Quality, Trustworthiness, and Credibility in Your Mini-Project

¶ … quality, trustworthiness, and credibility in your mini-Project on interviewing and in your qualitative research plan. Evidence of quality in qualitative research Unlike quantitative research, the standards for qualitative research are considerably more fluid, causing some to dispute the ability to evaluate such research at all in a systematic fashion. It remains an open question if the standards of rigor should be equal when applied to qualitative research vs. quantitative research (Spencer et al. 2004:3).

On one hand, given the multifaceted purposes of the different types of qualitative research, uniformity would be impossible. However, according to Tracey (2010), some good general guidelines to keep in mind are to ask if the qualitative research involves "(a) worthy topic, (b) rich rigor, (c) sincerity, (d) credibility, (e) resonance, (f) significant contribution, (g) ethics, and (h) meaningful coherence" (Tracey 2010:837).

In the case of my research on women who have been the victims of human trafficking, interviewing these women and allowing them to provide their personal input about their experiences seems to be both worthy and sincere, as well as a significant contribution to contextualizing the debate about how to end trafficking. There is a dearth of meaningful personal data on the subject of this crime against human rights.

The main problems occur with the questions of rigor and ethics, namely the ability to interview the subjects in a non-traumatic fashion and to obtain enough subjects to make a credible and coherent statement about the women. Because the women willing to speak may be somewhat self-selected, the study may even lack generalizability. It may be difficult to develop a theory about the women which is the stated purpose of the grounded research approach.

Another limitation will be the need to provide translators for the women who are not only fluent in their language but are sensitive to the cultural and economic situation from which the women come from. All of these factors may limit the population and thus limit my ability to make generalizations from the research. I should note I do not think this invalidates my research aim: it merely means that I must be careful in terms of how I frame and phrase my conclusions.

Particularly if my sample size is limited for logistical reasons, I must not make overly bold claims about the application of the research. Also, ideally, the use of multiple methods of evidence gathering would be helpful, such as contextualizing the primary source interviews of the women with interviews of experts in the field of gender studies, cross-border issues, and psychological trauma. I will also conduct a literature review of existing studies of survivors of other types of sexually and economically-related trauma. References Spencer, L, Ritchie, J, Lewis, J.

& Dillon, K. (2003). Quality in qualitative evaluation: A framework for assessing research.