I'm about to teach an evaluation course in public health. When I taught the
course before we looked exclusively at quantitative research and used threats to
internal validity as the main basis of determining 'success' of a program. This
time I would like to include evaluation of qualitative research but I'm not sure
just how to go about it or maybe even if I'm asking the right questions. Is
'success' in qualitative research primarily about theory generation? Is it
about two or more researchers looking at the same transcripts and pulling out
the same themes? Am I really trying to get at apples and oranges here,
quantitative evaluation measuring program success in terms (for public health)
of behaviour change, qualitative research looking at data-gathering to enhance
program design and/or implementation but not program outcomes?
I may be just getting to a place of thinking about this that many of you have
been for awhile now so I would appreciate your thoughts on this or ways to
decipher my, as yet, fuzzy thinking.
Books that I've examined so far do not explicitly address evaluation of
qualitative research (some have discussed using qualitative methods to enhance
quantitative methods of assessment) so any resources would also be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Jacquie Fraser, PhD
Department of Health Science
Armstrong Atlantic State University
Savannah, Georgia USA
|