Toward Methodological Emancipation in Applied Health Research
- 16 December 2010
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Qualitative Health Research
- Vol. 21 (4), 443-453
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732310392595
Abstract
In this article, I trace the historical groundings of what have become methodological conventions in the use of qualitative approaches to answer questions arising from the applied health disciplines and advocate an alternative logic more strategically grounded in the epistemological orientations of the professional health disciplines. I argue for an increasing emphasis on the modification of conventional qualitative approaches to the particular knowledge demands of the applied practice domain, challenging the merits of what may have become unwarranted attachment to theorizing. Reorienting our methodological toolkits toward the questions arising within an evidence-dominated policy agenda, I encourage my applied health disciplinary colleagues to make themselves useful to that larger project by illuminating that which quantitative research renders invisible, problematizing the assumptions on which it generates conclusions, and filling in the gaps in knowledge needed to make decisions on behalf of people and populations.Keywords
This publication has 38 references indexed in Scilit:
- How Different is Qualitative Health Research From Qualitative Research? Do We Have a Subdiscipline?Qualitative Health Research, 2010
- What's in a name? Qualitative description revisitedResearch in Nursing & Health, 2009
- Evaluative Criteria for Qualitative Research in Health Care: Controversies and RecommendationsAnnals of Family Medicine, 2008
- Whatever happened to qualitative description?Research in Nursing & Health, 2000
- The Significance of SaturationQualitative Health Research, 1995
- Going in "Blind"Qualitative Health Research, 1994
- Methodological Orthodoxy in Qualitative Nursing Research: Analysis of the IssuesQualitative Health Research, 1991
- A Historical Overview of the Phenomenologic MovementImage: the Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 1987
- Ethnography: contributions to nursing researchJournal of Advanced Nursing, 1984
- Loss of self: a fundamental form of suffering in the chronically illSociology of Health & Illness, 1983