Ask the Editors: Practical Guidance for Designing and Reporting Qualitative Research

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On this episode of the Academic Medicine Podcast, the journal’s editors–Bridget O’Brien, PhD, Jonathan Amiel, MD​, Megan Brown, MBBS(H), PhD, and Laura Hirshfield, PhD–join host Toni Gallo to share practical guidance for designing and reporting qualitative research. They make recommendations for getting started, choosing a methodology, and effectively using published guidelines. Then they dispel common myths around writing up and publishing qualitative research. While the advice in this episode comes from the editors of Academic Medicine, much of it also applies to designing and reporting qualitative research for other journals and publications. 

This episode is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else podcasts are available.

A transcript is below.

Check out the resources discussed in this episode: 

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Transcript

Toni Gallo:

Hi everyone, I’m Toni Gallo with Academic Medicine, and I want to start today with a quick note that this is our 250th episode. The podcast debuted back in 2015, and we’ve changed and grown over the years, but what has stayed the same is our commitment to bringing you stories and discussions to expand your thinking about timely and meaningful issues in academic medicine. And I want to offer my thanks to all of the cohosts and guests and listeners who have taken these conversations from the pages of the journal to us here on the podcast and hopefully into your everyday practice. Thank you all for sharing your expertise and your perspectives and your time with us. Here’s to the next 250 episodes.

Onto today’s discussion. Designing, conducting, and writing up your research. It’s quite the task. Where do you even start? And what best practices should you follow? It’s not surprising then that one of our most cited papers and some of our most accessed author resources provide guidance on conducting and reporting research. So to pull back the curtain and hopefully provide you with some practical guidance on this key part of academic medicine, I’m joined by a few members of the journal’s editorial team and we’re going to be discussing qualitative research. We’ll talk about how to start your research, how to choose a methodology, how to effectively use published guidelines, and then we’ll dispel some common myths that you might have heard. And we’ll end our discussion today with a new feature for us on the podcast–listener questions. So to get started, I want to do some introductions, so I will turn it over to all of you.

Bridget O’Brien:

Thank you, Toni. I’m Bridget O’Brien. I’m a professor in the Department of Medicine and an education scientist in our Center for Faculty Educators at the University of California San Francisco. And I serve as the deputy editor for Academic Medicine.

Laura Hirschfield:

Hi everyone, I’m Laura Hirschfield. I’m an associate professor in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and I’m one of the assistant editors for Academic Medicine.

Megan Brown:

Hi everyone, I’m Megan Brown. I’m a teaching fellow in medical education research. I’m based at Imperial College in London in the UK and I’m just the same as Laura, one of the assistant editors at Academic Medicine.

Yoni Amiel:

Hi everybody, I’m Yoni Amiel. I’m a professor of psychiatry and senior associate dean for innovation in health professions education at Columbia University in New York, and I’m an assistant editor at the journal as well.

Toni Gallo:

Well, thank you all for being here on the podcast today. I’m looking forward to our discussion and I want to turn it over to Bridget to give us some kind of context and background for our discussion, why this was something we wanted to talk about here.

Bridget O’Brien:

Sure. Well one of the reasons that we wanted to do this was actually because we, as a group of assistant and associate editors and myself and staff actually, meet to discuss some of the kinds of challenging papers that we see come through… challenging decisions. We’re all people who not only review and manage qualitative research papers that come through, but we also conduct our own research and largely qualitative research. So we know some of the kinds of challenges that can come up and a lot of these are really tough issues and we recognize there’s different recommendations and perspectives offered by qualitative researchers.

And truthfully, at least from my perspective, there’s rarely one right way to do things. So it’s helpful for us to talk through some of these topics and some of the dilemmas that we see coming up in papers and to think through ways to improve our feedback and guidance to authors and reflect on our own thought processes and decision making processes as we make these recommendations. So we’re excited about this podcast as an opportunity to share some insights from our discussions and observations and our experiences sort of wrestling with some of these issues as researchers and as an editorial team. And we’re glad to be able to share them with the community that submits to our journal.

