In Pilnick and Swift’s article (2010), the quality of qualitative research in nutrition and dietetics is evaluated and reviewed. The authors note the increasing ubiquity of qualitative research, but still have questions about the quality of the research, finding it difficult to differentiate ‘good’ research from ‘bad’ research that has not been evaluated with sufficient rigor. To that end, this review works to go over several of the scientific debates that have taken place around the criteria used in qualitative research to evaluate quality, including validity, reliability, generalisability, and more. The qualitative design used is a literature review, dividing the literature used into the specific criteria and debates in order to properly organize the issues at hand, focusing first on the establishment of the problem and the creation of guidelines and checklists for assessing these pieces of research.
The research design is somewhat appropriate, as it organizes the issue at hand into strict and easy to follow categories. However, the question remains whether or not the qualitative research referenced is an accurate or representative sample of the whole of the field of qualitative research; the trends found may only be trend insofar as that specific literature is concerned. As this is merely a literature review, no ethical boundaries were crossed with regards to patient safety or confidentiality. If a qualitative design were used for this study, numeric values would be given to the criteria discussed in the article, in order to measure them against each other in objective values of quality. The fact that this is difficult to do is what necessitates the article in the first place; currently, it is difficult to determine the quality or true meaning of qualitative research design results and conclusions.
References
Pilnick, A., & Swift, J.A. (2010). Qualitative research in nutrition and dietetics: assessing
quality. Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics 24: 209-214.
