BACKGROUND Chronic illness and disability can have damaging, even catastrophic, socioeconomic effects on individuals and their households. We examined the experiences of people affected by chronic heart failure, complicated diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to inform patient centred policy development. This paper provides a first level, qualitative understanding of the economic...

OBJECTIVE To study private-practice clients' perspective on reasons for psychotherapy termination and how these are related to demographic and treatment variables and to satisfaction with therapy. DESIGN Eighty-four persons who had been in extended private-practice psychotherapy which ended in the preceding three years participated in the study. Mean number of months in treatment was 27.70 (S...

Qualitative research methods are gaining popularity among Information System (IS) researchers (Myers, 1997). Among the various qualitative methods, action research (AR) is considered both effective and controversial. Action research as a methodology is becoming more common in the IS research field, although its validity is sometimes questioned (Baskerville & Wood-Harper, 1996; Myers, 1997). One...

Positivist and interpretivist researchers have different views on how their research outcomes may be evaluated. The issues of validity, reliability and generalisability, used in evaluating positivist studies, are regarded of relatively little significance by many qualitative researchers for judging the merits of their interpretive investigations. In confirming the research, those three canons n...

Qualitative methods open analytical pathways and present specific challenges, particularly for early career scholars forging a path in a field dominated by quantitative inquiry. However, for many scholars, qualitative methods reflect a particular ontological point of view, which tends toward privileging the experiences of groups that are often marginalized in research. Given this point of view,...

BACKGROUND Latina immigrants from Mexico suffer significantly increased morbidity and mortality from cervical cancer when compared with non-Hispanic White women, largely owing to lack of screening and appropriate treatment. OBJECTIVES To demonstrate that by combining the tools of community-based participatory research (CBPR) with the tools of interpretive inquiry, it is possible to address ex...

In this article, I try to think through the question, "What distinguishes phenomenology in its original sense?" My intent is to focus on the project and methodology of phenomenology in a manner that is not overly technical and that may help others to further elaborate on or question the singular features that make phenomenology into a unique qualitative form of inquiry. I pay special attention ...

Mixed methods, defined as one complete method (as the core project) plus a different simultaneous and sequential supplemental strategy, have been well explicated for combining the most difficult designs—that is, qualitative and quantitative methods. However, experts in qualitative inquiry have relatively ignored the issues that occur while describing qualitative simultaneous and sequential desi...