Being a member of this community, or even being a friend to your participants (see my blog post on the ethics of researching friends), may be a great advantage and a factor that both increases the level of trust between you, the researcher, and the participants and the possible threats of reactivity and respondent bias. a student investigating other students’ experiences). It may be granted, for example, by the duration of the study, or by the researcher belonging to the studied community (e.g. Prolonged involvement refers to the length of time of the researcher’s involvement in the study, including involvement with the environment and the studied participants. So, what exactly are these strategies and how can you apply them in your research? Robson (2002) suggested a number of strategies aimed at addressing these threats to validity, being prolonged involvement, triangulation, peer debriefing, member checking, negative case analysis and keeping an audit trail. Respondent bias refers to a situation where respondents do not provide honest responses for any reason, which may include them perceiving a given topic as a threat, or them being willing to ‘please’ the researcher with responses they believe are desirable. Reactivity, in turn, refers to a possible influence of the researcher himself/herself on the studied situation and people. Researcher bias refers to any kind of negative influence of the researcher’s knowledge, or assumptions, of the study, including the influence of his or her assumptions of the design, analysis or, even, sampling strategy.
What seems more relevant when discussing qualitative studies is their validity, which very often is being addressed with regard to three common threats to validity in qualitative studies, namely researcher bias, reactivity and respondent bias (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). In qualitative interviews, this issue relates to a number of practical aspects of the process of interviewing, including the wording of interview questions, establishing rapport with the interviewees and considering ‘power relationship’ between the interviewer and the participant (e.g. Reliability in qualitative studies is mostly a matter of “being thorough, careful and honest in carrying out the research” (Robson, 2002: 176).
Things are slightly different, however, in Qualitative research. In Quantitative research, reliability refers to consistency of certain measurements, and validity – to whether these measurements “measure what they are supposed to measure”. What is Validity and Reliability in Qualitative research?
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