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Qualitative Research Basics: A Guide for Engineering Educators

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esearcher’s findings are plausible; that is, would reasonable people believe that they are<br />

accurate descriptions? In order to achieve credible findings, they advocate the following:<br />

• Use prolonged engagement and persistent observation. Stay in the field long<br />

enough and look at as many cases as needed to thoroughly know the phenomenon<br />

of interest.<br />

• Triangulate (compare results of) different methods, sources, and theories. Capture<br />

multiple points of view, use different approaches, and entertain different<br />

theoretical perspectives to look <strong>for</strong> patterns that persist across all of these.<br />

• Triangulate researcher perspective using peer debriefing. Confer with colleagues<br />

about methods and data interpretation to ascertain whether approaches are<br />

reasonable and appropriate.<br />

• Triangulate with participants using member checks. Interact with research<br />

participants or those who are contributing data to ask whether your data recording<br />

and interpretations are accurate from their points of view.<br />

• Collect referential adequacy materials. Seek out descriptions, quotations,<br />

documents, or products that provide the support <strong>for</strong> your interpretations.<br />

• Use structural corroboration. Make sure that your arguments hang together and<br />

make sense, that they are logical and describe the data well.<br />

Reliability is the concern with consistency of the methods and findings. Its parallel in<br />

Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) scheme is “dependability.” They advocate that researchers<br />

use “overlap methods,” by which they mean triangulation of method as described above,<br />

and “stepwise replication,” the systematic checking of research processed during the<br />

study. They also suggest that researchers leave an “audit trail,” describing their<br />

approaches carefully and detailing what inferences they made in drawing their<br />

conclusions. An external auditor should be able to look at the evidence and make a<br />

judgment about the dependability of the research.<br />

Objectivity is another of the traditional criteria that requires reconceptualization in a<br />

multiple-truths paradigm. The concern is with researcher bias and there are several<br />

approaches to this issue. The most common is to have colleagues of the researcher, either<br />

through the triangulation or audit approaches described above, examine the work <strong>for</strong> bias.<br />

A more fundamental approach is to assert that all research is conducted from the position<br />

of the researcher and so is inherently “subjective.” More conservative scholars suggest<br />

that by describing their positionality thoroughly, researchers can control their bias<br />

through the use of devices such as reflexive journals, surfacing to conscious awareness<br />

their emotional reactions and taken <strong>for</strong> granted assumptions. They also recommend that<br />

the researcher alert the user of the research to the point of view through which the<br />

research was conducted by describing this fully in the research report. Less conservative<br />

scholars argue that one’s positionality is a source of strength and is an essential part of<br />

the research. They agree that this perspective should be described as openly as possible<br />

<strong>for</strong> the user of the research but not from the point of view of trying to control one’s<br />

subjectivity, but to use one’s life experience and judgments as an important research tool<br />

and to reveal this perspective as well. In critical approaches, an identified lens, such as<br />

Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory, or Marxism, is an essential part of the method,<br />

which does not pursue an unbiased view, but rather an identified one. The avowed aim of<br />

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