Viewing the Rich, Diverse Landscape of Qualitative Research

Abstract

The power of qualitative research is gripping. It provides nurses with a privileged glimpse in the world of their patients, frightening and horrifying as it is at times. Qualitative research allows nurses and other health care providers an opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of their patients so they can better design interventions to help improve the quality of their patients’ lives. Qualitative research helps make the invisible visible. For example, in the author’s qualitative study of mothers’ anniversaries of their traumatic childbirth experiences an invisible phenomenon was discovered. The celebration each year of the child’s birthday was in fact, for these women who suffered birth trauma, a tormented day where family, friends, and clinicians failed to rescue them. As one mother painfully shared, ‘‘Every birthday is no longer the celebration of the child, but is really an anniversary for the rape.’’ In Beck’s qualitative studies on birth trauma and its resulting posttraumatic stress disorder because of childbirth, the most frequent image women used to describe their traumatic births was that it was like being raped on the delivery table, with everyone watching and no one offering to help. In this article, six of the most common qualitative research designs are discussed: phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, historical research, narrative analysis, and meta-synthesis. Some of these research designs are illustrated by concrete examples from the author’s research program on postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, and others are examples from published studies in perioperative nursing. The article ends with a discussion of criteria to assess the rigor of qualitative research. Qualitative research stems from the naturalistic paradigm. This paradigm provides the blueprint for different methods for conducting nursing research that are dramatically in contrast to those of the positivistic paradigm, which guides quantitative research. For the discipline of nursing, which deals with human complexity, both traditional quantitative research methods and the exciting qualitative research methods are needed for the discovery of knowledge to improve nursing care and the quality of life of our patients.