Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to support potential users of thematic analysis (as outlined by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke). Researchers with the intention of applying thematic analysis are advised to consider the theoretical framework of their work and how differing ontological and epistemological standpoints influences their…

It is a necessity for a researcher to ensure that the validity and reliability of the study is met to prove a discovery. However, there are still qualitative researchers who are still reckless and do not emphasize the concept of validity and reliability when designing, collecting, and analysing the research findings. The quality of a qualitative…

Purpose: This article develops a methodological framework to support qualitative analyses of legal texts. Scholars across the social sciences and humanities use qualitative methods to study legal phenomena but often overlook formal legal texts as productive sites for analysis. Moreover, when qualitative researchers do analyze legal texts, they…

Purpose: This article explores challenges faced by doctoral candidates using grounded theory (GT) in their theses, focusing on coding, theory development and time constraints. It also examines the impact of doctoral committees on GT dissertations, addressing epistemological clashes and the desire for familiarity over novelty.…

This article examines an important and thorny problem in interview research: How to assess whether what people say motivated their actions actually did so? We ask three questions: What specific challenges are at play? How have researchers addressed them? And how should those strategies be evaluated? We argue that such research faces at least five…

When researching with or about families in home-based research, there are numerous unexpected ethical issues that can emerge, particularly in qualitative research. This paper is based on reflective accounts of four homed-based research projects, two in the UK and two Australia, which examined ethical dilemmas identified when engaged in home-based…

This article introduces an open-source software package--R for Qualitative Data Analysis (RQDA). RQDA is an R package for analysis of text-formatted data, which is compatible across operating platforms. It is user-friendly and seamlessly integrates with R, which makes it possible to conduct statistical analyses on qualitative coding. Alternative…

Qualitative research (QR) has gained visibility and acceptance in the field of special education due to early efforts to identify quality indicators focused on technical and methodological aspects of QR. Whereas these indicators focused on credibility and trustworthiness of data, this article articulates additional QR quality indicators to enhance…

The use of codebooks to categorise qualitative data and to increase consistency in coding between multiple researchers is a well-established strategy in qualitative research. However, due to the focus on team-based research projects, the possibilities for the use of codebooks by individual researchers are rarely discussed. With the aim of adding…

This article is developed from the contents from one of the chapters the researcher has written as part of her PhD thesis. It discusses various methodological challenges the researcher had to face during the phase of data collection in the prisons of Kerala, India, and the strategies adopted to overcome these challenges. This article is intended…

Audre Lorde's provocative admonishment, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," is a fitting caution for Black and other scholars of color who seek to use traditional social and behavioral sciences research as a tool to achieve social justice and health equity in Black communities. Invoking Lorde, I use the…