Exploring Ethical Validation as a Key Consideration in Interpretive Research Quality

The engineering education community is adopting an increasingly diverse range of qualitative methods. This rapid expansion in required methodological expertise has sparked a vibrant discourse around ways to foster and articulate research quality in qualitative and mixed-methods studies. This paper describes three engineering education scholars’ engagement with a processoriented framework for interpretive research quality. Set in the context of a collaborative inquirybased approach to reflecting on and improving research practice, this paper presents five instances when we turned to the framework to address quality challenges that emerged in our own research projects. Analysis of these experiences demonstrates the exploratory and explanatory power of the existing framework. At the same time, however, our collaborative process revealed the need to consider another dimension of research quality, specifically concerned with the human experience of the researcher and the researched throughout the inquiry. In this context, we propose Ethical Validation as a validation construct that, we argue, lies at the heart of conducting and evaluating interpretive research.