Ensuring Trustworthiness in Qualitative Research
Quantitative researchers talk about reliability and validity. Qualitative researchers more often talk about trustworthiness: whether readers can have confidence in the findings and how they were reached. In this blog, we'll look at the four widely used criteria proposed by Lincoln and Guba (1985) and practical strategies for meeting each one.
Credibility:
- Credibility asks whether your findings are a believable account of participants' experiences.
- Strategies include prolonged engagement with the setting, triangulation of data sources or methods, and member checking, where participants review a summary of findings.
- Peer debriefing, where a colleague questions your interpretations, can also help.
Transferability:
- Transferability asks whether your findings might apply in other contexts.
- You cannot prove this yourself, but you can help readers judge it by providing thick description: detailed information about your setting, participants and context.
Dependability:
- Dependability asks whether your research process is consistent and well documented.
- Keep an audit trail that records your decisions about sampling, data collection, coding and theme development.
- An external audit, where someone reviews your process, can strengthen dependability.
Confirmability:
- Confirmability asks whether the findings are shaped by participants' data rather than by the researcher's own assumptions.
- Support your interpretations with clear evidence, such as quotations, and link each theme back to the data.
- Keep a reflexive journal in which you note your own background, assumptions and reactions, and consider how they might influence the analysis.
Writing About Trustworthiness:
- Include a short section in your methodology chapter that names the criteria you used and the specific strategies you applied.
- Be concrete. Instead of saying "member checking was used", explain how many participants reviewed what, and what changed as a result.
- Some qualitative traditions use different quality criteria, so check what is expected in your field and by your supervisor.
Trustworthiness is built throughout a qualitative study, not added at the end. Plan your strategies for credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability from the start, document what you do, and report it clearly. This will give examiners confidence in your findings.