One may say, it depends on the subject and focus of the study. Can you shed light on this issue base from your experience of doing your research?
Noel - rigorous research is never easy - no matter the paradigm or methodology. However, the recent 'explosion' of descriptive exploratory designs, especially in the health professions, is often an indication of practitioners seeking the 'easier' option - compared to traditional methodologies i.e. phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography etc. That is because descriptive exploratory is less philosophically/theoretically-driven as it is more a 'free-style' form of design that draws on generic principles of qualitative approaches. The attached chapter may assist in clarifying.
Thank you so much Dean, I find your work very helpful. I do agree with you that using the traditional qualitative methodologies are rigorous and not easy to do.
I would suggest that if a particular method seems "easy" to use, you might want to question the validity of that method. Even something as presumably simple as non-participant observation requires prolonged engagement with your data and reflection on your methods and analysis. Simply going into a social scene, taking some notes, and then writing a research report is not enough. If whatever method that you're employing seems "easy," I would certainly question the extent to which you are employing it satisfactorily.
That being said, the more we engage with particular methods, the more we should become accustomed to them, potentially leading us to perceive some sort of increased facility. I've used particular analytic tools that require detailed coding schemes for linguistic analysis. At the time, the more and more I employed those tools, the easier the analysis was. After being away from it for a while, though, it would take me a bit to get back into it.
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