Qualitative Methods Flashcards
What is the aim of how and why questions?
- we want to understand peoples understandings and action sin relation to a health issue
- Health literacy = awareness and beliefs
- Emotions = fear, embarrassment
- Social interactions = role of the family y
- Decision making - when is a symptom serious
What is qualitative data?
- anything which sheds light on understandings, attitudes and experiences
- most commonly interviews or focus groups where participants explore the topic
Give one advantage and one disadvantage of the following:
- Systematic review
- RCT
- Cohort study
- Case control study
- Case series and repots
Systematic review \+ significance - loss of context RCT \+ high control - v . specific population Cohort study \+ over time/real world - no control over participants Case control study \+ captures rare outcomes - retrospective comaparison Case series and reports \+ focus on detail/individual - not generalisable
Give three strengths of qualitative studies
+ focus on the real world and real patients
+ high level of detail and context
+ can capture and explain experiences, understandings…
Give three weaknesses of qualitative studies
- Loss of auditability (need to trust researchers)
- cannot predict (but can suggest) causations or outcomes
- generalisable only with caution
Why do we need qualitative data?
- important to find out about patients and providers experiences/opinions to improve care
- describes and explains health behaviour
- improves quantitative research by informing questions to ask e.g. in a questionnaire
- helps understand study findings e.g. why did an intervention work or fail
What are the differences between quantitative and qualitative methods?
Quantitative - numbers - how many - hypothesis - representative sample - statistical power - replicable - information Qualitative - words - how and why - emerging themes - purposive sampling - small numbers - depend on context - understanding
Data collection: In qualitative studies, you can: - - -
- do data collection concurrently with analysis
- change your methods depending on what you find (e.g. add new questions to the interview topic guide)
- this includes modifying the research question
What is the iterative method?
repeating cycles of data collection and analysis
- interview, modify, interview modify
This continues ideally until saturation is reached and there are no new emerging themes
What does qualitative analysis do?
- transcripts are ‘coded’ i.e. topics and issues raised by participants are identified and labelled
- main themes (most important issues) are identified
- especially important are the emerging themes which are not researcher led
- researchers interpret the data throughout and not only in discussion sessions
What is reflexivity bias?
- as humans collect and analyse the data, their thoughts and feelings influence their findings
- there need to know this/be reflexive
- papers do need detail on the researchers backgrounds, data collection, analysis, interaction with participants
- as there is no statistics, it is a matter of judgement whether finding fairly represent the data
Can we trust the results?
- difficult to judge as researchers are not separate from the research
- there is no one ‘true’ interpretation
- the aim is find on insightful, consistent and useful interpretation
- multiplicity of perspectives on developing this is valuable!
What are Type 1 errors and when may they occur?
Finding something in the data that is not there
- suspicions/conflicts of interest
- social pressure on participants to give positive answers
- cherry picking quotes that support
- forcing a predefined model on to the data
Hard to prove by might be suspected if there is little evidence of how conclusion were obtained from the data/conclusions do not match data
What are type 2 errors and when may they occur?
Ignoring something that is there
- overly influences by a particular context, theoretical approach, researcher interst
- forcing participants into categories e.g. good and bad patients
- overly simplistic where data is complex; ignoring contradictions and different perspectives within the data
Results would still be legitimately obtained forms he data by will be very ‘thin’
What are the 5 parts of rigour in qualitative research?
- Transparency - explicitness of methods and analysis
- Validity - justify interpretations; possibly return to participants/invite their comments
- Reliability - different researchers will analyse differently but using more than one coder can flag up blind spots and increase complexity
- Comparative - compare between and within individual participants; accounts, compare with other studies
- Reflexivity - account for role of researcher