Toni Gallo:

Thanks, Bridget. I think this conversation today is going to be a great resource for our authors as they’re thinking about how to write up their work and even revise when they get comments from the editors and reviewers. So Laura, I’m going to turn it over to you to talk about getting started. Do you start with a methodology? With data? What would you recommend if folks want to conduct qualitative research? Where should they start?

Laura Hirschfield:

Great question. I would say there’s a bunch of different approaches that you can take in terms of starting your research. And like Bridget said, there’s no right way. What I would say is that the easiest approach and the way that I think tends to be the most linear for folks who are developing their research studies is to start with a research question or a research topic. When you start with a question or the topic that led you to conduct a study, you can then often figure out which method is best to answer that question and what data you need to investigate it. And that can be the most sort of streamlined approach to developing your research study. That said, oftentimes since the field of health professions education is so applied and so many of us are very deeply in this space, we often start instead from different angles, often with the data or really in the application of the process, which is often a different angle than starting with the research question.

So if you start with the data, you have to sort of think from a different approach. When you start with the data and you have a bunch of… oftentimes it’ll be really cool qualitative data that you have in your possession, you have to then sort of retrofit the study onto it, and I think that’s the really big key that sometimes people struggle with. So you need to spend some time thinking through, once I have these data, what kinds of questions can I reasonably ask of these data? What methods make sense to use for that data and how do those fit with the questions that I want to ask and that I can ask of those data?

And the other thing I really want to say about this, because we see this all the time as a challenge, is it’s really important if you start with the data to not forget to ask for ethics approval. Whatever the process is, in whichever country you’re working in, there is some sort of institutional review board, REBs. Ethics review boards exist to make sure that the data that you’re using are appropriate and are valid for research use. And the reason we sometimes struggle with that is that oftentimes medical educators or health professions educators have access to data in our roles as medical educators or as physicians or in whatever role we’re in that is not the role of researcher. And there’s different rules for use of data for research than there is for use of data if you’re in those other roles. So it’s a really important piece that can be hard to remember and it’s really a key part of that process if you’re sort of retrofitting.

The other way that people sometimes approach developing a research question, that sometimes is the hardest but I think is a completely reasonable, especially for the folks who are trainees or who are trying to really gain research skills, is to start with the methodology. I often find that my students, medical students or our masters of health professions education students, will come to me with the goal of learning an approach, learning how to do focus groups, learning how to do ethnographic observation. And what they need to do in that case is sort of similar to the data issue. They need to think about what questions you can ask with that kind of approach.

The key there is to just make sure that the kinds of research questions you’re asking align with the method that you’ve got because there’s nothing worse than having an interview study… you’re developing one that’s really better suited for a survey, and then you have sort of a clash. But all of those approaches work, and I would say making sure you’ve just thought it through and that you’ve looked at the alignment of all three things–the research question, the data source, and the method–you’ll be fine.

Toni Gallo:

Laura, I wonder if you or anyone else could maybe give an example of a study you’ve done recently and how you’ve kind of approached it. What did you start with and then how did you progress from there?

Bridget O’Brien:

Sometimes they get handed to you. So I was actually just thinking of … there are some projects where maybe our school has got funding or we’ve done something innovative or we have a pressing issue that we need to understand better. For one example, we had some funding to explore professionalism and some of the critiques that are coming up of professionalism and to try to understand that better. And so we conducted an interview study. One team actually worked on a study interviewing medical students and residents from 3 different institutions about their experiences with professionalism. And we were particularly looking at the different backgrounds and identities of the participants and how that intersected with their understanding of professionalism.

And then another part of our team studied faculty perspectives on this topic, so that was a great example of… actually, a problem that was coming up locally, a lot of people were wrestling with how do we give feedback around professionalism? And so we developed a study out of that, but other times they’ll be maybe an instrument that someone has developed and they want to understand the implementation of this or a curricular innovation that they want to understand more about what that implementation process looked like and how it works and what needs to be improved. And those are just 2 examples, but there are many others.

