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Reporting on the Issues of Research Rigour and Ethics: The Case of Publications Using Qualitative Methods in the Croatian Social Science Journals

This paper discusses the issues of research rigour and ethics in the qualitative research on the case of studies published in the Croatian social science journals. The author discusses the qualitative research applications of the concepts of generalizability, validity and reliability and the relevance of the ethical considerations in the qualitative research, and examines the conventions of reporting on these issues in the Croatian social science journals. For these purposes, the author examined articles using qualitative methods in which the researcher interacted with the research participants (in-depth interviews, focus groups interviews, observation) published in 2000–2009 in seven Croatian journals indexed in the International Bibliography of Social Sciences (IBSS) and/or Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The results testify to the underdeveloped conventions of reporting on the ethical issues, which are further reinforced by the weak institutional accountability in the domain of ethics regulations. Furthermore, the misconception about the lack of research rigour in qualitative studies is often responsible for the accusations of these studies being “less scientific”. But, just the opposite, good qualitative studies require stricter regimes of researcher accountability in terms of her/his research decisions and procedures. However, the reports on the research steps and the discussions of generalizability, validity and reliability, as adapted to the nature of the qualitative studies, are mostly missing from the Croatian publications using qualitative methods. This reinforces the misconceptions about the qualitative studies and disables the discerning reader from evaluating the credibility and legitimacy of the qualitative studies’ results.

research rigour ; ethics ; qualitative research ; generalizability ; validity ; reliability ; social sciences

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