Building Rigor in Qualitative Methods: Application to a Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study

Marilyn Peterson Armour
School of Social Work
University of Texas at Austin
1925 San Jacinto Boulevard
Austin TX  78712
512-471-3197
FAX: 512-263-5812
marmour@mail.utexas.edu
This paper will describe an innovative use of hermeneutic phenomenology in a qualitative study of 14 families of homicide victims and the strategies employed to build rigor into the study.
 
Data collection included family interviews to capture the experience of shared loss due to murder, triangulation of data through a review of newspaper accounts, victim impact statements, videos, and magazine articles, and a detailed log of the researcher’s observations and reactions.  Data analysis included assignment and clustering of themes on a line-by-line and holistic reading of transcripts, determination of essential themes using the process of imaginative variation, and re-coding using Atlas-ti to retrieve the quotes to substantiate and describe the findings.
 
Strategies to build rigor included the regular use of a consultant in hermeneutic phenomenology, family interviews as a check on the credibility of members’ accounts, the “shadowing” of the entire research process by an second independent consultant, a structured rating system to assess the applicability of the results, and anonymous written responses to the findings from support group facilitators.    The systematic completion of reflection sheets for researcher accountability, spot checks for interrater consensus, independent review of audiotapes for researcher influence on participants, collaborative review of theme development, and substantiation of findings based on independent matching of associated quotes with themes added additional precision to the study.
 
These strategies answer some of the issues that have plagued qualitative inquiry by offering techniques for contextualizing data collection, enhancing reliability and validity of the research process, and substantiating the validity of research results.  Moreover, these strategies provide mechanisms to monitor the objective use of the researcher’s subjectivity.  This paper offers detailed guidelines to operationalize these strategies.