Why a Toolkit for Qualitative Research?

In my new book, Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone: An Essential Toolkit, I use a toolkit approach. But what do I mean by this?

The toolkit for qualitative research is a collection of expert skills, knowledge, procedures, tools, or information.

The book shares this collection of ‘tools’ across nine chapters, because I believe that once you are familiar with a wide range of tools, you can draw on them as and when required in order to make informed and relevant choices that reflect your own philosophical perspective, that respect your research participants, and that you can explain and justify when asked.

My overall aim is for qualitative researchers to be flexible, ethical, and respectful – of all that has gone before them and all they hope to achieve.

I’m not sure how many tools there are in the book (the word toolkit appears over 200 times) but here is an example of some. Toolkit boxes highlight my most important take-aways.

For your toolkit: qualitative research proceeds in a flexible and responsive manner so that we can learn as we go from our participants and from our own experiences.

For your toolkit: Objectivity here means we aim to learn from and with our participants, not to impose our views of the world on them through our predetermined research questions.

For your toolkit: philosophy should provide the role of underlabourer, helping us make sense of the choices we make and their implicit assumptions, not dictating decisions.

For your toolkit: phenomenology simply means obtaining the actors’ point of view, tapping into their lived experiences, feelings, and meanings, how they relate to the world.

For your toolkit: put ethnographic methods, and creative and participatory methods, into your methods toolkit and consider their role in achieving your research aims and objectives.

For your toolkit: ongoing sampling involves returning to (more or the same) people, to examine emergent ideas, new topics, developing insights, and reviewing what, where and who are included as known relevant diversity.

For your toolkit: if qualitative research is ongoing, iterative and inductive, then so must be our relationships with participants, gatekeepers and funders.

I hope this has given you a bit of a flavour of how a toolkit approach might be helpful.

You might also enjoy The Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone Podcast

https://shows.acast.com/qualitative-research-methods-for-everyone-podcast/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts