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

From practice to research
tracked down through a network of people, organisations and peak
bodies or clearing houses.
It is highly desirable to undertake a thorough literature search
and here the assistance of a specialist librarian will be helpful in
accessing the numerous electronic databases which contain the
published research literature. This involves carefully selecting key
words relating to the research topic and systematically searching
electronic data bases for books, journal articles and reports which
have been classified according to one or more of the key words. It
is possible to pay someone to do this for you, but it is essential that
this person fully understand your question and your setting and
thus it is preferable to do it together. That way you also learn the
skills of searching the literature.
It is important to be aware that the same thing may be described
differently in different places and sometimes the same terminology
means rather different things in different places. For example, the
term ‘child care’ in Australia generally refers to the day care of
children of working parents, whereas in the United Kingdom ‘child
care’ is often synonymous with child welfare or child protection. If
the literature search is crossing service systems, or is going back to
a time when different terminology prevailed, then it is obviously
important to know the range of terms to use in any literature search.
More challenging again is to ask ‘What is my question a question
of?’ in order to conceptualise your issue of interest. What you are
interested in may be a concrete example of a broader phenomenon
and it may be very useful to consult this broader literature. For
example, in the study described above on post-natal depression and
the role of the maternal and child health nurse, asking ‘What is the
question a question of?’ led to a body of literature which a literature
search based on the more obvious key words would not have
accessed.
By conceptualising the question as one which was essentially
about the core and marginal functions of a professional role (the
core role of the nurse was weighing and measuring babies and the
marginal role was assessing maternal emotional well-being), role
theory became a central conceptual framework for the study. It led
to examining other studies which at first sight might seem totally
irrelevant (such as studies on the roles of policewomen and parish
priests). These, however, proved to be very pertinent and helped
lead the researcher out of a narrow mindset to fresh ways of seeing
the issue.
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