Pearls, Pith and Provocation: Evaluating Interpretive Inquiry: Reviewing the Validity Debate and Opening the Dialogue." Qualitative Health Research

Designing and carrying out effective and valid research are the desired goals of all research-ers, and demonstrating the trustworthiness of one’s dissertation research is a requirement for all doctoral candidates. For qualitative researchers, reaching the desired goal and meeting the requirement of trustworthiness become particularly problematic due to the considerable debate about what it means to do valid research in the field of qualitative inquiry. This article reviews the various approaches to the validity problem in the hope of turning this debate into a dialogue. Validity is traced from its origins in the realist ontology and foundational episte-mology of quantitative inquiry to its reformulations within the lifeworld ontology and non-foundationalism of interpretive human inquiry. Various recent qualitative approaches to validity are considered, and interpretive reconfigurations of validity are reviewed. Interpre-tive approaches to validity are synthesized as ethical and substantive procedures of validation. Until recently in the social sciences, the issue of how we arrive at valid knowl-edge has involved a debate between the proponents of quantitative proce-dures and those who preferred a qualitative approach. For a time, qualitative meth-ods were accepted only as an exploratory approach to inquiry that required further validation by quantitative methods (Leininger, 1992). Presently, there seems to be at least tacit agreement that some aspects of human experience cannot be understood through reductionistic measures (Giorgio, 1992; Mishler, 1990). The major debate now hinges on the issue of validity. Proponents of positivist quantitative research regularly imply that qualitative, especially interpretivist, approaches to human inquiry are so rife with threats to validity that they are of no scientific value. In the debate over legitimacy, the validity of qualitative research findings has become “the most controversial issue ” (Bailey, 1997, p. 21). This article reviews the various approaches to the problem of validity in the hope of turning this debate into a dia-logue, and it traces validity from its origins in the realist ontology and foundationa