Should qualitative health researchers call themselves ‘qualitative health researchers’?

Dr Kirsten Bell is a Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Imperial College’s Patient Experience Research Centre. She’s also a member of the BRC Qualitative Social and Behavioural Research Network. Here she reflects on how labelling research disciplines influences how we think about them.

Qualitative research is a concept that has become thoroughly naturalised today. As Aldrich observes, most of us take the ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ distinction for granted as ‘a seemingly fixed property in the firmament of social science data collection and analysis strategies’. Indeed, many academics – especially those working in the fields of health and medicine – define themselves as ‘qualitative researchers’. But this is a relatively new way of speaking about – and thinking about – research.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the qualitative/quantitative distinction came into usage. If there is a culprit for the distinction, it is arguably psychology. As Jovanović has outlined, although there was an explosion of interest in non-numeric methods in psychology in the 1960s, they were minority approaches that were deemed suspect and unscientific – a view that remains dominant today in the field.

While the ‘qualitative’ label was a reaction to the value placed on quantification, some have argued that it ironically reinforced it, by reifying differences between so-called qualitative and quantitative approaches. It also served to remove the latter methods from their disciplinary underpinnings, with qualitative research increasingly framed ‘as method or technique, a “toolbox” of procedures divorced from their philosophical undercarriage’. However, these efforts to consider qualitative research as a unified field (e.g., the COREQ criteria), inevitably impose a particular view of what ‘good’ qualitative research looks like. Standards, after all, are never neutral but codify, embody and prescribe particular ethics and values.

This begs the question of whether it’s in our interests to claim the ‘qualitative health researcher’ label. While this provides a ready-made identity, it’s important to think about what we mean by the term and why we use it, especially given that until relatively recently we were not identifying ourselves in such a fashion. I guess it comes down to what is lost and what is gained by employing the label. The answer to that question is probably far less self-evident than we think.