Developing rigor in qualitative research: problems and opportunities within sport and exercise psychology

ABSTRACT

Qualitative research has grown within sport and exercise psychology and is now widely conducted. The purpose of this review is to discuss three commonly used ways to demonstrate rigor when conducting or judging qualitative research in sport and exercise psychology. These are the method of member checking, the method of inter-rater reliability, and the notion of universal criteria. Problems with each method are first highlighted. Member checking and inter-rater reliability are shown to be ineffective for verification, trustworthiness, or reliability purposes. Next, universal criteria within the context of Tracy’s, heavily drawn on paper within sport and exercise psychology is problematized. Throughout the discussion of each method and universal criteria more suitable possibilities for conducting rigorous qualitative research are offered. The paper concludes that to support high-quality qualitative research, scholars – including journal editors and reviewers – need to change how rigor is developed and judged, rather than perpetuate the problems with how it has been commonly evaluated in the past. Recommendations for developing rigor when conducting and/or judging qualitative research within sport and exercise psychology are also offered.

KEYWORDS:

• Member checking
• inter-rater reliability
• universal criteria
• research quality

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that enhanced the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A common misunderstanding attached to believing in epistemological constructionism and ontological relativism is that a researcher denies that there is a physical world out there independent of us. This is not the case; a physical world is accepted (Smith & Hodkinson, 2009). But, while it is believed that there are physical beings out there moving around in time and space and uttering what people call words, it is argued that the interpretations/descriptions we offer of these movements and utterances are not out there in the sense of being independent of our interests and purposes.

2. If a researcher does believe that recall bias or member distortion is a problem when conducting interviews then to write this as a limitation in a paper that uses interviews reflects a poor decision on their behalf. From the start, they should not have chosen interviews but rather, for example, naturalistic data (i.e., data that are generated without the influence of the researcher) (Smith & Sparkes, 2016c). The ‘problem’ and ‘limitations’ then lies with their methodological decision making, not with the method of interviewing.