The concepts of objectivity, reliability and validity are taboo terms in the qualitative paradigm. The qualitativists reject the legitimacy of these notions, arguing that they have a quantitative burden. Instead of these "contaminated" terms, qualitativists propose to talk about "credibility," "authenticity," and "fairness," among other quality criteria in qualitative research. You can irritate some qualitativists if you speak of objectivity, reliability, and validity.

The concepts of objectivity, reliability and validity are taboo terms in the qualitative paradigm. The qualitativists reject the legitimacy of these notions, arguing that they have a quantitative burden. Instead of these "contaminated" terms, qualitativists propose to talk about "credibility," "authenticity," and "fairness," among other quality criteria in qualitative research. You can irritate some qualitativists if you speak of objectivity, reliability, and validity.

Dear Amrit:

Most of such formerly quantitative criteria have been traslated, discussed and adapted to the qualitative realm under terms such as "transferibility", "dependibility", "credibility", etc. Obviously, the most polemical among them is the topic of "objectivity". Usually, you will find them -in qualitative literature- grouped under the title of "quality criteria in qualitative research".

If you are looking for practical examples, I strongly recommend you the following books:

Miles, M. y Huberman, M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.

Patton, M. (2002). Qualitative evaluation and research methods. Newbury Park: Sage.

Flick, U. (2004). Triangulation in qualitative research. In U. Flick, E. von Kardorff and I. Steinke (Eds.), A companion to qualitative research (pp. 178-183). London: Sage.

Steinke, I. (2004). Quality criteria in qualitative research. In U. Flick, E. von Kardorff and I. Steinke (Eds.), A companion to qualitative research (pp. 184-190). London: Sage.

For one of the most acid and intelligent critiques to the "methodolatry" (and the trinitarian figure of validity, trustworthiness and generalization) from a qualitative approach, I recommend you the work of Janesick:

Janesick, V. (1994). The dance of qualitative research design: Metaphor, methodolatry, and meaning. In N. Denzin e Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 209-219). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.

Finally, for an interesting discussion about the the conjunctions and divergences between quantitative and qualitative research methods, including the aforementioned criteria, I recommend the the following issue of the open access journal for qualitative research FQS:

http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/issue/view/26

http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/issue/view/26

In qualitative study, issues such as "saturation" or "triangulation of methods and sources" have utmost importance, while quantitative studies put more importance in "validity" and "reliability" issues.

Hi Amrit

On the one hand you need to describe a phenomenom on the other hand you want to test a idea objectively. Both ar important and lead to the emergence of two fields of research one is descriptive(inductive) the other which allows the vioce of the people to be heard and is used in fields such as ethnography or understanding the disease experiencefor the point of view the ill person the other is inferential and allows a particular strategy to be tested. Ok take for example health promotion you might want to know how a particular thing like smoking is spoken about by teenage girls this is the descriptive the analysis of this should lead to insights as to designing a appropriate intervention specific to teenage girls this then becomes a hypothesis to be tested.

You need to know what it is you want to do, some people do mixed methods and allow the inferential hypothesis testing to be informed by the inductive work so that the topic is fully understood. So Amrit the choice is yours as to how you approach the work but generally the descriptive process by its nature can not be objective as it is by its nature subjective, but what follows is objective testing of the ideas you get in the descriptive process.

Hope all this makes some sort of sense

Dear Amrit,

I totally agree with john. I actually wrote following lines wrt your question but then john already had made the point.

"May be you need to go back to your research design as well. The argument of objectivity only occurs if you understand what you want to discern from your research. if objectivity is really an important issue in your research problem then you need to think right from the start for opting mixed methods methodology". regarding validity and reliability I second Imam, reliability and validity is as important in qualitative as it is in quantitative but then its just the tools and approaches that differs.

