A plea to include the people, stories, and lives in qualitative research writing, and to avoid Disembodied Quotes
When I am delivering Research Methods Training, I often ask participants to please try to avoid using disembodied quotes when writing up, or presenting. I thought it was time I clarified what I mean by this, as it is not written anywhere (to my knowledge). By disembodied quotes I mean this sort of thing:
One of the themes that emerged in the study was that research participants felt the GPs were using terminology they couldn’t understand, and they often felt both embarrassed to ask for clarification, and pressed for time.
“I always feel the doctor is in a rush, so when she told me I’ve got xxx, I didn’t want to ask what she meant. I know the answer would take a long time and I still not might understand” (woman, 40s).
This is OK. It is clear what is going on here, but it lacks richness, context, and personality. We learn very little about this woman who is speaking, and she doesn’t even have a name. Compare it with this.
Research participants were reluctant to ask questions when they felt their lack of understanding was vast, or when they believed the GP was under a lot of pressure with regards to time. Sophie, a mother of two in her 40s, had visited her GP for her own health (as opposed to taking her children) for the first time in ten years . She was very anxious about her symptoms, and had tried to look them up on the internet but had felt even more confused. Her appointment was the last one in the morning, the surgery was empty apart from herself and one other person, and the GP, Sophie told me, looked frazzled and tired. Under such conditions, she didn’t feel she could ask the questions she needed to. Sophie told me,
“I always feel the doctor is in a rush, so when she told me I’ve got xxx, I didn’t want to ask what she meant. I know the answer would take a long time and I still not might understand” (Sophie, 40s, mother of two children).
This uses many more words but if the point is to help GPs understand what meanings and understandings patients bring to the interaction, then it has done a much better job than the shorter introduction to the quote, above.
Also, when people use the disembodied quotes approach they usually follow an explanation with a series of quotes, as if they are trying to show how important this insight is quantitatively. So, the word count may well end up the same, but without the richness and context.
This desire to demonstrate the quantity of a response illustrates a basic misunderstanding of the value of qualitative research, which is to reveal meaningful insights that can be acted on to improve society.
Karen O'Reilly 