Challenges to ensuring quality in qualitative research: A procedural view

Qualitative research methods are increasingly being used in engineering education research. In this context there is an ongoing discourse in the community around ways of ensuring interpretive research quality. This paper presents a process-oriented framework of research quality that was developed while undertaking a study that was recently published in the Journal of Engineering Education. Drawing on the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM), the framework consists of two components i) a procedural view of the research process, broadly defined as Making Data and Handling Data, and ii) a flexible typology of fundamental processes of validation (theoretical, procedural, communicative, pragmatic) and the notion of process reliability. Both of these aspects of the framework are illustrated with examples from the aforementioned study. Future work is planned to further develop the conceptual framework as a language for the engineering education community to engage in a discourse around shared, contextual and flexible understandings of research quality.