Laura Hirschfield:

I would just say that those kinds of models are really wonderful and great examples of times where the question is really embedded in the space. And then you’ve developed some studies sort of out of that. The sort of different approach that I’ve often seen is often where you have a study that’s developed, sort of asking different questions but then a health professions education question will also sometimes emerge in those data. So for example, I’ve been working with a colleague of mine, a new colleague in my department who did some research prior to joining our department on pathways for folks who are undocumented or who have DACA status in education, higher ed in general.

And she did this research in Indiana in a sort of big area, and she focused in, recently, on folks within the health professions education pathways. And that’s been something that we’ve really been focusing on in academic medicine and in this space. So sometimes you can do a bigger project and find that there’s smaller questions that are really interesting to ask based on the data that you find or a sort of narrower question that you want to ask of the data that you’ve found. So that’s sort of, by the way, a slightly different version of what I described before, a study that’s been developed and then pulling off a piece that you notice is really interesting and highly relevant to your area.

Yoni Amiel:

Toni, maybe if I can add one additional kind of approach. My favorite way of thinking about research questions or generating research questions is actually when there’s a difference of opinion or an argument in a particular setting. Like if a curriculum committee is trying to struggle through something or a faculty group or a student group, and people have pretty dug in views on what the particular reality that they’re trying to advocate for is, whether it’s clerkship grading or psychological safety in teams. There are lots of these examples where people have strong feelings, and one of the nice things about them suggesting or thinking about actually trying to describe the various perspectives and using qualitative approaches is that suddenly you learn so much more about the specific conflict that you’re in and those are the papers that I love to read too.

Toni Gallo:

Well, let’s turn to Megan. You’ve all alluded to different kinds of methodologies and there’s a ton out there. So Megan, maybe you can tell us a little bit about that whole spectrum of qualitative methods. And then how do you figure out which is the right one to use for your project?

Megan Brown:

Yeah, so really good question. What I would say is that the spectrum of methods is always broader than you think. It’s that whole idea of the more you know about something, the more you know that you don’t know about it. So the more that I read and learn about qualitative methods myself, actually the less I feel like I know about that spectrum sometimes. But I think that we all have our favorite corners of qualitative research topics or methods that feel like home. As Laura said, sometimes that’s where actually your research questions begin. I think in medical education, within academic medicine, we do tend towards the more traditionally scientific end of the spectrum, even of qualitative methods, those methodologies and methods that are a bit more pragmatic or maybe they’re a bit more post-positivist or realist. And by that I mean they’re very focused on exploring those kinds of mechanisms of how the world works, how experiences… the same or unified across groups of people that allow us to say something about populations beyond the population that we’re studying.

And I think that’s fine. I’m not against those approaches at all and I think it makes sense because we are very closely aligned with the sciences. Obviously, that makes sense in terms of the history of our field, but I think there are approaches that are gaining more traction, approaches to qualitative research that are more about exploring people’s subjective experiences in the world, variations of experiences that people have, those more constructivist or constructionist approaches. And then there’s even further out on the other end of the spectrum is where I see things that are kind of more creative approaches that are arts based, that are less typical to our fields, things that we’re, I think still slightly less comfortable with, approaches like poetic inquiry is something that I have a kind of great love of, but it’s not an approach that we talk much about.

And I think it’s because all of these approaches have different aims and I think that comes into the question of how you select an approach on this spectrum, how you decide where you’re going to go. It depends on the aims of your research. And we can’t apply the same goals for research that’s focused on exploring mechanisms within the world to research that’s focused on experiences, emotions, kind of differences in context. That would be something that’s a bit more constructivist or even more towards the arts-based end of that spectrum. And I think at any point of that spectrum, it’s also important to flag that there are different quality criteria. So thinking about that, thinking about what the aims of your research are, what you’re trying to do through your research question, what you’re trying to achieve, and then what quality looks like within that research is a kind of important note in guiding that decision.

