People with intellectual disability are often excluded from shaping research priorities in areas that directly affect their health, including obesity. This paper describes a co-design process used to develop a research agenda for a PhD program on obesity among adults with intellectual disability. Two Lived Experience Advisory Groups (LEAGs), comprising adults with intellectual disability and supporters, contributed through accessible, participatory activities and discussions and their insights were synthesised into a systems map of influences on weight and health behaviours. This paper describes how participatory qualitative approaches were used to co-design the research question and methods. The paper details how collaborative decision-making, accessibility and lived experience can shape the direction of research. These findings demonstrate the feasibility and value of co-designing research agendas alongside people with intellectual disability, highlighting research agenda setting as a rigorous participatory method that ensures future research is grounded in the priorities, experiences and expertise of those it aims to benefit.
In the last forty years, research, studies, and articles on gender and sexualities have flourished within and beyond the fields of sociology and social sciences. The scholars’ efforts have pushed the boundaries of the discipline to unprecedented limits in terms of both the quality and the richness of their research. Despite these growing and fascinating numbers, it is possible to notice a gap: namely, methods. There are two main reasons for that. On the one hand, scholars had to fiercely fight to make space for their studies in gender and sexualities, as methodologies were left behind. On the other hand, the rigidity and rigorousness of “standard” methodologies were difficult to apply in these new and enhancing fields of study. Today, we know that academic production is not “neutral”, and that it is “gendered”.
Phenomenological research offers distinctive insights into lived experience, yet its appraisal within qualitative evidence syntheses is often constrained by generic tools that privilege procedural transparency over philosophical and methodological integrity. Instruments such as CASP, JBI, and MMAT remain valuable across qualitative traditions, but risk obscuring the epistemological and ontological commitments central to phenomenology. In response, this paper introduces the Phenomenological Research Quality Indicator (PRQI), a reflexive six-dimensional framework that enables phenomenological studies to be appraised on their own terms while ensuring transparency and credibility for interdisciplinary audiences. The PRQI pays attention to philosophical grounding, methodological clarity, use of phenomenological processes, fidelity to the lifeworld, researcher reflexivity, and evocative representation. Developed through sustained engagement with phenomenological scholarship and applied to 25 empirical studies of young people’s experiences in physical education and sport, the PRQI aims to move beyond checklist compliance toward dialogical assessment that honours interpretive nuance. By making visible otherwise tacit dimensions of phenomenological rigour, the PRQI advances methodological coherence, enhances reflexivity, and strengthens the credibility of qualitative evidence syntheses that inform clinical guidelines, educational reform, and policy development. It also functions as a globally transferable pedagogical resource, supporting doctoral education, postgraduate training, and peer-review of qualitative phenomenological research manuscripts. In advancing a philosophically grounded yet accessible approach to appraisal, the PRQI contributes a world-leading methodological innovation that not only safeguards phenomenology’s integrity but also expands the global methodological repertoire available to qualitative researchers across disciplines.
Existing work offers limited concrete guidance for evaluating topic-model outputs in qualitative analysis, including when machine-generated topics can meaningfully complement human-coded themes without sidelining human judgment. This paper introduces a six-stage Alignment and Usefulness Rating Audit (AURA) workflow for qualitative analysis. It combines standard data stages (collect, transcribe, structure, model) with two quality checks: an alignment check that assesses whether machine-generated topics align with human-coded themes, and a usefulness check that evaluates whether those topics are clear and useful for inclusion. At each stage, we specify who is responsible for what (human vs. machine), what is involved, and how decisions are made. We illustrate the workflow through a secondary analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews of nurses about their experiences with generative artificial intelligence. A publication from the manual coding of the interviews produced a set of top-level themes that served as a reference. We then used BERTopic to discover topics, compared the average sentence-level representations of themes and topics to assess alignment, and had two researchers rate the usefulness of the resulting topics on a scale of 1-5 (5 being the most useful). Eleven of the 12 human themes had at least one topic above the similarity cutoff. Although the highest similarity with themes was concentrated in four of the eight topics, six themes had the second-highest matches with topics, indicating both concentration and overlapping correspondence. All topics met the analytic usefulness criterion, but the findings provided limited evidence of additive thematic discovery beyond the human-developed framework. We argue that this alignment-and-usefulness-rating workflow provides social science researchers with a practical approach to integrate qualitative judgment with topic modeling, emphasizing transparency and human validation.
