This document discusses key concepts of validity in qualitative research. It explains that research design should be reflexive and iterative at all stages. Validity is ensured through techniques like prolonged engagement, thick description, peer debriefing, examining rival explanations, and triangulation of data, theories, methods, and analysts. While qualitative research focuses on depth over breadth, external validity is based on developing theories that can potentially explain other cases rather than statistical generalization. Reliability means using accepted qualitative methods, while confirmability involves researcher reflexivity and maintaining an auditable analysis process. There are no set rules for qualitative research as the appropriate methods depend on the specific research questions, context and phenomena being studied.

1. Preeti Kana Sikder
Assistant Professor
Department of Law & Justice
Jahangirnagar University

2. Hammersley &
Atkinson, 1995
“In a qualitative study,
research design should
be a reflexive process
operating through
every stage of a
project”
The activities of collecting and
analyzing data, developing
and modifying theory,
elaborating or refocusing the
research questions, and
identifying and dealing with
validity threats are usually
going on more or less
simultaneously, each
influencing all of the others

3. Why is Validity relevant?
▪ How might your results and conclusions be wrong?
▪ What are the plausible alternative interpretations
and validity threats to these, and how will you deal
with these?
▪ How can the data that you have, or that you could
potentially collect, support or challenge your ideas
about what’s going on?
▪ Why should we believe your results?

4. ▪ Validity threats and their significance
▪ What is meant byValidity?
▪ Criteria for validity

5. Validity Threats and their Significance

6. Validity Threats and their Significance
Researcher
bias
Reactivity

7. ▪ According to Collingridge and Gantt, 2008 –
“In qualitative research validity means selecting an
appropriate method for a given question and
applying that method in a coherent, justifiable and
rigorous manner. Careful craftsmanship and
attention to detail makes legitimate results possible
and allows for defensible knowledge claims.”

8. Internal
Validity
External
Validity
Reliability Confirmability

9. Ensuring Internal Validity
▪ In order to ensure internal validity, the researcher should carry out
prolonged engagement to elicit all dimensions.
▪ There shall be use of thick and rich description of the process and
product along with the context.
▪ Peer debriefing: the process whereby a researcher calls upon a
disinterested peer—a peer who is not involved in the research
project—to aid in probing the researcher's thinking around all or parts
of the research process.
▪ Examining rival explanation and atypical cases ensure internal
validity

10. Ensuring Internal Validity: Triangulation
Method
Data
Theory
Analysts

11. Ensuring Internal Validity: Triangulation
▪ Method: Using more than one methods of data collection and study
approach
▪ Data: Data collected through more than one sampling strategies
from different individuals or groups (persons) in different social
situations (sites) at different point of times – reduce biases.
▪ Analysts: Use of more than one researcher with complementary
background to collect and interpret data or use of more than one
analyst (from different gender, race and culture) to analyse the data.
▪ Theory: Use of more than one disciplinary lens or theory or
theoretical position in the analysis of the same data set.

12. The Issue of Probability Sampling
▪ Probability sampling method is a sampling method that utilizes
some form of random selection.
▪ In order to have such random selection, the researcher must set
up some process or procedure that assures that the different
units in your population have equal probabilities of being
chosen.
▪ Types of probability sampling include:
– Simple random sampling
– Stratified random sampling
– Systematic random sampling
– Cluster Random sampling

13. External Validity
▪ Generalisability
▪ Applicability of the concept to a larger group or
other people, is context dependent. If there are
similarities in time frame, place, people, and setting
- transferable

14. Generalisation in QLR
▪ Qualitative researchers often study only a single setting or
a small number of individuals or sites, using theoretical or
purposeful rather than probability sampling, and rarely
make explicit claims about the generalizability of their
accounts.
▪ Indeed, the value of a qualitative study may depend on its
lack of generalizability in the sense of being representative
of a larger population; it may provide an account of a
setting or population that is illuminating as an extreme
case or “ideal type.”

15. The generalizability of qualitative
studies is usually based not on explicit
sampling of some defined population to
which the results can be extended, but
on the development of a theory that can
be extended to other cases

16. Reliability
▪ Reliability in qualitative research means adopting research
methods that are accepted by the research community as
legitimate ways of collecting and analysing data.
Specifically, reliable qualitative methods consistently
produce rich and meaningful descriptions of phenomena.
▪ In QLR, when different researchers come up with different
findings, it is not because an unreliable method was used,
rather, the fact that people experience social phenomena in
different ways and observed as such.

17. Confirmability
▪ Reflexivity is the influence of researcher position and
background or preoccupation.
▪ In order to confirm that the finding is not influenced by
reflexivity, researcher should:
– Mention his preoccupations (say who you are)
– Maintain empathic neutrality
– Tape own data and transcribe
– Analysis process and notes shall be recorded (auditable)

18. There is no “cookbook” for doing
qualitative research. The
appropriate answer to almost any
question about the use of
qualitative methods is,
“It depends.”
The value and feasibility of your research methods cannot be
guaranteed by your adhering to methodological rules; rather, they
depend on the specific setting and phenomena you are studying and
the actual consequences of your strategy for studying it.

19. Sources used for this lecture
▪ Md. Munir-ul Islam, Validity, Reliability and
Limitation of Qualitative Legal Research, 24th Basic
Course on Qualitative Research Methodology,
icddr,b, January 2019
▪ Joseph Alex Maxwell, Qualitative Research Design:
An InteractiveApproach, 2012