Promoting meaningful qualitative research in social pharmacy: moving beyond reporting guidelines

The application of qualitative research has expanded in the health professions and is increasingly accepted by journals and funding agencies. Similarly, the application of qualitative research methods in social pharmacy has grown exponentially. From 1970 to 1990, a total of, 48 publications studied community pharmacy using qualitative research methods. By 2017, that had doubled to 99 publications in a single year (Figure 1). The expansion of qualitative research in social pharmacy has enabled our field to move beyond characterizing practice and its impact to allow for exploration of experiences, understandings, and processes in pharmacy practice. The application of qualitative research in social pharmacy builds on seminal of works by qualitative research pioneers and decades of methodological, epistemological and ontological debates in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology and nursing. Given this lineage, researchers in social pharmacy should strive for credible research that not only makes a significant contribution to social pharmacy but also advances the field of qualitative research. We argue progress could be achieved by (1) the thoughtful application of publishing guidelines and (2) moving beyond checklists alone to consider to the generation of themes and application of theory. First, while the use of qualitative reporting guidelines does not inherently result in high-quality qualitative work, they ideally help authors provide the necessary detail so peer reviewers and eventually readers can assess the merits and rigour of a study and avoid the ‘waste’ in biomedical research due to bad reporting. Dozens of reporting guidelines have been developed by experienced qualitative researchers. While each has unique elements, they have many commonalities. Most address the concepts of reflexivity, qualitative paradigms, sampling and recruitment, coding and analysis, and data presentation and discussion. One of the most widely used in health research is the COnsolidated criteria for REporting Qualitative research (COREQ). This guide is a 32-item checklist that was developed from a synthesis of 22 other reporting guidelines. The criteria in the COREQ are discrete, making it a relatively simple process to examine if a study meets particular criteria. A more recent guideline is the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (SRQR). The SRQR is more conceptual and gives overall guidance on reporting study elements, such as a general call for a description of study procedures that support trustworthiness, and a discussion that elaborates on how the findings connect to and challenge other research. Reporting guidelines are useful throughout the qualitative research process, not just in the final stages of manuscript preparation. Both new and experienced researchers could use reporting guidelines in crafting their initial proposal, documenting their process and decisions while collecting data, analysing the data and in all aspects of disseminating their work. There may be a benefit to using multiple reporting guidelines, such as using the COREQ in study design and the SRQR during analysis and reporting. Journal editors and peer reviewers may employ reporting guidelines to ensure the completeness of articles and refer to them when requesting that authors provide missing information. Some journals already recommend including a completed checklist with article submission. As mentioned previously, checking off all reporting guideline elements does not inherently produce a highquality article. Barbour suggests that the unreflective application of standards may provide a false sense of quality. For example, the use of ‘grounded theory’ is too often claimed in place of methodological details and epistemological underpinnings. Lau and Traulsen identified two areas where researchers may benefit from additional attention as they are not easily assessed using checklists: (1) the difference between themes and categories, and (2) the use of theory in qualitative research. Both authors shared equally in conceptualizing, writing and critically reviewing the draft for important intellectual content and approved the final version to be published.