Reporting Standards for Qualitative Primary , Qualitative Meta-Analytic , and Mixed Methods Research in Psychology : The APA Publications and Communications Board Task Force Report

State the problem/question/objectives under investigation. • Indicate the study design, including types of participants or data sources, and analytic strategy, main results/findings, main implications/significance. • Identify five keywords. • Authors: Consider including at least one keyword that describes the method and one that describes the types of participants or phenomenon under investigation. • Authors: Consider describing your approach to inquiry when it will facilitate the review process and intelligibility of your paper. If your work is not grounded in a specific approach to inquiry or your approach would be too complicated to explain in the allotted word count, however, it would not be advisable to provide explication on this point in the abstract. Introduction Description of research problem or question • Frame the problem or question and its context. • Reviewers: The introduction may include case examples, personal narratives, vignettes, or other illustrative material. • Review, critique, and synthesize the applicable literature to identify key issues/debates/theoretical frameworks in the relevant literature to clarify barriers, knowledge gaps, or practical needs. Study objectives/aims/ research goals • State the purpose(s)/goal(s)/aim(s) of the study. • State the target audience, if specific. • Provide the rationale for fit of design used to investigate this purpose/goal (e.g., theory building, explanatory, developing understanding, social action, description, highlighting social practices). • Describe the approach to inquiry, if it illuminates the objectives and research rationale (e.g., descriptive, interpretive, feminist, psychoanalytic, postpositivist, constructivist, critical, postmodern or constructivist, or pragmatic approaches). • Authors: If relevant to objectives, explain the relation of the current analysis to prior articles/ publications. • Reviewers: Qualitative studies often legitimately need to be divided into multiple manuscripts because of journal article page limitations, but each manuscript should have a separate focus. • Reviewers: Qualitative studies tend not to identify hypotheses, but research questions and goals. Method Research design overview • Summarize the research design (data-collection strategies, dataanalytic strategies, and, if illuminating, approaches to inquiry (e.g., descriptive, interpretive, feminist, psychoanalytic, postpositivist, critical, postmodern or constructivist, pragmatic approaches). • Provide the rationale for the design selected. • Reviewers: Method sections can be written in a chronological or narrative format. • Reviewers: Although they provide a method description that other investigators should be able to follow, it is not required that other investigators arrive at the same conclusions, but rather that their method should lead them to conclusions with a similar degree of methodological integrity. • Reviewers: At times, elements may be relevant to multiple sections and authors need to organize what belongs in each subsection in order to describe the method coherently and reduce redundancy. For instance, the overview and the objectives statement may be presented in one section. • Reviewers: Processes of qualitative research are often iterative versus linear, may evolve through the inquiry process, and may move between data collection and analysis in multiple formats. As a result, data collection and analysis sections might be combined. • Reviewers: For the reasons above and because qualitative methods often are adapted and combined creatively, requiring detailed description and rationale, an average qualitative Method section typically is longer than an average quantitative Method section. 34 LEVITT ET AL.