Usos e abusos da pesquisa qualitativa em saúde em análise

Abstract

With this issue, number 50, we complete 17 years since Interface: Comunicacao, Saude, Educacao was first launched in August 1997. Over the course of this period, Interface has progressively become characterized as a periodical directed towards publishing research with a qualitative approach, since the growing presence of this type of methodology in papers published here has led us to include this methodology as part of the journal’s scope. It should be emphasized that this increase in the volume of qualitative studies published, both in Interface and in other journals within the field of public health, expresses the growth and acceptance that such production has attained over recent decades and the important contribution of interdisciplinary nature that these studies have made towards strengthening the field of public health. This great dissemination of qualitative methodology in studies conducted in our field has, on the other hand, revealed a variety of problems regarding the quality of what has been produced. This topic is taken up, using several focuses, in the Dossier “Uses and abuses of qualitative healthcare research”, which opens the current issue. The authors of texts presented here 1-3 deepen the rich discussion that they conducted at the round table of the same name that took place at the Sixth Brazilian Congress of Social and Human Sciences within Healthcare, which was held in Rio de Janeiro, in 2013. We invite you to read the papers that make up this Dossier, especially our contributing authors, since many of the reasons why papers submitted to this journal and to others in its field are rejected stem from problems relating to the use of qualitative methodology. Among these reasons, we can cite: absence of a theoretical reference framework; presentation of quantified results; treatment of empirical data that is very descriptive and non-analytical; and limited contextualization of the object and field of study.