Toni Gallo:

So what would you all say to authors who are maybe using a methodology that isn’t one of those typical med ed methods? Is that something we like at Academic Medicine? How do you all assess that as editors?

Megan Brown:

It’s something I’d like to see more of. I’m aware that I’m one of the more junior editors on the call, so maybe Bridget might have more to add to this. I think it’s tricky to do though, my own experiences of trying to get research that used poetry published was very challenging. And I don’t think, to be fair, I did a great job of communicating what I needed to communicate when I first set out trying to publish that research, but also you’ve got a lot of legwork to do in terms of explaining the methods.

It’s not just saying, I did a thematic analysis. You can’t kind of assume that people know what the background of that approach is or the steps of the approach are and why you’re using it and what your justification for using that approach is. So you have to think very carefully about how you explain it. So I think I’d love to see more of it, but I guess it’s just making clear why you’re using that approach and thinking very carefully how you’re communicating it to a wider audience. So find some critical friends to have a look at your manuscript before the peer review process, which is not what I did, but would be helpful.

Bridget O’Brien:

I would agree, Megan. I think we would love to see more, and we do love seeing more variety in the types of qualitative methods, things that are coming out of the arts and humanities that inform different methodologies than we might typically see. And I agree that authors do need to explain a bit more about the methodology, but I also think as editors and for reviewers, we have a responsibility also to do some of our own reading about these methodologies. If a reviewer is not familiar with that methodology, as you were saying earlier, it’s important for them to recognize the quality criteria might be different for this approach or methodology. And they need to be sensitive to that and aware of it.

And even if they don’t have the time to maybe explore it in depth, it’s almost like a reflexivity statement to say, this is not a methodology that I know a lot about and therefore, I can’t offer a lot of critique of what they’ve done but I can maybe raise some questions where I’d like a little bit more clarification so that then, in a revision, the authors can maybe help their audience and their readers understand that more. I do try to offer some of that guidance sometimes in revision to say, I’m not sure all of our readers will be familiar with this, so could you explain this a little bit more for us?

Also, I know that word limit can be a challenge, and so we do have supplemental digital content, so if something really requires a lot more elaboration than we might be able to fit in the main text of the manuscript, that is also always an option. And I’ve seen some authors make some very nice use of that option. But I do think the main text has to give readers enough explanation to understand at least some of the basics of what you’ve done and why you’ve done it.

Yoni Amiel:

I think maybe my role on the panel is introducing kind of the clinician educator perspective. And so I think that us, as an editor group, we’re really excited to see new approaches and we try to keep the audience in mind. So if you’re using something the people aren’t likely to have seen before, really make the case for why that’s the way to approach it so that they give you that chance and keep reading because then they’ll learn. And we’re really trying to open minds with the method there, which can be very exciting, but clinician educators, or I’ll say I’m sometimes a little bit reluctant to figure out how much effort am I going to give a particular article, so help me.

Toni Gallo:

So you’ve mentioned quality standards and there’s a number of different guidelines out there to help folks with different types of qualitative research. Bridget, I want to turn to you to talk a little bit about those guidelines and how should our listeners think about using them? What role do they play? Can you just give us a little bit of advice there?

Bridget O’Brien:

Yeah, I’m really appreciative of the opportunity to talk about this. I feel kind of passionate about this topic. So very early in my career, I remember getting some reviews back on a qualitative study that I’d submitted. I think it was the very first paper I’d ever submitted to a med ed journal and it actually was Academic Medicine. It seemed like maybe some of the reviewers didn’t understand the methodology and I wasn’t really using anything terribly fancy, but it was things that from grad school I kind of expected to be generally understood, not realizing I went to a school of education and maybe the way I learned qualitative research was not the norm in this field. So that prompted me to develop some reporting guidelines that could help authors and reviewers kind of know what information to include in writing up a qualitative manuscript and this field is really taken off.

