Forero Roberto, Nahidi Shizar, De Costa Josephine, Mohsin Mohammed, Fitzgerald Gerry, Gibson Nick, McCarthy Sally, Aboagye-Sarfo Patrick
The Simpson Centre for Health Services Research, South Western Sydney Clinical School and the Ingham Institute for Applied Research, Liverpool Hospital, UNSW, Liverpool, NSW, 1871, Australia.
Psychiatry Research and Teaching Unit, Liverpool Hospital, NSW Health, Sydney, Australia.
BMC Health Serv Res. 2018 Feb 17;18(1):120. doi: 10.1186/s12913-018-2915-2.
The main objective of this methodological manuscript was to illustrate the role of using qualitative research in emergency settings. We outline rigorous criteria applied to a qualitative study assessing perceptions and experiences of staff working in Australian emergency departments.
We used an integrated mixed-methodology framework to identify different perspectives and experiences of emergency department staff during the implementation of a time target government policy. The qualitative study comprised interviews from 119 participants across 16 hospitals. The interviews were conducted in 2015-2016 and the data were managed using NVivo version 11. We conducted the analysis in three stages, namely: conceptual framework, comparison and contrast and hypothesis development. We concluded with the implementation of the four-dimension criteria (credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability) to assess the robustness of the study, RESULTS: We adapted four-dimension criteria to assess the rigour of a large-scale qualitative research in the emergency department context. The criteria comprised strategies such as building the research team; preparing data collection guidelines; defining and obtaining adequate participation; reaching data saturation and ensuring high levels of consistency and inter-coder agreement.
Based on the findings, the proposed framework satisfied the four-dimension criteria and generated potential qualitative research applications to emergency medicine research. We have added a methodological contribution to the ongoing debate about rigour in qualitative research which we hope will guide future studies in this topic in emergency care research. It also provided recommendations for conducting future mixed-methods studies. Future papers on this series will use the results from qualitative data and the empirical findings from longitudinal data linkage to further identify factors associated with ED performance; they will be reported separately.
本方法学论文的主要目的是阐述定性研究在急诊环境中的作用。我们概述了应用于一项定性研究的严格标准，该研究评估了澳大利亚急诊科工作人员的看法和经历。
我们使用了一个综合的混合方法框架，以确定急诊科工作人员在实施政府时间目标政策过程中的不同观点和经历。定性研究包括对16家医院的119名参与者进行访谈。访谈于2015年至2016年进行，数据使用NVivo 11版本进行管理。我们分三个阶段进行分析，即：概念框架、比较与对比以及假设发展。我们最后实施了四维标准（可信度、可靠性、可证实性和可转移性）来评估研究的稳健性。
我们采用了四维标准来评估急诊部门背景下大规模定性研究的严谨性。这些标准包括组建研究团队、制定数据收集指南、定义并确保足够的参与度、达到数据饱和以及确保高度的一致性和编码员间的一致性等策略。
基于研究结果，所提出的框架满足了四维标准，并为急诊医学研究产生了潜在的定性研究应用。我们为正在进行的关于定性研究严谨性的辩论做出了方法学贡献，希望这将指导该主题在急诊护理研究中的未来研究。它还为未来进行混合方法研究提供了建议。本系列的后续论文将使用定性数据的结果和纵向数据链接的实证结果，以进一步确定与急诊科绩效相关的因素；这些结果将分别报告。
