A qualitative description design is particularly relevant where information is required directly from those experiencing the phenomenon under investigation and where time and resources are limited. Nurses and midwives often have clinical questions suitable to a qualitative approach but little time to develop an exhaustive comprehension of qualitative methodological approaches. Qualitative descr...

BACKGROUND Determining the credibility of qualitative research findings remains a contested area and leaves the way open for additional theoretical and methodological discussion. AIMS In this paper we focus on audit trails and confirmability, within the context of 'expert' qualitative researchers. Having outlined the audit trail process, we develop existing arguments about the 'expert' qualit...

This study examined qualitative research on adolescent pregnancy to determine designs and methods used and to discover emergent themes across studies. Most of the 22 studies reviewed were described as qualitative or phenomenological by design and included samples comprising either African-American and Caucasian participants or African-Americans exclusively. Based on analysis of the collective p...

The general view of descriptive research as a lower level form of inquiry has influenced some researchers conducting qualitative research to claim methods they are really not using and not to claim the method they are using: namely, qualitative description. Qualitative descriptive studies have as their goal a comprehensive summary of events in the everyday terms of those events. Researchers con...

Measurements are usually thought of as precise numbers resulting from observation of a real-world system by means of special sensors or measuring devices. Humans frequently resort, however, to qualitative descriptions—based on the extent by which measurements agree with various models of relevance to the system being observed—to explain the nature and importance of a particular measurement or t...

Qualitative representations of spatial knowledge have been widely studied and a variety of frameworks are used to express relationships between static regions. Dynamic regions present a much greater challenge, but are important in practical applications such as describing crowds of people moving over time. Previous work has analysed changes as regions merge and split and as new regions are crea...