Premium
What's in a name? Qualitative description revisited
Author(s) -
Sandelowski Margarete
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
research in nursing and health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.836
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1098-240X
pISSN - 0160-6891
DOI - 10.1002/nur.20362
Subject(s) - qualitative research , interpretation (philosophy) , value (mathematics) , epistemology , sociology , psychology , computer science , linguistics , social science , philosophy , machine learning
Abstract “Whatever Happened to Qualitative Description?” (Sandelowski, 2000) was written to critique the prevailing tendency in qualitative health research to claim the use of methods that were not actually used and to clarify a methodological approach rarely identified as a distinctive method. The article has generated several misconceptions, most notably that qualitative description requires no interpretation of data. At the root of these misconceptions is the persistent challenge of defining qualitative research methods. Qualitative description is a “distributed residual category” (Bowker & Star, 2000). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) in the classification of these methods. Its value lies not only in the knowledge its use can produce, but also as a vehicle for presenting and treating research methods as living entities that resist simple classification. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Res Nurs Health 33:77–84, 2010