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1 The “What,” “Why,” “Who,” and “How” of Qualitative Research: A Snapshot

      Qualitative research methods began to appear in nursing in the 1960s and 1970s, to cautious and reluctant acceptance. In the 1980s, qualitative health research emerged as a distinctive domain and mode of inquiry (Sandelowski 2003). “Qualitative research” refers to any kind of research that produces findings not arrived at by means of statistical analysis or other means of quantification (Borbasi and Jackson 2012; Strauss and Corbin 1990). It uses a naturalistic approach that seeks to understand phenomena related to persons' lives, stories, and behaviors, including those related to health, organizational functioning, social movements, and interactional relationships. It is underpinned by several theoretical perspectives, namely constructivist‐interpretive, critical, post‐positivist, post‐structural/post‐modern, and feminist (Ingham‐Broomfield 2015). One conducts a qualitative study to uncover the nature of a person's experiences with a phenomenon in context‐specific conditions such as illness (acute and chronic), addiction, loss, disability, and end‐of‐life (EOL ). Qualitative research is used to explore, uncover, describe, and understand what lies behind a given phenomenon, about which little may be known. This deeper understanding can only be attained through a qualitative inquiry, and not through mere numbers or statistical models. Qualitative inquiry represents a legitimate mode of social and human science exploration, without apology and without comparison to quantitative research (Creswell 2007).

1.1 Why Do Qualitative Research?

The tradition of using qualitative methods to study human phenomena is grounded in the social sciences (Streubert and Carpenter 1999). This methodological revolution has made way for a more interpretative approach, because aspects of human values, culture, and relationships are not described fully using quantitative research methods. Unlike quantitative researchers, who seek causal determination, prediction, and generalization of findings, qualitative researchers allow the phenomenon of interest to unfold naturally (Patton 2014), striving to explore, describe, understand, and delve into a colorful, deep, contextual world of interpretations (Golafshani 2001). Thus, the practice of qualitative research has expanded to clinical settings because empirical approaches have proven to be inadequate in answering questions related to human subjectivity where interpretation is involved (Thorne 1997). Consequently, qualitative health research is a research approach to exploring health and illness as they are perceived by the individual, rather than from the researcher's perspective (Morse 2012). Morse (2012) states that “Researchers use qualitative research methods to illicit emotions and perspectives, beliefs, and values, actions, and behaviors, and to understand the participant's responses to health and illness, and the meanings they construct about the experience” (p. 21). Qualitative research provides a rich inductive description that necessitates interpretation. It also calls for more holistic evidence to inform health policy decision‐making, shining a spotlight on the synthesis of qualitative evidence (Carroll 2017; Lewin et al. 2018; Majid and Vanstone 2018). Researchers in the healthcare arena, practitioners, and policy‐makers are increasingly pressed to translate these qualitative findings for practice, put them to use, and evaluate their utility in effecting desired change, with the goal of improving public health and reducing disparities in healthcare delivery (Sandelowski 2003).

      Morse (2012) asserts that there are other reasons for conducting a qualitative inquiry. Other writers believe that the role of qualitative inquiry is to provide hypotheses and research questions based on the findings of qualitative studies. Qualitative research can serve as a foundation from which to develop surveys and questionnaires, thus producing models for quantitative testing. But what is really the most important function of qualitative inquiry? According to Morse (2012), it is the moral imperative of qualitative inquiry to humanize health care. She states: “The social justice agenda of qualitative health research is one that humanizes

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