Research: Qualitative Research

• Provides depth and detail: looks deeper than analysing ranks and counts by recording attitudes, feelings and behaviours
• Creates openness: encouraging people to expand on their responses can open up new topic areas not initially considered
• Simulates people's individual experiences: a detailed picture can be built up about why people act in certain ways and their feelings about these actions
• Attempts to avoid pre-judgements: if used alongside quantitative data collection, it can explain why a particular response was given

• Usually fewer people studied: collection of qualitative data is generally more time consuming that quantitative data collection and therefore unless time, staff and budget allows it is generally necessary to include a smaller sample size.
• Less easy to generalise: because fewer people are generally studied it is not possible to generalise results to that of the population. Usually exact numbers are reported rather than percentages.
• Difficult to make systematic comparisons: for example, if people give widely differing responses that are highly subjective.
• Dependent on skills of the researcher: particularly in the case of conducting interviews, focus groups and observation.

Finding Qualitative Research

Formulate your question using:

Population AND Situation

or PICo

Population 

phenomena of Interest

Context

See PICO or PICo from Curtin University Systematic Reviews Guide 

Qualitative research filter for PubMed

PubMed includes saved search strategies (queries) that may help in the identification of literature relavent to health services research, including qualitative research.

1. Connect to PubMed
2. Under PubMed Tools choose Topic-Specific Queries .
3. Choose Health Services Research (HSR) Queries.
4. Select category Qualitative Research and choose narrow (usually preferable) or broad scope.  [Note:  To see what this actually searches, click on filter table.]
5. Type topic terms in search box and click Go.

A modification of this strategy is linked below. Click on the strategy to run the search in PubMed, using the KEMH-specific URL.  You may then add other concepts to the search

qualitative research [MeSH] OR qualitative[tiab] OR themes[tiab]

Adapted from Duke University