Health and Social Work,

The frequency of qualitative studies in the Emergency Medicine Journal, while still low, has increased over the last few years. All take a generic approach and rarely conform to established qualitative approaches such as phenomenology, ethnography and grounded theory. This generic approach is no doubt selected for pragmatic reasons but can be weakened by a lack of rigor and understanding of qualitative research. This paper explores qualitative approaches and then focuses on ‘‘best practice’ ’ for generic qualitative research. T here are qualitative and mixed methods approaches that could inform practice for a wide range of emergency department (ED) issues—for example, patient experiences, the impact of life threatening events on patients and families, mentorship, stress and coping in junior doctors, experience of managing aggression, the ‘‘lived’ ’ experience of working in an ED, or the culture of the ED community. However, these approaches are largely neglected. As a background review we performed a hand search of all editions of the Emergency Medica