I examine Therapy-Supported Meditative Archery (TMB) as a practice-based field of inquiry and introduce the Perceiving–Acting–Integrating Cycle (PAI-Cycle), a qualitative process heuristic tracing how embodied and situational qualities become relevant to action and how action consequences enter later experience. The longitudinal field comprised six eight-month TMB diploma training programs conducted from 2018 to 2025; the analytic reconstruction was completed in 2026. The core corpus consisted of 48 handwritten process notes recorded immediately after the modules, supplemented by 54 structured reflection documents. The analysis draws on three training episodes from the second, fourth, and fifth programs and one authorized diploma-paper excerpt. I ordered the materials chronologically, reconstructed them descriptively, compared episodes and programs, and examined transitions, interruptions, adjustments, negative cases, and incomplete integration. Preliminary categories were developed abductively and repeatedly tested against the corpus. The analysis identified three recursively interconnected process movements. Perceiving concerns the differentiation of embodied, affective, material, and situational qualities; Acting describes how these qualities inform orientation, regulation, decision, interruption, adjustment, or action; and Integrating denotes how action consequences are registered through attention to aftereffects, articulation, and renewed orientation. Such integration may reshape later perception and action; transitions can be recursive, interrupted, delayed, or incomplete. I offer the PAI-Cycle as a focused heuristic for examining embodied process relations, not as a model of therapeutic efficacy, a diagnostic instrument, or a prescriptive sequence.
Researcher positionality is crucial to qualitative research and influences all aspects of the research process, including access to the research setting, the questions that guide inquiry, and the interpretation of data. Yet the dominant way scholars communicate positionality in publications—the positionality statement—often reduces complex and emergent positional dynamics to static lists of social identities. Recent scholarship reconceptualizes positionality as relational, negotiated, and shifting across sociocultural contexts and specific research encounters. However, these conceptual advances have not been accompanied by clear methodological strategies that enable researchers to engage with positionality as an emergent relational process in research practice. In this paper, we propose an integrative framework and methodological strategies that enable qualitative researchers to work with the relational dynamics of positionality. Drawing on a qualitative study of sleep in families with young children and informed by scholarship on positionality and processual-relational sociology, we advance three contributions to qualitative methodology. First, we develop a framework of trans-actional positionality , grounding researcher positionality in a processual-relational ontology in which researchers and participants co-produce positions through ongoing trans-actions within emergent social fields. Second, we introduce positionality snapshots , a methodological device that isolates and examines moments in which positional configurations become unsettled and reconfigured within research encounters. Third, we propose positionality flow statements as an alternative to static positionality statements, offering a way to reconstruct how positional configurations unfold across the research process and how key turning points shape interpretation and emerging analytic directions. Together, these contributions provide qualitative researchers with conceptual and methodological tools for engaging with positionality as an emergent and processual feature of qualitative inquiry.
This article describes a visual and participatory research study exploring the ways young adults represent their feminist identities through objects. We detail our two-phase virtual approach – combining individual object elicitation interviews with group participatory data analysis sessions. We show how the objects participants selected tended to reflect academic, bodily, expressive, and relational understandings of feminism, not unlike the items Sara Ahmed chose to include in her “killjoy survival kit.” Finally, we highlight the methodological insights we gained during our research process; namely, how participants played with or expanded traditional definitions of an object, selected items that held both explicitly and implicitly feminist meanings, and spoke to the context of participating during a pandemic, when many were limited to objects within their bedrooms and other domestic spaces.
This article introduces rasan-rasan, a Javanese practice of informal talk or gossip, as a feminist qualitative research method. In contrast to structured interviews, rasan-rasan allows women to share narratives without the performative filtering typical in formal research encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with mothers in Nguter and Kendeng, Central Java, the study demonstrates how rasan-rasan functions as a relational epistemic practice: participants negotiate meaning collectively, voice dissent, and articulate experiences often hidden from conventional research methods. I explicitly reclaim “gossip” from its pejorative connotations, following feminist scholarship that positions informal talk as a legitimate site of knowledge production, relational truth-seeking, and epistemic resistance. Integrating feminist epistemology and gossip studies ( Adkins, 2002 ; Besnier, 2009 ; Dreby, 2009 ), the article positions informal talk as a legitimate source of knowledge production and methodological innovation. The discussion highlights ethical and reflexive considerations, including emotional labor, researcher positionality, and cultural sensitivity. By documenting how rasan-rasan operates as a culturally embedded feminist method, this study contributes to expanding the repertoire of qualitative methodologies that honor Indigenous knowledge, relational storytelling, and the epistemic agency of women. Implications for global feminist research practices are discussed, emphasizing the potential of informal conversational ethnography to generate rich, authentic, and ethically grounded data.
