Transparency and replicability in qualitative research: The case of interviews with elite informants

By Herman Aguinis, A. Solarino. Strategic Management Journal, 2019

536 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research Summary We used interviews with elite informants as a case study to illustrate the need to expand the discussion of transparency and replicability to qualitative methodology. An analysis of 52 articles published in Strategic Management Journal revealed that none of them were sufficiently transparent to allow for exact replication, empirical replication, or conceptual replication. We offer 12 transparency criteria, and behaviorally‐anchored ratings scales to measure them, that can be used by authors as they plan and conduct qualitative research as well as by journal reviewers and editors when they evaluate the transparency of submitted manuscripts. We hope our article will serve as a catalyst for improving the degree of transparency and replicability of future qualitative research. Managerial Summary If organizations implement practices based on published research, will they produce results consistent with those reported in the articles? To answer this question, it is critical that published articles be transparent in terms of what has been done, why, and how. We investigated 52 articles published in Strategic Management Journal that reported interviewing elite informants (e.g., members of the top management team) and found that none of the articles were sufficiently transparent. These results lead to thorny questions about the trustworthiness of published research, but also important opportunities for future improvements about research transparency and replicability. We offer recommendations on 12 transparency criteria, and how to measure them, that can be used to evaluate past as well as future research using qualitative methods.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78c138b67ce5855c9e8be8eabd1f015d6fdf7cbc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Best Practices in Data Collection and Preparation: Recommendations for Reviewers, Editors, and Authors (2019, background): “Moreover, in the case of qualitative research, transparency regarding sampling procedures is particularly pertinent because samples are often nonprobabilistic (Aguinis & Solarino, 2019; Teddlie & Yu, 2007).”
MTurk Research: Review and Recommendations (2020, background): “There are growing calls in management and many other fields about the need for greater transparency regarding specific procedures, judgment calls, and decisions made during a study (Aguinis et al., 2018; Aguinis, Banks, Rogelberg, & Cascio, 2020; Aguinis & Solarino, 2019).”
Learning to Do Qualitative Data Analysis: A Starting Point (2020, background): “For instance, a recent analysis of 52 qualitative articles in the Strategic Management Journal revealed that none of the published studies were sufficiently transparent, with insufficient transparency being potentially pervasive in qualitative research (Aguinis & Solarino, 2019).”
Best-Practice Recommendations for Producers, Evaluators, and Users of Methodological Literature Reviews (2020, methodology): “In other words, it is targeted at enhancing the transparency of the process used to conduct the literature review and consequently, the trustworthiness of a review’s recommendations (Aguinis et al., 2018; Aguinis & Solarino, 2019).”
Editorial Essay: The Tumult over Transparency: Decoupling Transparency from Replication in Establishing Trustworthy Qualitative Research* (2019, background): “But appealing to transcendental realism as grounds for replication of qualitative work (Aguinis and Solarino, 2019) demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of this ontological view.”