So reporting guidelines I see as mainly truly a guideline, not a rule book or a must include, and certainly not even a tool that you would use for critical appraisal. These are meant to help an author understand what kinds of information they should give to readers, what they should describe about what they did and why they did it, why they made the decisions that they made. And it’s not necessarily that you can always include everything and you’re not going to do every minutiae detail or every decision that you’ve made, so there’s some judgment in there, but in general, it gives you a good way to know what information to report. And originally I think when these kinds of reporting guidelines were created, they were designed for replication. So people wanted to be able to replicate a study and all the information that they needed, or if they were doing a systematic review, they wanted to be able to extract the same information that was kind of standardized across papers.

When I think of qualitative research, I don’t really think of reporting guidelines as serving the purpose of replicating a study or even standardizing things, but rather giving your readers the information they need to put your study in context, to situate the work, to understand, does this work resonate with me? Why or why not? What might help explain why not? Would it be useful in my own context and circumstances and that kind of thing? There’s reporting guidelines. I recommend the EQUATOR Network as a place to find some of these reporting guidelines. Sometimes the authors say that they use something like the SRQR or COREQ to design their study or they follow this in conducting their study, and I think that’s not the way I usually think about reporting guidelines. So they can help you decide what to write about your study, but they shouldn’t be the tool that you use to design your study.

There you’d want to be looking for more the… there’s some great how-to guides in medical education and I think those give you a general sense of what is this methodology and then you want to go and read more in depth. So if you were going to do constructivist grounded theory, I’d recommend going and reading Charmaz’s book on constructivist grounded theory. So those are where you really would go for the design and methodology.

And then there are critical appraisal tools like Megan was saying, those give you more of the… this is what to look for to evaluate the actual quality of the study. That’s how I think about those different things. There’s reporting guidelines, there’s critical appraisal tools, and then there’s how-to-guides.

Toni Gallo:

You mentioned a few specific examples, Bridget, any other resources you would recommend for listeners? Maybe people who are just getting started or looking to try out a different methodology that they haven’t done yet? Anything else they should look to for some help?

Bridget O’Brien:

I do really like the AMEE guides, they do offer a good introduction and kind of overview of different methodologies. We have some Last Pages. I feel like our field is a field that really does try to make things very accessible to people. So I think across many of our journals in the field, you can find a lot of these different types of resources, but others might also have suggestions.

Laura Hirschfield:

I’ll say maybe this is my own perspective, but I would say the best resource is finding some teammates and some collaborators who have experience in qualitative methods. This can be people who are social scientists with experience in education or sociology or other social sciences or folks who are clinical educators who’ve done lots and lots of qualitative research and who have a lot of experience. And I will say as somebody who’s been doing this kind of research for many years, I learn every time I work with somebody else and so I think one of the best resources is not only the written guidelines and tools and how-to guides, but also your teammates and your colleagues who’ve done work like this because they’re also a social network that you can reach out to in the future when you have questions. Because what I will say about qualitative research and all research is that each project is different and you come across different questions and different issues and you have to make decisions. And having a big stable of people to ask those questions to help you make those decisions is one of the benefits of this deeply collaborative field that we’re in. And I would take that as the biggest resource that I found in being in HPE.

Megan Brown:

Yeah, I completely agree. And I think I would say as well that there’s a big online community as well across lots of different platforms, be it Twitter or whatever platform you prefer using but I think that you can follow along with people on there. I’m constantly bookmarking things, resources to come back to later or threads that people have done. Things like the character counts on some of the platforms really force you to explain things plainly. So I think that’s a great way as well of connecting with people. If you are in an institution where you feel like maybe there’s not that interest around you, there’s a wider network there for you to reach out and connect with.

Yoni Amiel:

Maybe a tiny additional practical tip if you’re near a public health school, that might be a really good kind of next step going from medicine to talk to your public health colleagues because many of them kind of appreciate the diversity of research approaches and at least can facilitate that introduction to people who are really adept at qualitative inquiry.

