A Good Example

Today I am reviewing a manuscript that includes a qualitative research component. A while back some bad qualitative research rocked the blogosphere, so I thought I would strip the identifiers and provide an example of what good qualitative research sounds like in the methods section:

Two of the authors independently reviewed the open-ended responses to questions…/… and developed a coding scheme. After discussion, a common coding scheme was developed and subsequently reviewed by a third author... The original two authors then independently coded the database.

So scheme developed, confirmed by another researcher, and then applied. That is the way you do a qualitative study.

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