Evaluating qualitative research: issues of reliability and validity

The issues that this paper considers arose from my experiences of teaching quantitative and qualitative research methods to postgraduate Masters students at my institution. These issues became apparent in some of my students’ writing for their assessed assignments. The way in which certain students approached validity and reliability as a means to evaluate research consistently surprised me as their application of these research criteria had little to do with what I had taught them. Reflection on this puzzling phenomenon led me to draw some provisional conclusions on how science is constructed in the public domain, and made me re-consider whether validity and reliability can be used as tools for evaluating qualitative research.

This paper is then a consideration of how qualitative research can be evaluated that draws from my own students’ evaluation of qualitative research. These thoughts are not conclusive; rather they represent a set of possibilities for qualitative researchers in striving to create, for want of a better word, ‘good’ research.