CRITICAL CONCERNS OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH.

RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Reliability and validity are important criteria in establishing and assessing the quality of research for the quantitative researcher. However, there has been some discussion among qualitative researchers concerning their relevance for qualitative research. Moreover, even writers who take the view that the criteria are relevant have considered the possibility that the meanings of the terms need to be altered. For example, the issue of measurement validity almost by definition seems to carry connotations of measurements. Since measurement is not a major preoccupation among qualitative researchers, the issue of validity would seem to have little bearing on such studies. A number of different stances have been taken by qualitative researchers in relation to these issues.
Adapting reliability and validity for qualitative research.

One stance is to assimilate reliability and validity into qualitative research with little change of meaning. Mason, for example, her book on qualitative research, argues that reliability, validity and generalizability are different kinds of measures of the quality, rigour and wider potential of research, which are achieved according to certain methodological and disciplinary conventions and principles. She sticks very close to the meaning that these criteria have in quantitative research, where they have been largely developed. Thus, validity refers to whether you are observing, identifying, or measuring what you say you are. LeCompte and Goez write about the following. External reliability, by which they mean the degree to which a study can be replicated. This is a difficult criterion to meet in qualitative research, since, as LeCompte and Goetz recognize, it is impossible to freeze a social setting and the circumstances of an initial study to make it replicable in the sense in which the term is usually employed. However, they suggest several strategies that can be introduced in order to approach are requirements of external reliability. For example, they suggest that a qualitative researcher replicating ethnographic research needs to adopt a similar social role to that adopted by the original researcher. Otherwise what a researcher conducting a replication sees and hears will not be comparable to the original research. Internal reliability, by which they mean whether, when there is more than one observer, members of the research team agree about what they see and hear. This is a similar notion to inter-observer consistency. Internal validity, by which they mean whether there is a good match between researchers observations and the theoretical ideas they develop. LeCompte and Goetz argue that internal validity tends to be a strength of qualitative research, particularly ethnographic research, because the prolonged participation in the social life group over a long period of time allows the researcher to ensure a high level of congruence between concepts and observations.

External validity which refers to the degree to which findings can be generalized across social settings. LeCompte and Goetz argue that external validity represents a problem for qualitative researchers because of their tendency to employ case studies and small samples.

As this brief treatment suggests, qualitative researchers have tended to employ the terms reliability and validity in very similar ways to quantitative researchers when seeking to develop criteria for assessing research.