Shedding the cobra effect: problematising thematic emergence, triangulation, saturation and member checking

By Lara Varpio, Rola Ajjawi, L. Monrouxe, Bridget C. O’Brien, C. Rees. Medical Education, 2017

946 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Qualitative research is widely accepted as a legitimate approach to inquiry in health professions education (HPE). To secure this status, qualitative researchers have developed a variety of strategies (e.g. reliance on post‐positivist qualitative methodologies, use of different rhetorical techniques, etc.) to facilitate the acceptance of their research methodologies and methods by the HPE community. Although these strategies have supported the acceptance of qualitative research in HPE, they have also brought about some unintended consequences. One of these consequences is that some HPE scholars have begun to use terms in qualitative publications without critically reflecting on: (i) their ontological and epistemological roots; (ii) their definitions, or (iii) their implications.

Subfields: Education, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6cc49a0d5ae5b26dadfdbc5c52c7ebf8dea5908

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In Education

In General Health Professions

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Supporting best practice in reflexive thematic analysis reporting in Palliative Medicine: A review of published research and introduction to the Reflexive Thematic Analysis Reporting Guidelines (RTARG) (2024, background): “29,30 For example, some described ‘small samples’ or a lack of (statistical) generalisability as limitations of the research; some described saturation as a criterion for stopping data generation (unsurprisingly perhaps, as saturation is widely advocated for and referenced in both COREQ and SRQR;…”
Thematic analysis of qualitative data: AMEE Guide No. 131 (2020, background): “Themes do not simply emerge from the data (Varpio et al. 2017); instead, themes are constructed by the researcher through analyzing, combining, comparing, and even graphically mapping how codes relate to one another.”
What makes for effective feedback: staff and student perspectives (2019, methodology): “We undertook an inductive analysis, with the acknowledgement that as feedback researchers we bring a set of domain theory to the topic, and that we actively construct themes rather than have them passively ‘emerge’ from the data (Varpio et al. 2017).”