Non-participant observation is a recognised method in qualitative research but remains underutilised in realist evaluation, with most published examples focused on frontline service delivery settings. This paper offers a methodological reflection on the specific contribution of non-participant observation to programme theory development within a realist evaluation of leadership and governance in an Integrated Care System (ICS) in England. The article argues that governance settings, where leadership is enacted through discourse, negotiation, and formal decision-making, present distinctive methodological challenges that make observation particularly valuable. Drawing on eleven observations of governance meetings, conducted alongside interviews and documentary analysis, this paper demonstrates how non-participant observation contributed to the iterative development and refinement of context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) configurations. Observation provided access to interactional and relational processes that participant accounts did not fully capture, including non-verbal cues, patterns of participation, and divergences between espoused and enacted practice. Where interview accounts described collaborative decision-making, observations of the same forums sometimes revealed more hierarchical dynamics, with these divergences becoming productive starting points for retroductive reasoning. Fieldnotes also informed the design of subsequent interviews, enabling specific observed incidents to be used as prompts to explore participant reasoning, consistent with realist interviewing principles. Limitations of observation in governance settings, including restricted access to informal interactions, interpretive uncertainty, and the constraints imposed by the formality of meeting structures, are presented. The paper concludes that non-participant observation can function as an active component of early theory development in realist designs involving complex organisational settings, and calls for greater methodological transparency in how observation is used and reported within realist evaluation.
This article introduces transnational reflexivity as a methodological practice in qualitative inquiry, repositioning reflexivity not as an individualized act of self-awareness but as a dialogical, relational, and power-sensitive practice of meaning-making grounded in transnational experience. While reflexivity is widely recognized as a cornerstone of qualitative research, the positionalities of transnational researchers remain under-theorized, often framed through individualized and static approaches that fail to capture the complexities of research across borders. Drawing on our experiences as Asian early-career ethnographers conducting research within and across U.S. educational contexts, we examine how transnational reflexivity shapes interpretation, positionality, and knowledge production in our work. Through collaborative dialogue and co-analysis of ethnographic materials, we illustrate how transnational positionalities generate interpretive friction that, under specific relational and ethical conditions, opens new forms of understanding unavailable to either researcher alone. We further offer a heuristic of guiding questions that qualitative researchers working transnationally can adapt to examine their own analytic positions and the power conditions shaping whose knowledge gets recognized. We argue that attending to transnationalism reframes reflexivity as a collective and dialogical practice that challenges traditional methodological boundaries, resists deficit framings of transnational scholars and participants, and expands the epistemological horizons of qualitative inquiry across borders. By conceptualizing transnational reflexivity as a heuristic methodological framework, this article calls for qualitative researchers to approach reflexivity as an evolving dialogical practice through which knowledge can be co-constructed in more relational, plural, and globally attuned ways that embrace the possibilities of working across epistemic borders.
Qualitative research working groups (QRWs) were formed alongside the development of grounded theory and are now an established part of maintaining quality and promoting reflexivity in interpretation for qualitative data and research. Despite increasing numbers of QRWs in the German-speaking context, what constitutes a QRW and how it works remains still unclear. Using the method of collective autoethnography, members of a QRW at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Germany analyzed their own working processes, experiences and perceptions. During the initial data collection (March 2022-May 2023), individual fieldnotes were written by QRW members in regular monthly meetings, then analyzed into a personal meta-summary of each person’s documentation. Collectively, meta-summaries were analyzed as a group and documented into a collaborative summary, interpreted by two authors, then refined in the collective QRW. Five main categories were developed: 1) Motivation – A regular participation is shaped by being methodological co-conspirators in a supportive environment; 2) Collaboration – Finding commonality while navigating inter-group roles and dynamics; 3) Benefits – Derived from critical assessment of our work and simultaneous increase in knowledge and experience; 4) Challenges – Stemming from contention in the degree of necessary structure or interpersonal factors; 5) Key features of a good QRW – Finding the balance between achieving work goals and welcoming environment. Overall, these findings underscore that the structure and openness of a QRW provides a consistent and secure space for encouragement and constructive critique. While group dynamics affect the working constellation and group continuity, discussions provide a resonance space for professional and experiential transformation. By addressing methodological challenges and questioning familiar ways of thinking, the transformation of participants into “Quali-Heroes” ultimately improves both the quality of research and the collective practice of qualitative inquiry.