Toni Gallo:

These are all great suggestions, thank you. So Yoni, I’m going to turn it over to you now. I know there are some common myths that we all hear from authors and out in the community. You’re going to tell us a little bit about why they may or may not be true so I’ll turn it over to you.

Yoni Amiel:

Yeah, I really appreciate the question, Toni. And actually this is the conversation that we as an editor group have on a very regular basis because we’re seeing submissions come in, we’re seeing reviews come in, and then people are approaching us who are trying to do this work and say, oh, I’ve heard this and that about Academic Medicine. Why is it that way? And so we came up with kind of 4 common myths to walk through and I think that they resonate with a lot of what we’ve talked about before.

But to make it really specific, the first myth is that the journal has a preferred approach to engaging with theory. And specifically what many of us have heard is that there’s this impression that every study has to stem from an existing conceptual framework. We think of this as a tension in qualitative research in HPE generally, but as an editor group, to be clear, we don’t have a preferred approach and the journal doesn’t have a preferred approach. And we unpack it this way. So first we’ve seen this in action. We’re really comfortable with approaches that either generate theory from data so the inductive approaches, or approaches that use theory to produce knowledge, the deductive approaches, with a nice Academic Medicine Last Page from 2020 that Meredith Young and a group of colleagues put together that includes examples of approaches across the spectrum with aspects of inductive and deductive approaches to them that are a great starting point in thinking about that.

Second related to this myth is that the gap actually is sometimes descriptive. So authors that don’t clearly describe how they engage with theory and why they took their approach, they leave it to us and to reviewers to try to figure it out and we’re not always good at that. So the bottom line is that there isn’t a preferred approach, but we do look to authors to clarify how they’re framing the problem or observation that they’re dealing with. Are they looking at a context and a process of what happens within a person or between people or in systems and help us walk through that logic so that we understand why they designed the study the way that they did.

The second myth is that a successful submission follows concretely the study design or logic framework of articles that we’ve previously published, maybe articles that have been read a lot or have been popular. We do see submissions that kind of copy others from time to time and the problem for that is that often while on the surface they replicate the other studies that have successfully passed peer review, maybe have been taken up well in the community. In a deeper way, they may have missed thinking through the decisions and study design and interpretation that best work. So again, going even back into the first myth, we just need to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. And sometimes when you think through it, you may adapt or diverge from something that you’ve seen that was compelling and that can be great. So work that has a clear goal but describes the reasoning behind it’s methodology, and that’s humble and draw conclusions from its results and importantly, from an editor group, that it follows the general article guidelines for the submission type for our journal, that’s what’s most likely to succeed.

The third myth is that we require positionality or reflexivity statements in every qualitative research study. And as we’ve talked about it and thought about it, this might be kind of a half myth, there’s nothing about positionality or reflexivity in our publication criteria for research reports, but I’d say that most if not all of us think that authors really stating their own characteristics and how they may influence the research is at the very least clarifying and often pretty necessary for us to understand the work. And that leaves authors to thinking about what the right way to describe their positionality or reflexivity might be, and there’s not one specific way that we insist on. As we talked about it as a group, we do think that all good qualitative researchers should be thinking about their positionality throughout their study, from thinking about why they’re doing it, to designing it, to writing their implications or conclusions. And really think about how your beliefs, experiences with a topic, your stance or position in the particular research study influence the way that you’re looking at the data, understanding the data. One thing that Bridget suggested too, which is I think a good suggestion, is if you want to explain more about the positionality of the research team but don’t have space in the main text, also consider that as a good use of supplemental digital content because we can take a look at that and that can be really helpful.

