Developing qualitative methods - or “same old wine in a new bottle”

An ongoing process in qualitative research aims at contributing to a deeper understanding of human experiences and behaviour, and the behavioural world of applied practice. This process also aims to improve the usefulness of the findings by giving evidence for practical action. Interpretive description , an alternative to the conventional qualitative approaches, can help in this regard by providing a better understanding of complex experiential clinical/ practical phenomena (Thorne, 2008). Modifying/expanding a qualitative method, often by adding something, is rather a common phenomenon (see Berterö, 2012, in this journal) when giving examples of grounded theory; another example is phenomenology. Phenomenology is often presented as descriptive or interpretive, but when combining these perspectives or adding something to it, there is not a new method but phenomenology as a movement (Rapporta & Wainwright, 2006). Qualitative content analysis is also a method that has been used as a movement. As Hsieh and Shannon (2005) write, content analysis can be directed, conventional or summative, or as other researchers have stated, deductive or inductive (Elo & Kungäs, 2007), or manifest or latent (Graneheim & Lundman, 2004). These examples of methods that have been modified or expanded have ontological and epistemological standpoints embedded in the different directions of their method and need to be reflected upon by those who conduct the research. So, have the methods mentioned above been expanded and modified, but not developed? I would say that they have been developed; they are in a process of growth. Sally Thorne (2008) argued that over the past two decades, researchers in the health area have challenged the dominant paradigm of positivistic research by using qualitative methodologies, which often lack evidence in quantitative terms, and she places the qualitative researchers ''somewhere between fact and conjecture'' (p. 15). Thorne says that interpre-tive description was a way for researchers to liberate themselves from using strictly normative methodolo-gies or as Sandelowski (2000) stated, a way to be free from the ''tyranny of method'' (p. 334) in favour of a less directed method. Interpretive description 2004) is a qualitative investigation of a clinical phenomenon of interest to the discipline. There are various disciplines in a clinic that will also direct the purpose of research questions derived from the discipline. Themes and patterns are captured within subjective perceptions, and they generate an inter-pretive description presenting a clinical understanding. Researchers have made efforts to ''build methods that are grounded in our own …