issues of validity and reliability in qualitative research

What is valid for clinical studies or policy studies may not be adequate or relevant for ethnography or autoethnography or performance ethnography.” Researchers and scholars in each of these areas have been grappling with issues of truth, validity, verisimilitude, credibility, trustworthiness, dependability, confirmability, and so on. “There are many ways to use, practice, promote, and claim qualitative research, and in each there is a proposed or claimed relationship between some field of human experience, a form of representation, and an audience. As Altheide and Johnson (2011: 582) argue: For example, Bochner (2000) argues that ‘traditional empiricist criteria’ are ‘unhelpful’ when applied to new ethnographic approaches (cited in Tracy 2010: 838). see Schwandt 1996 Altheide and Johnson 2011). Some have also argued that standardized criteria in are unhelpful in qualitative inquiry (i.e. Over the years, many qualitative scholars have proposed frameworks and criteria for assessing qualitative research (see Guba and Lincoln 1989 Lather 1993 Schwandt 1996 Bochner 2000 Ritchie et al. Should We Use Standardized Criteria to Evaluate Qualitative Research? The quality standards used in quantitative research do not directly translate to qualitative studies. At some point in their research career, qualitative researchers will inevitably experience the ‘apples versus oranges’ phenomenon, whereby our qualitative research is evaluated based on quantitative principles and criteria, instead of qualitative principles. One of the questions that comes up regularly in training courses on qualitative methods is how we should assess the quality of a qualitative study.

Issues of validity and reliability in qualitative research