Although many critics are reluctant to accept the trustworthiness of qualitative research, frameworks for ensuring rigour in this form of work have been in existence for many years.
education
Description
Although many critics are reluctant to accept the trustworthiness of qualitative research, frameworks
for ensuring rigour in this form of work have been in existence for many years. Guba’s constructs, in
particular, have won considerable favour and form the focus of this paper. Here researchers seek to satisfy
four criteria. In addressing credibility, investigators attempt to demonstrate that a true picture of the
phenomenon under scrutiny is being presented. To allow transferability, they provide sufficient detail of
the context of the fieldwork for a reader to be able to decide whether the prevailing environment is similar
to another situation with which he or she is familiar and whether the findings can justifiably be applied
to the other setting. The meeting of the dependability criterion is difficult in qualitative work, although
researchers should at least strive to enable a future investigator to repeat the study. Finally, to achieve
confirmability, researchers must take steps to demonstrate that findings emerge from the data and not their
own predispositions. The paper concludes by suggesting that it is the responsibility of research methods
teachers to ensure that this or a comparable model for ensuring trustworthiness is followed by students
undertaking a qualitative inquiry
1. Introduction
The trustworthiness of qualitative research generally is often questioned by positivists, perhaps because their concepts of validity and reliability cannot be addressed
in the same way in naturalistic work. Nevertheless, several writers on research
methods, notably Silverman [1], have demonstrated how qualitative researchers can
incorporate measures that deal with these issues, and investigators such as Pitts [2]
have attempted to respond directly to the issues of validity and reliability in their
own qualitative studies. Many naturalistic investigators have, however, preferred to
use different terminology to distance themselves from the positivist paradigm. One
such author is Guba, who proposes four criteria that he believes should be considered by qualitative researchers in pursuit of a trustworthy study [3]. By addressing similar issues, Guba’s constructs correspond to the criteria employed by the positivist
investigator:
