Welcome to Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare

Abstract

On behalf of the authors, the reviewers, the editorial staff and our wonderful Editorial and Advisory Boards I extend a warm welcome to our first issue of Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare (QRMH)! I am lucky to be working with so many great people, and dedicated to making this a great place to publish.With many qualitative research journals already on the academic scene, and a good amount of these in the areas of health communication, healthcare, and medicine a new journal is a risky proposition. As our aims and scope promise, it is nonetheless a vital and crucial undertaking. As the articles in this first issue demonstrate, QRMH is true to its promise of interdisciplinarity; four of its five pieces are collaborations by scholars sand practitioners in medicine, nursing, communication, biology, theology, international affairs and conflict resolution. And all of the articles raise complex queries, tell difficult stories or ask the complex and uncomfortable questions for which qualitative research is best equipped.As many of you already know, qualitative research is not for the faint of heart. It is reflexive, positioned and like life itself, often messy and focused not on producing easy answers but on the very process of questioning. It is, at best, acutely aware its ontological consequentiality. Unlike research studies under positivist or post-positivist auspices, true qualitative research does not separate the observer from the lived experience of those whom she observes.Rather, it is by understanding the ways in which our own research practices bring forth the very world in which we live that qualitative researchers have a stake in understanding the very reflexive dynamics of how we constitute the world makes us.Consider the traditional process of knowledge construction in medicine and healthcare and how, in these very social and human sciences, we unproblematically take notions of scientific evidence as detached from the very measurements, screenings, and processes of lived experience in which knowledge-making is situated. Data, findings, reports are always written in the third person omniscient language of science, concealing writers, bodies, lives. We try to fit ourselves into the spaces offered by questionnaires, rather than finding questionnaires designed to fit us.Though evidence-based has become a popular phrase, for example, it works by pronominal omission; and yet it is always evidence for someone, by someone, and in a particular context with very real and life changing consequences. By the same token, that of patient (including the popular patient-centered), disadvantage, vulnerable, and so on are constructs -that is, categories that create the very situations they purport to describe. By way of our research findings and discussions, these categories can either re-enter the world as natural, or we may use research as a process in which to examine the social dynamics of what it means for these terms to categorize and create what Wittgenstein called forms of life, that is, to describe, as ...

Editorial

“…In that iterative spirit, I have taken the opportunity to read with deep appreciation the editorial that Dr. Bartesaghi provided for the first issue of QRMH (2017). 2 In that brief essay, Dr. Bartesaghi provided the foundation for what it means to do qualitative research with respect to communication, health, and medicine: As many of you already know, qualitative research is not for the faint of heart. It is reflexive, positioned and like life itself, often messy and focused not on producing easy answers but on the very process of questioning.…”

“…Unlike research studies under positivist or post-positivist auspices, true qualitative research does not separate the observer from the lived experience of those whom she observes. Rather, it is by understanding the ways in which our own research practices bring forth the very world in which we live that qualitative researchers have a stake in understanding the very reflexive dynamics of how we constitute the world...(p. i) 2 Mindfully positioned and messily bent on questioning our own assumptions about health, illness, patients, providers, the medical industry, government policies, and the ways that all those things are embedded in cultural systems shaped by history, economics, epistemology, and many other factors, we move forward, backwards, and sideways following our winding, twisting, circular, and sometimes overlapping paths.…”

“…In that iterative spirit, I have taken the opportunity to read with deep appreciation the editorial that Dr. Bartesaghi provided for the first issue of QRMH (2017). 2 In that brief essay, Dr. Bartesaghi provided the foundation for what it means to do qualitative research with respect to communication, health, and medicine:…”

“…Unlike research studies under positivist or post-positivist auspices, true qualitative research does not separate the observer from the lived experience of those whom she observes. Rather, it is by understanding the ways in which our own research practices bring forth the very world in which we live that qualitative researchers have a stake in understanding the very reflexive dynamics of how we constitute the world...(p. i) 2 …”