As Lithuania transitions from a multi-track to an inclusive system, changes in teacher training are needed to better respond to diversity within learning spaces. This study explores the application of a Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) design in a multicultural Master’s pedagogical course aimed at developing future teachers’ intercultural competence. Identity curation techniques were tested through the application of elicitation methods to narrative artefacts during student reflections on their personal identities, in response to the lack of “identity-safe school practices” (Steele & Cohn-Vargas, 2013) in the Lithuanian education system. PNI here is a research strategy and intervention with pedagogical implications. The project employs the multicultural story framework ‘TARMAC’, developed by Ward & Keck (2021), which facilitates dialogical discussions among learners with cross-cultural backgrounds. Participants engage in the creation of narratives and artefacts (e.g., collages, maps, digital stories), followed by narrative research through the elicitation of these artefacts (via autoethnographies, interviews, and focus group discussions). Through identity curation, this process yielded useful data on intercultural development, offering classroom-ready tools and insights into how participants’ experiences shaped the learning environment. Artefact elicitation as a research methodology, allows participants to actively engage in the research process and propose their own views and solutions. From a pedagogical perspective, the elicitation process encourages deeper student reflection and self-understanding. The project’s participatory and co-creation process embodied a transformative learning model for all participants. The study also reflects on the intersectional and plural roles experienced by student-teachers and participant-researchers across local and foreign contexts.
Conventionally, the field in qualitative research is understood as a community or social setting, often located in distant areas, for extracting data, thereby privileging the researcher’s control. Drawing from Indigenous and decolonial epistemologies, this article theorizes the research field is not just a community but the Indigenous lands which is relational, emergent, and living space that serve as a source of knowledge. Taking Nepal’s Sampang Indigenous community as a case, we argue that the field is a fluid and co-constructed space embedded in everyday life, ritual practice, history, culture, spirituality, and an assemblage of multiple living and non-living entities. We propose five community-grounded fieldwork methods, such as Dapla Khaa (hearth talk), Sakela -informed inquiry, Talk of Indigenous Artifacts (ToIAs), land-based interviews, and Mundhum recitation as storytelling which facilitate in participatory, shared, and collective knowledge generation. These methods of fieldwork in Indigenous cultural lands foster responsible, accountable, ethical, relational, and culture-sensitive engagement in research.
Co-creation is increasingly promoted in global public health as a participatory methodology that centres lived experiences, the preferences, and structural realities of those most affected by health interventions. Within human-centred design (HCD), co-creation is typically operationalised through intensive cycles of qualitative inquiry, in-person workshops, facilitation, and iterative prototyping. While these approaches are methodologically robust, they are often resource-intensive and difficult to implement in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and other low resource settings, precisely where context-sensitive and equitable intervention design is most needed. Despite this tension, existing literature offers limited guidance on how co-creation can be meaningfully adapted to such contexts without eroding its epistemological, ethical, and participatory foundations. This conceptual qualitative methodology paper addresses this gap by proposing a ‘Modest Co-Creation’ framework, that is a resource-sensitive adaptation of co-creation grounded in constructivist and interpretivist qualitative paradigms. Drawing on a synthesis of participatory design, HCD, and qualitative methodology literature, alongside practical experience, the paper argues that methodological rigour in co-creation is not contingent on scale or intensity, but on adherence to core qualitative principles. The proposed framework foregrounds contextual understanding, shared interpretation, relationship-centered ethics, reflexivity and realistic iteration as non-negotible elements. The paper advances conceptual clarity on participatory rigour in constrained environments by articulating how co-creation can be recalibrated rather than reduced. It offers practical guidance for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and funders seeking to democratise health intervention design without reproducing resource-driven inequities, and contributes to broader debates on equity, feasibility, and methodological integrity in global public health innovation.
Qualitative research with transnational queer international students poses distinct ethical and methodological challenges. Participants’ identity practices span digital platforms with varying privacy norms; sexuality remains sensitive, heightening confidentiality risks during recruitment and data collection; and mobility constraints disrupt physical access to interview spaces. This article presents an agile, reflexive qualitative research toolkit developed with People’s Republic of China (PRC)-born queer female students living in Australia during COVID-19 lockdowns. Twenty cisgender female and gender-diverse individuals aged 20–34, encompassing those who identified as lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, non-binary, and others who resisted fixed labels, were purposively recruited through lesbian-centred, community-oriented social media channels and networks. The research design involved an initial in-depth semi-structured interview, followed by a scroll-back interview in which participants revisited and narrated self-selected social media posts and personal photographs. Interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese, with translation, de-identification and the ethical management of visual materials and digital traces treated as core methodological tasks to prioritise participants’ safety and confidentiality. The article demonstrates the value of flexibility and participant-centred design in sensitive research with participants from marginalised groups. Recruiting through community channels enabled engagement across dispersed geographical and digital contexts, while lockdown conditions required ongoing methodological adjustment and reflexive decision-making. The adapted scroll-back approach elicited temporally expansive but specific narratives and generated bilingual, multimodal data that broadened what participants felt comfortable to share about identity, intimacy, and mobility. Reflexive attention to the researcher’s insider positionality supported rapport and culturally nuanced interpretation, while also foregrounding the emotional labour required to maintain analytical rigour. Together, these strategies show how ethical care, community engagement and methodological innovation can be integrated under shifting fieldwork conditions, offering a practical protocol for qualitative studies with intersectionally marginalised communities.
