Time to catch up...Qualitative research in child and adolescent psychiatry.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a research tool, qualitative research has been of little interest to researchers in psychiatry. A few recent editorials and articles in Canadian psychiatry journals have attempted to nudge researchers towards qualitative methodologies. Considered anecdotal, abstruse, and failing to meet familiar (i.e. quantitative) criteria of reliability, validity and generalizability, qualitative methodologies have been spurned rather than welcomed in psychiatry research (Brown & Lloyd, 2001; Whitley & Crawford, 2005). The lack of a template for conducting research, the flexibility, and hence uncertainties, inherent in the method and the variety of methodologies from which to choose have quite simply deterred its uptake. Qualitative research is an especially relevant method to the subject matter of the Journal. In the past, research generally has been conducted on children and youth. More recently there has been a move towards research with children, engaging them as active participants, recognizing their rights, respecting their autonomy, and giving them voice (Grover, 2004). This requires recognising and reflecting on the inequalities of power and authority between researchers and child/adolescent participants. Qualitative research, with its focus on shared construction of meaning with participants, and flexibility in design, methods and process can partially disrupt these imbalances and give participants voice. Other challenges, too, remain: in recruitment, consent, access, confidentiality, interview space, and language skills, to name but a few (Bassett et al, 2007). The papers published in this qualitative issue have explicitly sought to address these challenges in often novel ways. Didkowsky, Ungar, & Liebenberg use video and photographs to breach the researcher-participant hierarchy of authority. Boydell, Volpe & Pignatiello’s use of televideo interviews give children and adolescents the freedom to walk away if they so choose. Both Alaggia and Grover explore participants’ subjective worlds, importantly giving voice, in Alaggia’s study, to adult survivor’s experience of child sexual abuse, and in Grover’s research, to the world views used by litigants and interveners, including mental health professionals, to position their arguments in legal cases. As is evident in Mordoch’s and Didkowsky et al’s papers, data beyond that elicited in interviews provides rich, multiple ways of looking, seeing, and understanding participants’ experiences. In the papers published here, videos, photographs, interviews, and/or drawings were analysed with a variety of methods: Didkowsky et al’s reflexive and visual methods, Grover’s analysis of text recorded in a legal case, Mordoch’s conceptually-dense understanding of children’s experiences using grounded theory, and Alaggia’s, Boydell et al’s and Grover’s phenomenological analysis of the subjective experiences of participants. Alaggia’s analysis included a relatively recent addition to the researcher’s toolbox: qualitative software. ATLAS.ti, NVIVO, HyperRESEARCH, and Transana, to name but a few, offer both advantages and disadvantages (Bassett, 2004). With reflexive use of software, thorough, replicable, trustworthy and credible analyses can be produced. Systematic and rigorous qualitative research has much to offer child and adolescent psychiatry. A wide range of methodologies and the availability of new digital technologies open doors not previously explored. Indeed, the insight to be gained from a variety of data sources and importance of context in understanding children’s lives is evident in all the papers here. The Journal welcomes your reaction to this theme issue and looks forward to future submissions of your qualitative research manuscripts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.079 | 0.132 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".