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Vulnerability, risk, and qualitative methodologies.

A few months ago, the Editor-in-Chief, Sean Clarke, invited me to join CJNR as Editor, Qualitative Research. I was quick to accept, and this is my first editorial in that capacity. CJNR has a 44-year history as a forum for issues central to research in nursing, health, and health services in Canada. Moreover, the qualitative scholar Joan Anderson (2013) recently noted that this journal consistently publishes articles across methodologies, which facilitates efforts to track the “state of the art” in Canadian qualitative research in particular. Indeed, well over half the submissions to CJNR are qualitative manuscripts. Various qualitative methodologies are used in Canadian nursing research, and with multiple goals (Anderson, 2013). Within evidencebased environments, qualitative methods can provide detailed evidence on how health-care providers or target populations engage in health interventions (Leeman & Sandelowski, 2012). Qualitative inquiry can tease out the complex causal mechanisms that contribute to the uptake and outcomes of interventions, as well as unplanned adaptations of them, unanticipated effects, and relevant contextual factors for understanding their implementation and impacts (Leeman & Sandelowski, 2012). The growing popularity of mixed methodologies attests to the benefits of “thinking qualitatively.” As Hoff (2011) observes, “many of our deepest understandings about how health care works derive in meaningful part from qualitative research studies” (p. 54). Beyond its contributions to research in health services, however, “thinking qualitatively” infuses knowledge development in the healthcare community with a critical approach — one that is sensitive to how historical context and intersections of social relations organize disparities in health, illness, suffering, and healing (Anderson, 2013). That stream of scholarship is reflected in a number of articles in this issue of CJNR that focus on the health of populations typically described as vulnerable. The use of the word “vulnerability” as an identifier directs attention to individuals or groups whose characteristics place them “at risk” for ill health or for poor access to health services (Mechanic & Tanner, 2007). While policies frequently are focused on individual-level modification of the behaviouralor lifestyle-related characteristics that are purported to CJNR 2013, Vol. 45 No 3, 3–5