Invitation to Qualitative Study in Health Sciences / 医学教育

ABSTRACT

Qualitative approaches have drawn increased attention from researchers in the health sciences who wish to understand the complex phenomena of health and sickness. This paper attempts to summarize the fundamental stances, theories, and characteristics of qualitative studies in the health field. With medical anthropology as the principal theoretical foundation, a few examples are discussed. Importance is placed on how health issues are socio-culturally constructed, thus, how their context can be holistically understood. A qualitative study typically presents a specific case or cases where health issues are bound by a particular time and locale to a social context within the study population. Because they are based on phenomenology and hermeneutics rather than positivism, qualitative approaches are quite different from mainstream quantitative approaches in terms of their objective, focus, process, methods of perceiving reality, and researchers’ stances. Dialogue between qualitative and quantitative approaches should be encouraged.