Qualitative research in health care: Assessing quality in qualitative research

doi:10.1136/bmj.320.7226.50

BMJ 2000;320:50-52 ( 1 January )

Education and debate

Qualitative research in health care

Assessing quality in qualitative research

This is the first in a series of three articles

Nicholas Mays, health adviser ^a, Catherine Pope, lecturer in medical sociology ^b.

^a Social Policy Branch, The Treasury, PO Box 3724, Wellington, New Zealand, ^b Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 2PR

Correspondence to: N Mays nicholas.mays@treasury.govt.nz

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In the past decade, qualitative methods have become more commonplace in areas such as health services research and healthtechnology assessment, and there has been a corresponding risein the reporting of qualitative research studies in medical andrelated journals.¹ Interest in these methods and their widerexposure in health research has led to necessary scrutiny of qualitativeresearch. Researchers from other traditions are increasingly concernedto understand qualitative methods and, most importantly, to examinethe claims researchers make about the findings obtained from thesemethods.

The status of all forms of research depends on the quality of the methods used. In qualitative research, concern about assessingquality has manifested itself recently in the proliferation ofguidelines for doing and judging qualitative work.^2-5 Users andfunders of research have had an important role in developing theseguidelines as they become increasingly familiar with qualitativemethods, but require some means of . . . [Full text of this article]

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