![]() GT is primarily inductive, which means that researchers move from the specific to the general to explain phenomena in the qualitative theory-generating process. More specifically, GT is concerned with psycho-social processes of behavior and seeks to identify and explain how and why people behave in certain ways, in similar and different contexts (Charmaz 2006 Corbin and Strauss 20). As for most other domains, participants of qualitative health care research tend to be key stakeholders who have first-hand experiences of and insights into the particular phenomenon under study it is important to treat them as the only experts on their own experience.īroadly speaking, GT is a systematic set of techniques and procedures that enable researchers to identify concepts and build theory from qualitative data (Corbin and Strauss 2008). The most frequently used method of data collection is the in-depth semistructured interview hence, our focus here is on interviews. ![]() Qualitative research is conducted in uncontrolled or “naturalistic” settings (Lincoln and Guba 1985). Qualitative research helps researchers in health care/health services to understand how social practices and patterns in health care are created and what meaning these practices have for people within specific and/or varied contexts. Qualitative research methods explain processes, that is, “what is going on here” or patterns of human behavior. Qualitative research is useful to describe novel, poorly understood phenomena and to engage in causal inference, hence being of particular help when building new theory or adjusting theory that has been shown to be deficient (Hurley 1999). Unlike quantitative research approaches which excel at testing hypotheses derived from existing theories, qualitative research provides rich descriptions of phenomena and generates hypotheses about phenomena (Sofaer 1999). The purpose of the article was to demonstrate that while the task of conducting a qualitative project and analyzing qualitative data is not easy, the challenges of undertaking good qualitative research are not insurmountable for quantitative researchers (or indeed inexperienced researchers with a qualitative orientation), provided that an established method, in this case GT, is followed and carefully documented. Quantitatively oriented teams might also have access to qualitative data that they would like to analyze and make sense of, but lack the analytical tools to do so (for a detailed introduction to qualitative data analysis, see Bradley, Curry, and Devers 2007). Third, the research team might need to gain a fine-grained understanding of processes behind patterns in their data for instance, there is a correlation between the location of services and level of satisfaction with services, but why is this the case? In each of the above scenarios, qualitative research methods are prerequisites for good quantitative research, yet quantitatively oriented researchers and teams frequently lack the toolkit necessary to conduct qualitative research that stands the chance of gaining acceptance with rigorous qualitative peer-reviewers. Second, there might be good grounds to argue that the existing quantitative research instruments are not valid or reliable, or not suited to the particular context where they are to be applied. First, the parameters of service user and provider experiences might be poorly understood, which in turn makes the design of survey and other quantitative research instruments impossible. ![]() The need to apply qualitative methods in conducting primary research and in analyzing data can arise for a number of reasons. We give practical advice pertaining to each step of a research project, and we illustrate these with the help of examples from a recent study that we conducted, and also hypothetical examples of research scenarios (the latter are in italics). ![]() This article seeks to enable such researchers to conduct qualitative research and data analysis with the help of the grounded theory (GT) method, one of the most widely used and established qualitative methods. Many researchers and research teams that are predominantly quantitative in orientation may find that qualitative methods are needed to answer some or all of the questions they seek to answer in their study. ![]()
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