Qualitative research in the RIME community: critical reflections and future directions.

Happily, the RIME community has moved beyond the (tiresome) debate about whether qualitative research is as “good” or as “valuable” as quantitative research. We now take the view, most of us, that qualitative research presents a different way of exploring a different set of questions than those accommodated in quantitative studies.1 This progress has been good for medical education research, encouraging the exploration of such social and human issues as professionalism, physician wellness, and team relations. It has also been good for qualitative research, which is proliferating in the context of its access to research funding, its growing community of graduate students, and its increasing appearance in peer-reviewed journals in our domain. The qualitative studies in this year’s RIME supplement demonstrate this success. However, my purpose in this wrap-up is to talk more broadly; not about the qualitative research reported at this year’s meeting, but about the discourse of qualitative research in the RIME community at large.