Background While African-centred methodologies have effectively articulated relational ontologies and community-owned ethics, academic journals continue to lack procedural frameworks for operationalizing these principles throughout the research process. Aim We propose Ori-Oyena, a methodology grounded in the cultural principles of Indigenous Ghanaian (Nafaanra ethnicity). Ori-Oyena is rooted in the axiom of “simultaneous multiplicity,” which means that both the observable and spiritual are understood as co-empirical phenomena. Ori-Oyena demands collaborative and participatory ownership from research planning through to the dissemination of findings. Approach The process of Ori-Oyena begins with Ori-Lefuor, a water-sharing ritual establishing equality between researcher and participants, supporting reciprocity. Data collection occurs through Ori-Oweyl, involving immersive exploration, and in Ori-Ojawa, conversations feature storied and proverbial exchanges. Data are analyzed using a braided, Indigenous thematic approach. Findings are presented to the community during Ori-Odorta, mapping sessions for validation and refinement, where unresolved issues, tensions in exchanges and differences in opinions prompt root-realignment dialogue for deeper exploration. The dissemination of results is governed by Ori-Okita, which ensures that outputs are collaboratively designed and subject to shared usage rights. Contribution Ori-Oyena offers a reproducible, adaptable five-phase method with concrete tools (such as Ori-notes ), and requires an ethics protocol that relocates rigour inside communal practice. Ori-Oyena is a demonstration of how culture and history can remain centred while conceptual decolonization, the reversing and avoiding unexamined assimilation of foreign frameworks, is advanced. Implications The methodology extends African scholarship by providing stepwise procedures for mental health and community research and criteria for reviewer audits. A field application with the Ghanaian community in Alberta shows feasibility across eight events, twenty-one one-to-one dialogues, and two mapping circles, with report-back workshops scheduled by community.
This study explored the application of the Delphi method within a two-phase qualitative research design to develop and validate the dimensions of the Quality of User Experience (QUX) in smart services. Although qualitative methods have frequently been integrated with the Delphi technique in policy and sustainability research, its systematic application in user experience (UX) and service quality research remains underexplored. Phase One comprised semi-structured interviews and focus groups with product designers and users to inductively identify preliminary QUX dimensions. Phase Two involved a four-round Delphi study with a mixed panel of 21 participants to refine and validate these dimensions using predefined consensus thresholds, quantitative ratings, and qualitative feedback. Consensus was achieved on ten QUX dimensions, each exceeding the predetermined 85% agreement threshold in the final round. This study contributes methodologically by demonstrating how inductively derived qualitative constructs can be systematically validated through Delphi consensus within an interpretivist research design. It also advances knowledge management by illustrating how qualitative user experience data can be transformed into structured insights that support organisational learning, evidence-informed decision-making, and service innovation across diverse smart service contexts. By integrating thematic analysis with structured consensus-building, this study provides a transparent and replicable approach for validating emerging constructs in interdisciplinary research. The findings demonstrate the value of the Delphi method as a rigorous mechanism for qualitative construct validation, theory refinement, and development of user-informed frameworks for complex, technology-enabled service environments.
Qualitative interviews are often treated as neutral tools for eliciting information, with methodological attention focused on question design, rapport, and researcher reflexivity. This article advances a methodological intervention by theorizing food as methodological infrastructure—a design arrangement that shapes power, temporality, consent, and disclosure within research encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024 with adults living in rural communities of Michoacán, Mexico, the analysis examines how food-mediated interviews reconfigure the social relations through which knowledge about intimate partner violence and everyday harm is produced. Shared meals and flexible pacing redistribute authority over narrative control, enabling participants to manage exposure through silence, delay, redirection, and selective narration. Rather than functioning as a rapport-building technique, commensality operates as an infrastructural condition governing when, how, and whether disclosure occurs. By centering methodological infrastructure, the article reframes interview design as a site of ethical responsibility and epistemic consequence.
