Dr Jess Morgan, working in the University of York, has taken time out from writing up a massive mixed-methods study to splurge on why you might like to use focus groups in your research study. You see, they aren’t just a way of getting a tonne of interviews done without having to do all the […]
Category: qualitative
More than numbers: The biology of complex interventions
“Yes” said the slightly cross voice, clearly meaning ‘no’, not ‘yes’ … “Yes, I can see how that might be nice to know, but what we actually care about is ‘does handing out the information sheets actually get the parents to do the right thing?’ ” [A mildly fictionalised account of a research group encounter] Sometimes it’s tricky to […]
>n: Card sorting
Sometimes in interview work there will be a desire to find out about how and why people make decisions. This can be done in lots of ways – for example, using discrete choice experiments, scenarios/vignettes, multiple choice questions, or card sorting exercises. […]
More than numbers: Grounded theory
New research in a qualitative area can be tricky – how do you know what you should be looking at or how you understand the way people are thinking? One method would be “grounded theory”. The technique here is to take a whole bunch of information – unclear on what it might be all about […]
More than numbers: demi-regularities
A qualitative version of the StatsMiniBlog Here’s idea that emerges from realist reviews – demi-regularities. This term implies common, frequently reproduced behaviours / patterns that get seen in human activity, and can emerge in the setting of a realist review as theme-type things that are seen across different studies. They are the ‘broad lessons’ and […]
How do you add up if there are no numbers: Qualitative Synthesis
Regular readers of this blog will know of its penchant for systematic review techniques (evidenced in the recent I-squared blog ). The process of qualitative synthesis uses many of those familiar methods – defining a clear question, systematic literature searching, selecting appropriate research and assessing the risk of bias. Following this, however, qualitative syntheses begin […]
More than numbers: Assessing quality in qualitative research
So now to go back to one of the big questions from the first blog of this series – ‘How are you even supposed to tell if a qualitative paper is even any good when there are no power calculations, blinding or difficult stats?’ Hopefully, if you’ve been reading through each blog, you might have […]
More than numbers: Reflexivity
What effect do you as a researcher have on your work? Perhaps the nice, neat, medical school answer is ‘we try to minimise how we influence research’. Certainly, quantitative techniques such as randomisation, blinding and objective measurements of results aim to reduce the potential for the researcher to influence the results of a study. However, […]
More than numbers: Triangulation
Imagine looking at a problem from different perspectives – perhaps the problem of why there are never any clean coffee cups on the ward.* You might choose to count the coffee cups, monitor their usage, record where they are found at different times of day, or even ask members of staff about why they think […]
Shape of services?
With the publication and debate around Shape of Training (a UK-based review of how training the medical workforce will be revised for a new era of health care) there is a fair bit of … conversation … about a number of things. Some of these things include the question about how a ‘medical’ service is […]