Moving Beyond Templates: A Bricolage Approach to Conducting Trustworthy Qualitative Research

By Michael G. Pratt, Scott Sonenshein, Maryann P. Feldman. Organizational Research Methods, 2020

310 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although the rising popularity of methodological templates has yielded an increasing interest in qualitative research, we discuss how the misuse of methodological templates can diminish the quality of research. As an alternative, we propose methodological bricolage as an organizing metaphor for how to do qualitative methods, which involves the combining of analytic moves for the purpose of solving a problem or problems tailored to one’s own research project. To develop a methodological bricolage approach, we draw on our own research as well as a broader set of qualitative research articles to illustrate how authors arrange various methodological moves to create an effective arrangement that communicates trustworthiness. We outline the benefits of methodological bricolage and some cautions in using this approach.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f52a1d3f463cabd91c3594c355f3dc474fb1c91

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Systematicity in Organizational Research Literature Reviews: A Framework and Assessment (2021, background): “Indeed, many published reviews display the features of what can be best described as methodological bricolage—the practice of “combining analytic moves for the purpose of solving a problem or problems tailored to one’s own research project” (Pratt et al., 2020).”
Editorial Essay: The Tumult over Transparency: Decoupling Transparency from Replication in Establishing Trustworthy Qualitative Research* (2019, methodology): “…how to assess trustworthiness—and to some degree what needs to be made transparent— may differ depending on the author’s ontological and epistemological assumptions about research (see Easterby-Smith, Golden-Biddle, and Locke, 2008; Gibbert and Ruirok, 2010; Pratt, Sonenshein, and Feldman, 2019).”