Hi Amrit. This can be an example of how search for objetivity from a qualitative strategy. http://hdl.handle.net/10272/5014

You can assess reliability by making the qualitative research replicable. Ensuring objectivity in a positivist sense will be difficult, but objectivity in terms of many members telling the same thing can be ensured. Predictive validity can be ensured by predicting the same outcome in similar contextual setting.

The terms validity and reliability are certainly problematic for qualitative researchers. Many of us who undertake research of this nature would suggest that these are terms that belong within a positivistic paradigm whereas qualitative researchers tend to work within a more interpretivistic framework. The term "trustworthiness" may be helpful. As researchers we want to produce work that can be interpreted in a manner which ensures that it can be trusted. We often talk of triangulation as one means of doing this, but this is too often interpreted in narrow terms. I find the work of Patton (2001) helpful here.

He identifies four approaches to triangulation that can assist in ensuring the trustworthiness of findings. The first of these described as methods triangulation is ons in which the researcher verifies their findings through the use of several methods of data collection. The second, triangulation of sources depends upon being able to examine the consistency of findings across a range of different settings and at different points of time. Analyst triangulation (the third approach) if defined by Patton as using multiple analysts of the data in order to share perspectives and reach a consensus with regards to the meaning of data. Finally he advocates theory or perspective triangulation which enables the researchers to examine data from a range of theoretical standpoints

Whilst it may not always be possible for researchers to use all 4 of these methods, use of several forms of triangulation is one way of increasing the trustworthiness of qualitative data.

Patton, M.Q. (2001). Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods (2nd Edition). Thousand oaks, CA: Sage Publications

There is no simple answer to your question, as you have guessed by now. There is a treasure trove of practical examples, and theoretical perspectives, available at this free and open publication from Germany (about 60% of the content is in English). It will take a bit of effort, but - if you buckle down and search all of FQS issues - you can develop/assemble a reasonable worldview on (not an "answer", but a way to "address") the 'problematique' that you have raised in your question:

http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs

Transparency

Aim for objectivity, but then there are factors that might interfere with this. As a researcher you have to be aware of that. You can look at certain criteria that you can follow in qualitative research.

See lincoln and guba (1985) and denzin and lincoln

As indicated from previous descriptions, this is a tough issue in qualitative research. Personally I like triangulation with different data methods to insure an accurate description of the phenomena under study. Say you are going to do a Phenomenological study - in that approach interviewing is the primary method of obtaining information. If you also do observations of your subjects and content analysis of documentation they complete, you have your three sources. When I did a study of critical care nurses, I interviewed them first. Most of the time the nurses described fairly dramatic events and patients who were very ill, cardiac arrests, patients pulling out chest tubes for example. When I did the chart audits and observations, I could put all these dramatic moments within the context of much more routine procedures. In 40 hours of observing, I saw no cardiac arrests. They happen but not as frequently as I would have assumed from just the interviews. According to the chart audits, the patients in the ICUs were older than the ones the nurses described.

The triangulation methods gives, in my opinion, a more complete picture of the phenomena under study.

There is an old paper by Clyde Mitchell that raises these questions in relation to use of case studies.Mitchell,J. (2006) Case and Situation Analysis in Enes,T and Handelman D. eds The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Practice in Anthropology Oxford and New York: Berghahan Books 23-45 He was a sociologist but working in field of social anthropology.

the above contribution are so informative and to add my voice. your question s can be answered by how you train the research assistant to be able to collect data the right way. make sure the target research participant are appropriate. Get a trained person to transcribe. all the issues of validity, objectivity and reliability will be no more.

Although not yet available in the English literature, a leading scholar in Japan in Action Research using Soft Systems Methodology uses the term "recoverability" to counter the positivistic notion of "repeatability". It would come close to what qualitative researchers often refer to as an "audit trail". A qualitative study by its nature is not repeatable, but the concept of "recoverability" enables the reader of the study to follow the path of the study and get a greater sense of the journey the researcher took with all parts of the journey documented in the source "data" and insights gained throughout the journey.

