Hello everyone. Holidays are lovely things, and I would greatly advise everyone to take one. A proper one, where you switch off your emails (?perhaps even deleting those that arrive?), ignore your work texts and generally hide in a work-free hole for a while. You might think about doing this every weekend you’re not working, or […]
Category: qualitative
More than numbers
Today begins a series of posts about understanding qualitative research in medicine, written by Jess Morgan (but open to further contributions!). Feel free to comment, tweet or facebook your thoughts too… Have you ever wondered what on earth qualitative researchers are on about? What is ethnography? Phenomenology? Purposive sampling? And then what about triangulation, […]
More than numbers: Ethnography or phenomenology?
What kind of qualitative researcher do you want to be? Going back to the previous blog, maybe you want to work on the research question ‘what is it like to be a teenager with Duchenne muscular dystrophy?’ Now, there are multiple ways to approach this question in qualitative research. Two of these approaches are ethnography […]
More than numbers: Sampling
So, medical school taught us all about the rules of sampling in research – generally more is better, if you want to be more accurate then do a power calculation (although sometimes this may be akin to picking a number out of the air). And we all know that randomisation is good practice too – […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: 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 […]
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: 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 […]