Do you trust me? Rigor and Information Power in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Qualitative researchers employ a variety of strategies to demonstrate the legitimacy of their work from the viewpoint of positivist scholars. While the traditional concepts of validity and reliability cannot be addressed the same way in qualitative as they are in quantitative research, qualitative researchers have established frameworks to ensure the rigor of qualitative work. In this talk, the qualitative trustworthiness criteria of credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability will be compared to their positivist counterparts of validity, generalizability, reliability, and objectivity, respectively. An additional threat to the legitimacy and perceived rigor of qualitative research is that many studies can have a small sample size. The concept of information power has been used in contrast to the quantitative sample size appropriation of power calculations and has recently been promoted as an alternative to saturation which is fundamentally a positivistic concept. This talk will provide practical advice for demonstrating the trustworthiness and rigor of qualitative research while maintaining the theoretical underpinning that drive qualitative studies in anatomy education.