The fourth and last myth that I wanted to name is that describing findings in their specific context is not enough and that we expect all papers to generalize into the more global implications of the work. And this is another maybe half myth because we do think that qualitative research that describes a new way of understanding a specific context is immensely important. That being said, we look to authors to synthesize and interpret their findings and then to ponder what the implications of their findings might be. I think we want to be clear that we don’t insist on certainty when you’re offering these implications. So we probably favor caution and humility when you’re drawing what you think are the global implications of your work. And then we guide against including implications that aren’t clearly supported by the result. So you can let yourself think large, but with a degree of humility and caution and kind of open it up to further conversations in the scholarly literature.

Toni Gallo:

So for listeners, if there is a myth that maybe we haven’t addressed here and they’re like, oh, I know Academic Medicine doesn’t do something or they require that you do something, what would you suggest people do? How would they figure out is this a true myth or is it not? What would you recommend if somebody were to come to you with a question like that?

Bridget O’Brien:

I think sometimes people feel like editors are like this very distant separate, not part of the community group, and I think you can always reach out and ask questions like this. And you can either email the journal and those emails get directed toward us but we also have social media platforms and blogs and different ways that you could leave comments that others might also benefit from seeing the answers to those questions. Or even reach out to us personally where our names are listed on the masthead for the journal so you can also find us that way as well.

Yoni Amiel:

Yeah, I’ll say that the group of people on this podcast and the larger community has really taken up these kinds of debates and mythbusting on Twitter. And so if people are interested, I’ve learned a ton hearing a lot of different perspectives and actually links to really good papers. I found that to be a great learning tool as long as you take it kind of with a grain of salt that the most prolific Twitters may not hold the ultimate truth. And so you still need to triangulate a little bit around where you land on your question.

Toni Gallo:

So this is a good segue way… for this podcast we actually tried something new. We reached out on social media and to journal readers and we asked if anybody had questions about designing, conducting, and writing up research. And we had a few that came in. So I’m going to pose them to this group and I’m curious what you all are going to say. And I would recommend to listeners, keep an eye out because we’ll be doing these kinds of ask the editors calls for questions periodically. And if you have a question, please reach out to us, we’ll tell you how to do that, and your question could be featured on a future episode of this podcast. So we had a learner actually reach out and ask, how do you recommend students who are at smaller institutions get involved in research? So what would you all recommend?

Laura Hirschfield:

First thing I would say is I would find out if there is any opportunity to get involved with OSR, which I always forget what that stands for…

Toni Gallo:

Organization of Student Representatives.

Laura Hirschfield:

Thank you. I will say my own institution, UIC has actually a very busy group of medical students doing a lot of great research, but I know that the OSR representatives from across the country often work together on research projects and so many of the OSR reps from smaller schools join in with schools that have a slightly larger research mechanism and get peer mentorship from folks at other schools who may have research mentors that they can sort of tag along with and create social networks through that. So if I were in that situation, I think that would be the first stop, to connect with other medical students and potentially also have a medical education leadership role in the process.

Bridget O’Brien:

I’d also say, look around in your own institution and see if you have a group that does health professions education research or scholarship, reach out to any of those people. You have a School of Education, I know Yoni mentioned School of Public Health, but if you’re at a comprehensive university, there might be people in the School of Education who could also be good partners. And then another thought as you are reading the literature or listening to podcasts, I know it seems a little bit intimidating, but reach out to any of those authors if something really catches your eye. I guarantee they will love to hear from you. And even if it’s just a little bit of a chat about what kinds of studies do you think need to be done or if you just want to talk to them about their work, how they got started with it. I think pretty much every author in our field would be excited to hear from you.

Yoni Amiel:

Another pitch I’d make is the regional meetings for the Group on Educational Affairs. Almost all have subsidized registrations for students and trainees. Both really interesting work that’s being presented there and also the people doing it. And so if at your school you kind of don’t have that community, those are some of the friendliest meetings I’ve ever been to. And so it’s really nice to go and just ask people questions. They’ll talk to you.

Toni Gallo:

And our second listener question, which we kind of touched on earlier, but maybe you have some other thoughts you want to add, is the best way to come up with ideas for research projects. I know Laura, you talked about some of that earlier and Bridget mentioned sometimes you are given projects to do, but if that’s not the case, anything else that you would suggest?

