The NSF has just released the report from a 2005 workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Systematic Qualitative Research. The workshop brought together 24 scholars from cultural anthropology, law and social science, political science, and sociology to:
- articulate the standards used in their particular field to ensure rigor across the range of qualitative methodological approaches;
- identify common criteria shared across the four disciplines for designing and evaluating research proposals and fostering multidisciplinary collaborations; and
- develop an agenda for strengthening the tools, training, data, research design, and infrastructure for research using qualitative approaches.
The report promises to be useful for both practitioners and reviewers of qualitative research. There’s a two-page section on design and evaluation standards for qualitative research, presented in an almost checklist format, including items like, “Well-designed research incorporates a detailed and theoretically informed justification for case selection and sampling procedure.”
While the report is 180 pages long, the appendices start on page 19, and there’s a good executive summary. The report is available as a PDF from the NSF Website.
