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Qualitative research: Thoughts on how to do it; how to judge it; when to use it

Qualitative methods have been gaining acceptance in biomedical research over the past decades.1,2 Nevertheless, skepticism remains about the validity, reliability, generalizability and general value of this type of work. The most enthusiastic acceptance of the qualitative research has been as a way to garner conceptual information about understudied domains in order to generate hypotheses for later quantitative studies. But many qualitative researchers reject this limitation on the perceived value of their approach. They assert that qualitative research asks different sorts of questions, ones that quantitative methods simply cannot answer. The impetus for writing this editorial was to accompany and help situate an excellent example of the appropriate use of qualitative research methods. In this issue of Genetics in Medicine, Geller et al.3 compare how scientists and science writers view and describe the same set of genetics discoveries. The authors are not interested in measuring the amount of convergence on “facts” that exists between those who discover and those who describe discoveries to the public, but rather on obtaining a deeper understanding of the relationship and interaction between them. The study suggests, among other things, that a too quick assumption of misunderstanding and cross-purposes between scientists and science writers is unwarranted. The purpose of this editorial is briefly to examine what qualitative research does, how it does it, and how a reader unfamiliar with this method may be able to judge the merit and believability of a particular study using qualitative methods.