Purpose & Goals

What qualitative frameworks allow the pursuit of rich data about practical research questions without requiring researchers to squeeze their study into traditional qualitative frameworks that were developed to create grand theories? This paper introduces interpretive description, a qualitative approach which originated in the field of nursing. It focuses on answering real-world questions in applied disciplines, with rigorous ontological and epistemological underpinnings. The goal of the paper is to familiarize the library research community with this promising approach for practical qualitative research.

Design & Methodology

I will provide a brief overview of qualitative research and major qualitative traditions originally intended to develop conceptual theories such as grounded theory, narrative inquiry, and phenomenology, and why they are often insufficient for research in applied fields. I will then describe the key tenets of interpretive description, originally introduced to the field of nursing by Sally Thorne in order to address this very issue. I will address specific components of interpretive description, including question development, ontology, epistemology, and the use of various data collection and analysis approaches, which are often borrowed from other qualitative traditions with thoughtful justification. From there, I will explain how one study focused on undergraduate students' attitudes about search data privacy in academic libraries would look if approached through the lens of each aforementioned traditional qualitative approach, and how the nature of the findings would differ based on each. Finally, I will demonstrate how interpretive description provided the right methodological fit to gain practical knowledge in this study, while still ensuring rigor. The focus of this example will be on methods, not on the specific findings of the study, although attendees will be provided additional citations to learn more about the results.

Conclusions

Many traditional qualitative traditions require librarians to perform force a square peg into a round hole when embarking on a practically focused research study. Interpretive description encourages the thoughtful utilization of methods from various qualitative traditions to answer specific research questions, which are posed in a way that allows answers to be resituated within the context of the applied field. In other words, interpretive description results in useful, practical findings for librarianship.

Implications & Value

Interpretive description, while utilized in many human services disciplines such as nursing, social work, and education, is essentially absent in library research with the exception of 1-2 studies. This methodological approach has tremendous potential to increase the pertinence of qualitative research in library research without compromising the rigor of the research being conducted.

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