Title: Limitations to Qualitative Research | The Classroom
Headings: Limitations to Qualitative Research
Limitations to Qualitative Research
Built-In Bias
Challenge to Repeat
Perceived Lack of Rigor
Time Consuming

Content: These values exert influence on how researchers in social psychology conduct and report on their qualitative research. One way to work against built-in bias is to recognize it in your research report. Challenge to Repeat
Because qualitative research is so inextricably entwined with the individual researcher, it is extremely challenging for other researchers to repeat qualitative studies. This makes it hard to confirm or deny the results of the original study. For example, in the field of education, one of the challenges of repeating qualitative study is that different elements of the original study can’t be repeated; the teachers and students will all be different, as will the school and classroom environment, the methods of teaching and the styles of learning. One way educational researchers work to overcome the challenge of repeatability is to distinguish, in their reports, between repeatable practices and the nonrepeatable results that emerged from those practices. Perceived Lack of Rigor
Quantitative research can demonstrate rigor by including a wide variety of numerical and statistical data, while the rigor of qualitative research is harder to demonstrate because it often involves the qualitative analysis of qualitative data. For example, in literary studies, researchers apply interpretive models to texts such as poems or novels. A literary researcher can apply a wide variety of interpretive models and can apply a single interpretive model in multiple ways to a variety of texts.