Write and represent qualitative data

Undertaking a piece of qualitative research can be an exciting, stimulating and thought-provoking exercise. It can enable the exploration of complex phenomena relating to aspects of medical education, patient perceptions and policy implementations. However, it may also prove to be an extremely stressful and time-consuming activity, requiring high levels of commitment. Having embarked upon a piece of qualitative research, the novice researcher will find that each of these elements very soon becomes apparent and perhaps none more so than the fact that qualitative enquiry generates huge volumes of data. For example, a one-to-one interview lasting an hour can typically generate 25–30 pages of transcript. Often these data are unwieldy, and the role of the researcher is to ‘make sense’ of them. This means imposing meaning, via a process of coding and analysis, of what has been captured. A central element of any research, once completed, is that it should be communicated to others. Crucially then, the work needs to be written and disseminated to as wide an audience as possible, in order to share its insights. While there are a number of different outlets for the dissemination of research findings with different audiences and style conventions, in order to do justice to the findings, there is a universal need to provide a clear, detailed account of the ‘what’, ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the study. However, the ways in which qualitative studies are written require a very different approach than that adopted for writing up quantitative work. In part this is because in a qualitative study, writing is an integral part of the analysis. The ways in which the research findings are communicated can be seen as a continuation of the reflexive process that will have informed the study as a whole. Importantly, the qualitative writing-up process recognises and acknowledges that the ‘facts’ created during empirical research are socially mediated. It is essential, therefore, to make explicit in the writing, the ways in which our own prejudices and preconceptions inform and shape both the research activity and its interpretations. This will allow for the account to make visible the subjective nature of the work and the concomitant partiality of the version that is produced. Consequently, writing up qualitative research needs to be approached in such a way as to ensure that the research process is adequately described. The assumptions made about the setting, the participants, and the events should all be recorded, and the methods used to collect the data should be adequately defined. This clarity of reporting will enable others to understand the research process and interpret the findings for themselves. Crucially too, the writing process itself allows the researcher to focus on the data that have been generated by the study, and to think about the connections that can be made both within and between them and the extant literatures. The wider research community relies on the ability of researchers to provide a clear and transparent account of their own work which will withstand the scrutiny of others. It is important, therefore, to include sufficient detail on both the research design and the research process. This will enable the reader to fully appreciate the rigour of the design and its implementation, and to better understand how the data have been analysed and theorised. With a qualitative study, the ideal time to begin to think about the writing process will be at the very onset of the project. It is important to keep a research diary to record the choices that are faced and the decisions that are made, together with the justifications for them as they arise. This is not only good research practice, but it also makes the reporting much simpler, since over the course of the study forgetting why something was done, or not done, is very easy. Formal guidelines for writing up quantitative studies have been available for a number of years (e.g. CONSORT [1], QUOROM [2], and MOOSE [3]) and are widely used by researchers to structure their accounts and help readers to gain a better understanding of the nature of the processes underpinning the research. More recently, Tong et al. [4] have developed a set of criteria to allow for the