You consult for Fortune Globule 500 companies and serve as a project lead for qualitative studies. A CEO of one of your client companies strongly prefers quantitative over qualitative methodology. In one of the meetings, you overheard him make a remark to another executive about the lack of trustworthiness of qualitative data sources and results. How do you help the CEO overcome this concern? Explain.
STUDENT JUAN-
To assist the CEO’s understanding about qualitative trustworthiness is to have a knowledge base on the qualitative methodology and how it has become trustworthy in research. To aid in the explanation of what is qualitative methodology is to say that this type of research is the understanding of people’s perceptions and meaning behind their lived experience where participant give details of what is happening in non-numerical narrative (Wilson, 2015). Furthermore, qualitative methodology is based on researcher choice of data collection, and in some instances can be questioned this type of methodology is bias, however, to avoid bias researcher would create semi-structured interviews, open-ended questions, or focus group to gain in-depth experiences and be transparent (Adler,2022). According to Jones (2021), who describes qualitative trustworthiness by verification of data collection such as peer reviews, lengthy interaction of participant and triangulation of data. This information discussed I would hope would build a stronger emphasis on how qualitative research can be addressed as trustworthy. Quantitative over Qualitative methodology
STUDENT 1- MEL
One way to open the conversation with the CEO is to acknowledge that historically, yes there have been concerns over the trustworthiness of qualitative research. Then proceed to inform the CEO of measures taken to address these concerns succinctly. Qualitative research meets a need to explore and discover phenomena and requires different criteria to judge trustworthiness (Antwi & Hamza, 2015). The CEO should also be informed that the foundation of qualitative research also benefits from an understanding of previous events and demonstrates the need to explore the phenomenon of interest (Chenail, 2009). Through this exploration, the company can discover information on little-known topics and explore the perspectives of potential clients (Antwi & Hamza, 2015). The company can then utilize this information in business planning and discover new topics such as leadership and follower engagement within the company or new areas of product development.
Qualitative research does have trustworthiness as a potential barrier to conducting meaningful research. The CEO should have an understanding of how trustworthiness is demonstrated through qualitative research such as reflexivity, triangulation, or member checking. Huttunen and Kakkori (2020) describe four dimensions of trustworthiness of credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability as validation criteria. The CEO should also be reminded that misleading data through research misconduct continues to be a concern in quantitative methods. This includes falsifying data or utilizing incorrect statistical analysis (Bradford, 2017). Both qualitative and quantitative have limitations but also meet different purposes in data collection and interpretation. Quantitative over Qualitative methodology
STUDENT BIND
To make the CEO aware of the use of qualitative methodology and address his concern about trustworthiness, they should be exploratory about the nature of the qualitative methodology and how and provides deeper insights into real-world problems. Qualitative research is also concerned with the meaning people attach to things and focuses on understanding people from their frame of reference and experiences. Qualitative research seeks to describe, decode, translate, and come to terms with the meaning of natural phenomena in the social world. Qualitative research is used to understand patterns of behaviors, describe lived experiences, and develop behavioral theories. Furthermore, qualitative methodology is well suited for locating people’s meanings in their lives, events, processes, structures, and perspectives (Rapport, 2004).
Although critiques of qualitative methodology have charged that qualitative research could be more robust and significant, such attitude is due, in part, to the poor quality of some early efforts. Increasingly, however, qualitative studies have improved rigor, such as ensuring the data’s trustworthiness. For example, narrative data is rich in its use of metaphor and description and expresses deeper levels of meaning. Compared to everyday language, they are likely to yield a trustworthy final model because the investigators have thoroughly described and understood the topic under study. Moreover, validity is also enhanced by some methodologies, such as grounded theory, which use participants’ own words to name categories and themes instead of using labels given by the investigator (Xiaohong, 2012) APA
