracy and is a sensible normative step but it feels like this is an over claim as to it’s role.Nonetheless it is clearly an important part of the total suite of measures to ensure credibility.

Interesting: the potential role of “multiple environments in which the phenomenon takes place” to provide an inclusive overall picture from an accumulation of findings. I think this has a lot of implications for the body of work I examine in my own work – finding content from a variety of contexts but with the same objective.

Disagree: the notion that credibility and dependability can be achieved by using repeatable overlapping methods, as that undervalues how importance the context is for qualitative methodologies. While overlapping methods are a good way to help achieve triangulation and feed into the iterative process this suggests an objective quality to the research which is counter to the “naturalistic”/ non-positivist paradigm for research