Qualitative Research

QR Methodology learning and its application to the field of public health/community medicine research and practice has been comparatively a recent phenomenon. It has been a bastion of Social science. Our increasing acceptance of ever increasing influence of sociobehavioral factors on health and health related issues, have led us to accept the use of QR methodology to examine some of it in the research settings. Unfortunately, so far, neither the correct training in this field of research methodology is available uniformly everywhere, nor its relevance and use is fully appreciated across the Medical colleges, in the state. Among medical researchers, it appears to be growing under the shadow of Quantitative research (QtR) methodology and therefore, suffers from being viewed with an inappropriate “Quantitative Lens” with a lot of misgivings about the robust methods and its relevance and application. In order to initiate understanding create health acceptance of Qualitative research Methodology; let us first examine what this methodology is not!