Qualitative Research Basics: A Guide for Engineering Educators

esearcher’s findings are plausible; that is, would reasonable people believe that they are
accurate descriptions? In order to achieve credible findings, they advocate the following:
• Use prolonged engagement and persistent observation. Stay in the field long
enough and look at as many cases as needed to thoroughly know the phenomenon
of interest.
• Triangulate (compare results of) different methods, sources, and theories. Capture
multiple points of view, use different approaches, and entertain different
theoretical perspectives to look for patterns that persist across all of these.
• Triangulate researcher perspective using peer debriefing. Confer with colleagues
about methods and data interpretation to ascertain whether approaches are
reasonable and appropriate.
• Triangulate with participants using member checks. Interact with research
participants or those who are contributing data to ask whether your data recording
and interpretations are accurate from their points of view.
• Collect referential adequacy materials. Seek out descriptions, quotations,
documents, or products that provide the support for your interpretations.
• Use structural corroboration. Make sure that your arguments hang together and
make sense, that they are logical and describe the data well.
Reliability is the concern with consistency of the methods and findings. Its parallel in
Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) scheme is “dependability.” They advocate that researchers
use “overlap methods,” by which they mean triangulation of method as described above,
and “stepwise replication,” the systematic checking of research processed during the
study. They also suggest that researchers leave an “audit trail,” describing their
approaches carefully and detailing what inferences they made in drawing their
conclusions. An external auditor should be able to look at the evidence and make a
judgment about the dependability of the research.
Objectivity is another of the traditional criteria that requires reconceptualization in a
multiple-truths paradigm. The concern is with researcher bias and there are several
approaches to this issue. The most common is to have colleagues of the researcher, either
through the triangulation or audit approaches described above, examine the work for bias.
A more fundamental approach is to assert that all research is conducted from the position
of the researcher and so is inherently “subjective.” More conservative scholars suggest
that by describing their positionality thoroughly, researchers can control their bias
through the use of devices such as reflexive journals, surfacing to conscious awareness
their emotional reactions and taken for granted assumptions. They also recommend that
the researcher alert the user of the research to the point of view through which the
research was conducted by describing this fully in the research report. Less conservative
scholars argue that one’s positionality is a source of strength and is an essential part of
the research. They agree that this perspective should be described as openly as possible
for the user of the research but not from the point of view of trying to control one’s
subjectivity, but to use one’s life experience and judgments as an important research tool
and to reveal this perspective as well. In critical approaches, an identified lens, such as
Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory, or Marxism, is an essential part of the method,
which does not pursue an unbiased view, but rather an identified one. The avowed aim of
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