Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

From practice to research
or exit from the marriage within an organisational
setting. So I was also concerned about the context in
which they visited, the purpose of meeting and visiting
and how nursing homes provided for family visiting
and so on...I was determined to try and catch what
it was like for the older people ...My concern was
that their perspective wasn’t understood in practice or
in policy. Visitors were being constructed in policy as
resources to help the organisation and to provide
resources for the resident, and I had a very firm view
that the purpose and meaning of visiting for this group
was particularly different.
Comments
Several points about qualitative research emerge from these
examples. First, it is important to note that each of these studies
grew out of a particular time and place. For example, Tim and
Wendy Booth’s study can be seen in the context of the history of
deinstitutionalisation and the emergence of reproductive rights for
people with intellectual disabilities. Similarly, Anne Coleman’s
study is about a particular community of homeless people in a
particular area that was undergoing urban redevelopment and
gentrification at a particular period of time. Cheryl Tilse’s study was
a response to what she considered to be a too-narrow conception of
the role of spouse visitors in nursing homes.
One of the issues for qualitative research is therefore the degree
of generalisability of findings across settings. The researcher needs
to acknowledge the limitation of their study’s findings in terms of
the context in which they were obtained and give the reader sufficient
information about this context. The reader needs to be aware
of this so that they can make allowances when extrapolating the
findings to other settings.
Second, it is probably obvious to the reader that the sample size
in most of these studies is much smaller than one would expect in
quantitative research and that the sample is often not selected
systematically to ensure that it is representative of a particular
population. Obtaining representative samples in these contexts is
often very difficult, and as the researcher seeks greater depth
of understanding there is an inevitable trade-off in the number of
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