Hi,

just a quick question: My supervisor has advised me to do a qualitative study comparing views of british doctors and german doctors regarding the care they provide.
Does anyone know if one can compare in a qualitative study? The concept seems strange to me as due to the small groups there seems a very high likelyhood of selection bias.

Any views?

Multiple case studies with comparative analysis-pretty much standard in clinical studies..

You can create reliability through case study protocol (s), chain of evidence, review processes and so on. Read Yin (2003)

the methodology Grounded Theory uses constant comparison to analyse the data. Have a look at groundedtheory.com or do a search on google. It is a methodology well used in the health professions

Beware of confusion! The methodology was developed by Glaser and Strauss in the 1960's, they 'split up' twenty years later and both have different ideas about what grounded theory is. You can either use Glaser's or Strauss and Corbin's.

Good luck

You don't have to necessarily use grounded theory methodology to compare your data. We are talking here about the research strategy and all I'm saying is: in the case study approach commonly used in medical studies, a comparative data analysis is nothing special.

Various measures apply in this case to increase reliability and significance and certain sub-sets of validity.

First you need to be very clear about your research strategy regardless of both methodology and research methods chosen.

Thanks for your replies, this helpful and appreciated

May be I have not been explicit enough: the quality of the care which the doctors provide is not based on explicit cases but on systems which they have in place to assure that optimal treatment is provided.

I am not aware that such wide concept comparisons are made in qualitative medical studies.

Regards

It's one common mistake to assume that "case study" is always a specific case. You have a lot of freedom to define your unit(s) of analysis and it can definitely be a system of care.

For example: you could compare one system with the German system through a case study approach.
That would be a multiple-case study with two systems.

Alternatively you could use a single-case study: the overarching unit of analysis would be the investigation of care systems, embedded units of analysis would be the English system and the German system which you can then compare within a single-case design.

Once again-read Yin..

that would be a conceptual analysis in itself with the conceptual care system itself being the actual case study (rather than individual cases)

Thanks Apollo

your explicit explanation is very helpful and I will have a look, as you suggest at Yin
How are you getting on?
Regards