Megan Brown:

I would say think about what bothers you, think about what you see in your own experience if you’re a learner, if you are a trainee, things that you have found challenging or things that stand out to you as having been issues because I think that starting from your own experience, it’s just a really useful place to start. And if you are going to take it upon yourself to create a research project, you want to at least start with an interest in that. My supervisor during my PhD told me, you have to start by liking the project because towards the end of the PhD you’re going to hate looking at the work.

So I’d say start and follow interests and I think once you’ve thought of that, there might be other people that are thinking in that space and that’s where then going to the literature, listening to podcasts and engaging with what’s already out there is helpful to get a sense of how the issue that you’ve observed fits with that. And there might still then be a kind of novel take that you have on it or a novel angle that then you can think about exploring further, possibly connecting with some of the people that are already working in that space if you are new to the kind of research environment … in my experience is what’s worked best is to follow your own interests.

Toni Gallo:

I want to give you each a chance, if you have any final thoughts or recommendations, things you want to share with listeners. We’’ll go around and everybody can give their final words. So Yoni, do you want to start?

Yoni Amiel:

Sure. I’ll say that when I was approaching this work, I had a tremendous amount of imposter syndrome. There are so many experts in the field and it can be complicated and all of that. Giving yourself a little bit of the grace to kind of relax and ask your question and find a lot of different approaches to how you might answer it and then choose one and learn from that is great. And so what I would suggest is get started because you definitely don’t learn until you try.

Toni Gallo:

Laura?

Laura Hirschfield:

Great segue, I would completely agree with Yoni and I would just add that one of the things that is I think joyful about qualitative work is how associated it is with observing interactions and watching people’s sort of lived experiences. And I think that one of the things that I would just urge people to do is to lean into that, spend time in the space that you’re in and people watch, do the sort of informal parts of qualitative methods, informally talk to people and observe people and use that to some degree to come up with the questions that you might have. I wouldn’t say then try to use that as your data, but certainly those are the places where just hanging out in the spaces that I’m interested in studying has led to really interesting questions for me and I think just leaning into your skills is a really good idea.

Toni Gallo:

Megan?

Megan Brown:

I would just add… we’ve spoken a lot about great resources within academic medicine, within medical education. I would say also look beyond the boundaries of the field. So we often say that we’re an interdisciplinary field. I think some of the evidence actually suggests that most of the theory that we use comes from within the field or from within health sciences more broadly. And I think there’s a lot of value to be had by engaging with conversations that are happening within qualitative research, say within sociology. I know Laura, as a sociologist, has a background in sociology, also within areas like the arts and humanities and philosophy. And I think some of that work is starting to happen, but it’s still kind of fringe to a lot of our discussions in the field. So I would say also just have an open mind and read widely, and you might be sort of surprised and be able to follow your interests into doing some of that more interdisciplinary work as well.

Toni Gallo:

And Bridget?

Bridget O’Brien:

Yeah, I would say keep the qualitative research coming, we love to see it. And I’d also say building on the idea of reading widely, as you read, note some of the things that you like that you see that authors do. I know we said you don’t have to follow a template and use their papers as a template, but do you like the way that they integrate the voices of participants in their study? What techniques are they using to present data? Because data is different in qualitative research from quantitative research, and there are so many creative interesting ways to write up that data. So look at some of the people’s work who you really like and see what they’re doing, see what things you think are maybe less effective and avoid those things but take notes as you read.

Toni Gallo:

Well, I want to thank you all for sharing your expertise and your experiences with us today. I think this is going to be a really helpful conversation and I want to remind listeners, check back next month because we’re going to have another episode talking about quantitative research, so you’ll get some guidelines around that too. So tune back in for that but thanks everyone.

Bridget O’Brien:

Thank you.

Megan Brown:

Thanks Toni.

Toni Gallo:

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