Editorial Essay: The Tumult over Transparency: Decoupling Transparency from Replication in Establishing Trustworthy Qualitative Research*

By Michael G. Pratt, Sarah Kaplan, Richard Whittington. Administrative Science Quarterly, 2019

382 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Management journals are currently responding to challenges raised by the “replication crisis” in experimental social psychology, leading to new standards for transparency. These approaches are spilling over to qualitative research in unhelpful and potentially even dangerous ways. Advocates for transparency in qualitative research mistakenly couple it with replication. Tying transparency tightly to replication is deeply troublesome for qualitative research, where replication misses the point of what the work seeks to accomplish. We suggest that transparency advocates conflate replication with trustworthiness. We challenge this conflation on both ontological and methodological grounds, and we offer alternatives for how to (and how not to) think about trustworthiness in qualitative research. Management journals need to tackle the core issues raised by this tumult over transparency by identifying solutions for enhanced trustworthiness that recognize the unique strengths and considerations of different methodological approaches in our field.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2823bf709be2ea5704367def042108523aadc512

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

  1. Michel Anteby
  2. Audrey L. Holm
  3. Stine Grodal

In Sociology and Political Science

  1. Michel Anteby
  2. Audrey L. Holm
  3. Stine Grodal

In Statistics and Probability

  1. Michel Anteby
  2. Audrey L. Holm
  3. Stine Grodal

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