By the way, when it comes to any study that involves the investigation of people, claiming that a study is "objective", in my opinion, denies the very notion of our humanness, When a positivist is developing a questionnaire to test out a hypothesis, this act is very subjective. The researcher, as a person, is developing questions based on "variables" they determine as important. There is a judgement call and so many other variables that might be important are being put aside. I like the qualitative research tradition that draws from an interpretive stance that has the researcher clearly state their agency in the study and philosophical approach. This enables the reader of the research to take their learning knowing the framework and context of the study.

(Qualitative) research is about the researcher being able to account for their work. The accountability is shown in the quality and comprehensiveness of their writing. You can deal with the issues of objectivity, reliability and validity by deciding what these terms mean in the context of your own study (heeding the literature and comments above about these terms) and letting the reader know what you have decided, that is, how have you made your study "objective" (need a clear ontological and epistemological base as there isn't much positivist qualitative research, but there is some), "reliable" and "valid". I've put the terms in quotes because you may decide there are better words to describe how you account for the quality of your work.

Ilona makes an excellent point about the researcher being able to "account" for their work. And it is in this frame that she uses the term "accountability". However, in general terms in non-positivist research, "accountability" has another meaning which is ethically based. It is easier understood by asking the question, "To who is my research accountable?" The notion of "accountability" can therefore take on two forms: 1. What I am going to phrase as "internal accountability" which is concerned with the rigor of your study, and 2. Accountability as answering to ethical considerations- your position and agency in the research, consideration of the participants, thinking of the target to which you present your findings and so on. Thank you Ilona for bringing up this important point. And Amrit, apologies for "muddying" your question, but rigorous qualitative research involves what others have written above. Francisco lists some excellent resources you can refer to and if you are willing to take it on, there are various editions of The Handbook of Qualitative Research also published by Sage. Enjoy the journey! :)

See the following: Campbell, John L., Charles Quincy, Jordan Osserman and Ove K. Pedersen. 2013. “Coding In-Depth Semi-Structured Interviews: Problems of Unitization and Inter-Coder Reliability and Agreement.” Sociological Methods and Research 42(3)294-320.

LIncoln and Guba's 1985 book, Naturalistic Inquiry was briefly cited earlier, and it is the source of much the terminology being used here -- including credibility, transferability, audit trail, and so.

I personally think the bottom line issue for both qualitative and quantitative research is indeed credibility -- especially in its translation from Latin as "believability." Different kinds of research have different standards for what makes a reader believe in the results. In quantitative research, it is not surprising that these issues of "evidence" have technical definitions (e.g., using Cronbach's alpha to assess reliability). Similarly, it should not be surprising that qualitative researchers use more subjective criteria (e.g., suggesting that if another researcher carefully "audited" your procedures they would agree with your conclusions).

So I would not worry about objectivity as some abstract goal to be obtained in qualitative research. In its place, I would think about who your audiences are and what they think of as highly credible research. In particular, go to the journals you value as good sources of qualitative research, and then look at how the authors' of those articles make a case for the believability of their work.

some terms 'objectivity, reliability and validity' might be considered quantitative. But i agree there are limitations in selecting a qualitative study that need to be controlled for. for example selection of participants, coding and analysis. Here is a paper that explores that

Community Health Workers Experiences And Perspectives On Mass Drug Administration For Schistosomiasis Control In Western Kenya: The SCORE Project

2012

The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene

Omedo MO

In qualitative research authors deal with the concept "Trustworthiness" I recommend you an article titled "Strategies for ensuring trustworthiness in qualitative research projects" (Shenton, 2004)

I have used Miles & Huberman's (1994), as suggested above, and found it extremely helpful in dealing with the concepts rigour, validity and relaibility

In order to address the trustworthiness as well as rigor of inquiry, various criteria are applied. I hope the attached file gives you the overall picture of trustworthiness of both quantitative and qualitative data.