Fidelity of Qualitative Data

Among the readings for this week, the arguments of Silver and Patasnick (2011) in relation to the fidelity of qualitative data draw my interest. The authors touch a very important at the same time very sensitive issue in qualitative research. Their discussions take me back to our first class meetings in which we discussed the importance of the reflection in the qualitative research. At that time, we came to agreement that reflection makes the qualitative research more transparent both for researchers and readers; consequently increases the trustworthiness of the study. In particular, reflection serves as means that making the qualitative study more perceptible and more visible for readers.

From Silver and Patasnick discussions, in particular from this statement “The relative lack of detailed documentation about analytic and technical procedures or critiques of software utility represents both an important gap in the literature and a failure to be transparent and reflexive” ( p.5) I have understood that researchers should keep their reflective stances when they use certain software programs. In relation to reflectivity, researchers who use CAQADAS first should gain awareness about their rationales why they use certain software programs and how they analyze the data using those programs. Also researchers should be knowledgeable about the features software programs and the dimensions of their data . In this way they can make sense whether digital tools they selected  are suitable to use for their own research. For instance, as Silver and Patasnick reveal, video is a multidimensional and complex data, so producing an analyzable data from that video requires more process and will be challenging. At this point, researchers should find the appropriate software programs and research approaches that allow them to analyze the data without losing the quality of original data.