23rd May 2006

Shenton, Andrew K. (2004). Strategies for ensuring trustworthiness in qualitative research projects. Education for Information 22; 63-75. IOS Press

The journal club met yesterday and discussed an article about qualitative research in libraries, and strategies for assessing the 'trustworthiness' (another word for validity or quality) of these types of studies. To put this in context of library research, an article published in J Info Sci, 2004 found that in libraries, descriptive research (an observational method) is published more frequently than any other type, and the domains with the highest number of research studies, in order, were Information Access and Retrieval, Collections, Management, Education, Reference.

The group spent most of the time discussing various methods which fall under the 4 broad criteria (these are credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability), relating these to particular examples from our own experiences in conducting and assessing research (or what we'd like to research). Some of the methods discussed were: triangulation, the role of the researcher's 'reflective commentary', the importance of context for transferability, and of having 'thick' i.e detailed descriptions of the context and the processes followed, researcher bias and objectivity, discussing methods and hypotheses with peers and colleagues, validating the meaning of the data with participants, and more!

Outcome: We decided that on the whole, we thought it would be possible to use these methods in our own research projects, and when applying the findings of research studies to our own situations.