Evaluative Criteria for Qualitative Research in Health Care: Controversies and Recommendations

By D. Cohen, B. Crabtree. Annals of Family Medicine, 2008

899 citations recorded by the source corpus.

PURPOSE We wanted to review and synthesize published criteria for good qualitative research and develop a cogent set of evaluative criteria. METHODS We identified published journal articles discussing criteria for rigorous research using standard search strategies then examined reference sections of relevant journal articles to identify books and book chapters on this topic. A cross-publication content analysis allowed us to identify criteria and understand the beliefs that shape them. RESULTS Seven criteria for good qualitative research emerged: (1) carrying out ethical research; (2) importance of the research; (3) clarity and coherence of the research report; (4) use of appropriate and rigorous methods; (5) importance of reflexivity or attending to researcher bias; (6) importance of establishing validity or credibility; and (7) importance of verification or reliability. General agreement was observed across publications on the first 4 quality dimensions. On the last 3, important divergent perspectives were observed in how these criteria should be applied to qualitative research, with differences based on the paradigm embraced by the authors. CONCLUSION Qualitative research is not a unified field. Most manuscript and grant reviewers are not qualitative experts and are likely to embrace a generic set of criteria rather than those relevant to the particular qualitative approach proposed or reported. Reviewers and researchers need to be aware of this tendency and educate health care researchers about the criteria appropriate for evaluating qualitative research from within the theoretical and methodological framework from which it emerges.

Subfields: Education, General Health Professions, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2070a0649c6e5f47af967c7c4ca75f859dddeb53

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Citations in the corpus

Demonstrating the validity of qualitative research (2017, background): “Over the past two decades a large number of papers and chapters have been published providing guidance, and happily the principles behind these recommendations are broadly convergent (Cohen & Crabtree, 2008).”
Critical Approach to Reflexivity in Grounded Theory (2014, background): “Methodological motives aside, a pragmatic reason for attending to reflexivity in any qualitative study is that it is a key requirement in quality appraisal or evaluation criteria, and research reporting guidelines for qualitative research (see Cohen & Crabtree, 2008; Tong, Sainsbury, & Craig, 2007).”
Sample Size in Qualitative Interview Studies (2016, background): “We look on information power as an aspect of internal validity, influencing the potential of the available empirical data to provide access to new knowledge by means of analysis and theoretical interpretations (Cohen & Crabtree, 2008; Kvale, 1996).”
Socially Assistive Robots in Elderly Care: A Mixed-Method Systematic Literature Review (2014, background): “Furthermore, D. J. Cohen and Crabtree (2008) suggested that techniques such as triangulation—use of multiple data sources—helps researchers conduct rigorous qualitative research.”
Critical Analysis of Strategies for Determining Rigor in Qualitative Inquiry (2015, positive): “As a result, new evaluation criteria are emerging that appears to be more useful for post-completion rating, such as the criteria proposed by Tracy (2010); Cohen and Crabtree (2008).”
The Cognitive Interviewing Reporting Framework (CIRF): towards the harmonization of cognitive testing reports. (2013, background): “Quality is a much-debated topic in qualitative research, and the lack of consensus on what constitutes quality is reflected in the large number of different instruments to review qualitative investigations (Boeije, van Wesel, & Alisic, 2011; Cohen & Crabtree, 2008).”
Child removal as the gateway to further adversity: Birth mother accounts of the immediate and enduring collateral consequences of child removal (2020, methodology): “These include consideration of ethics, transparency in methods of sampling and description of the sample, the use of appropriate and rigorous methods of data collection and analysis and attention to all elements of study reporting (Cohen and Crabtree, 2008).”
Qualitative research methods: when to use them and how to judge them. (2016, background): “It is widely accepted that qualitative research should be ethical, important, intelligibly described, and use appropriate and rigorous methods (Cohen and Crabtree, 2008).”
Navigating the digital divide: A systematic review of eHealth literacy in underserved populations in the United States (2016, methodology): “To promote inter-coder reliability, coding discrepancies were resolved through group discussion until consensus was reached (18,22).”
Does student agency benefit student learning? A systematic review of higher education research (2021, methodology): “Third, we assessed studies’ quality based on their focus on and approach to agency and their evidence base concerning issues of trustworthiness and reliability (Cohen and Crabtree 2008).”