Making Meaning Matter: an Editor’s Perspective on Publishing Qualitative Research

The term qualitative research refers to a family of primarily non-numeric methods for describing, analyzing, and interpreting the lived experiences of people in their day to day lives. Originally developed to study social problems such as poverty, juvenile delinquency, and race relations, qualitative research methods have been used in the health sciences since the 1960s to better understand the socialization of medical professionals and the culture of medical education and practice. More recently, qualitative research has been employed in health services research to address and improve the quality and safety of care. While quantitative researchers generally ask “what” or “how many” questions, qualitative researchers generally ask, “why” or “how”? Publishing qualitative research comes with a number of challenges, among them, manuscript length, unfamiliarity of reviewers with qualitative traditions, and sample sizes that, by design, are difficult to generalize from. In addition, while there is general agreement about the quality of evidence and types of research designs used in quantitative studies, the same is not yet the case for qualitative and mixed methods research although a variety of useful guidelines have recently appeared. From the perspective of journal editors, we raise and offer guidance on three important questions: (1) Is the study under review suitable for this journal? (2) What is the rationale for using qualitative methods to carry out the research? (3) What are editors/reviewers looking for in a qualitative submission? In unpacking the third question, we describe common strategies editors use and challenges that we have encountered in the abstract, background, methods, results, discussion, and conclusions sections of qualitative submissions we and our colleagues have reviewed.