From the Editors for the Lack of a Boilerplate: Tips on Writing up (and Reviewing) Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is only one of the methods that are appropriate for our journal, but over the past several years we at AMJ have worked diligently to increase the number and quality of the qualitative research papers we review and publish. Just this year, one of our qualitative papers won the award “Best Paper in Organizational Behavior” from the OB Division of the Academy of Management (Margolis & Molinsky, 2008). Our efforts to increase high-quality qualitative work in the Journal stems, in part, from our mission to publish research that has the highest impact. Qualitative research certainly fits this bill, as work in this area has won multiple best paper awards in AMJ and Administrative Science Quarterly, and qualitative research was overrepresented (in terms of the total number of studies published) in AMJ’s survey regarding the most interesting management-related articles published in the past 100 years (Bartunek, Rynes, & Ireland, 2006). Qualitative research is great for addressing “how” questions—rather than “how many”; for understanding the world from the perspective of those studied (i.e., informants); and for examining and articulating processes. Just as quantitative research encompasses many ways to collect data, such as survey and lab studies, and many ways to analyze it, such as ANOVAs, multiple regression, and factor analyses, so does qualitative research. For example, one may choose to collect data using a case or an ethnographic method; however, when analyzing these data, one can continue to employ case (Yin, 2003) or ethnographic methods (Spradley, 1979), respectively, or even employ grounded theory (e.g., Eisenhardt, 1989; Pratt, 2000). Moreover, qualitative research can be either inductive or deductive (see Bitektine [2008] for a discussion of deductive designs) or, in very rare circumstances, a combination of both (see Ross and Staw [1993] for an example). Finally, it is possible to analyze qualitative data quantitatively, just as we analyze quantitative data qualitatively when constructing stories around the numbers we present. For the purpose of this editorial, I follow Gephart in discussing qualitative research that includes both qualitative data and qualitative analysis: “Qualitative research starts from and returns to words, talk, and texts as meaningful representations of concepts” (2004: 455). Moreover, the focus of this editorial is on one type of qualitative research—inductive qualitative research—and the challenges that face the qualitative researcher, and the qualitative reviewer, during the review process for a top-tier journal. More specifically, I hone in on what appears to be at the heart of these challenges: that there is no accepted “boilerplate” for writing up qualitative methods and determining quality. A “boilerplate” refers to standardized language, and here also refers to an accepted template for writing up qualitative research. Unlike quantitative findings, qualitative findings lack an agreed-upon “significance level.” There is no “magic number” of interviews or observations that should be conducted in a qualitative research project. What is “enough” depends on what question a researcher seeks to answer. To illustrate, if a researchers wanted to study Supreme Court justices’ decision making, he or she would be limited to a very small sample. However, to examine how three cohorts of physicians changed their identities over the life of their residency programs, my colleagues and I had to conduct well over a 100 interviews (Pratt, Rockmann, & Kaufmann, 2006). This lack of a boilerplate begets other challenges for publishing qualitative research. One could rewrite this editorial’s epigraph to read: