Reflection/Commentary on a Past Article: “Verification Strategies for Establishing Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research”

“Verification strategies for establishing reliability and validity in qualitative research” is one of the International Journal of Qualitative Methods’ (IJQM) most downloaded articles over the past 18 years. To date, it has been cited in 4,398 articles tracked in Google Scholar. At the time of its publication, in IJQM’s Volume 2 in 2002, there was still lively debate about the role and nature of reliability and validity in qualitative inquiry. This was a time in which the seminal work of Guba and Lincoln in the 1980s had been sufficiently disseminated to several generations of qualitative researchers. Discussion as to what rigor ought to be—its dimensions, parameters, and terminology—gradually obscured a subtle but important shift in the way qualitative researchers conceptualized rigor—from integral processes implemented by the researcher to standards and criteria utilized by the reader. The marginalization of reliability and validity—language familiar to researchers using quantitative methods—and replacement with qualitative-specific criteria, goals, and standards for rigor, each with their own terms to suit specific contexts, had created a confusing and unworkable landscape in which criteria and processes for establishing rigor became less clear.