This blogpost is inspired by the Open Qualitative Research Symposium at VU on 28th March 2025. We thank the organizers and speakers for this interesting and energizing meeting.
The blogpost is a summary of and reflection on some key issues that were raised during the event, how those relate to reproducibility in a broader context and how the NLRN works on solving some of those issues.
Authors: Tamarinde Haven and Daniela Gawehns; Foto credits: QOS organising team
Open and Qualitative – an epistemic clash?
How to open and share data collected with qualitative research methods was a central point of discussion and featured prominently in the workshop program. Tools for anonymizing data, and for sharing data such as videos and pictures, were presented and discussed. A recent review on enablers of reproducibility in qualitative research reflects this emphasis, finding that more than half of the included studies addressed Open Data as a topic. One of the authors explained: These papers are not all about how to share data, but many of them attempt to explain how the requirement to open data does not align with the needs of qualitative research:
While familiar privacy concerns also apply in quantitative research, qualitative researchers face an additional, epistemic challenge: most require access to un-anonymized, rich data as a basis for interpretation. And this type of data is difficult to share. The epistemic requirements clash with the broader push for transparency.
The discussion around Open Data requirements for qualitative research highlights a mismatch between the epistemics of a majority voice in the Open Science discussion and the needs of a smaller group of researchers. At the NLRN, we aim to include as many voices as possible in the reproducibility debate, and to take a range of epistemic challenges into account.
Qualitative stepping stones
The second main topic addressed how qualitative research methods can help quantitative scientists work more reproducibly. Reflexivity, a central aspect of qualitative research, can serve as a stepping stone toward process reproducibility and transparency in quantitative research:
“Reflexivity is the process of engaging in self-reflection about who we are as researchers, how our subjectivities and biases guide and inform the research process, and how our worldview is shaped by the research we do and vice versa” (quote from Reflexivity in quantitative research: A rationale and beginner’s guide – Jamieson – 2023 ). In their paper, Pownall and colleagues make the case for reflexivity as a basic first step towards reproducibility: a reflection on the research process makes opening that process up much easier.
The NLRN brings organisations together to share best practices and learn from each other. We would love to amplify and share cases where methods from qualitative research helped quantitative researchers approach the reproducibility of their own non-qualitative work in new ways and make it more transparent.
Parallel Communities of Practice
Several speakers voiced their concern about duplication of efforts as parallel communities of open qualitative methods form. The recent call for a European community of qualitative researchers is an answer to this fear and will hopefully create more synergies to avoid duplication of efforts and slowing the process of change down. 250 people already expressed their interest in such a community. We will cross post updates on this initiative on LinkedIn and via our newsletter.
The NLRN will organize a symposium in collaboration with the Dutch-Belgian Context Network for Qualitative Methodology to continue the discussion on transparency at the national level and foster learning from other, non-qualitative methodologies.
Open to the citizen – with methodological consequences
A topic that gets rarely touched upon in the reproducibility discussion is participatory or community driven research. The goal of this approach is to make research more relevant by including citizens, not only as participants or as data collectors, but also as researchers and to guide the research process.
With reproducibility being a way to share research processes, questions around methods and research pipelines arise: Are those methods flexible enough to accommodate evolving consent forms, fluid management plans and research designs that are sourced from the impacted communities themselves? Is there a way to pre-register those changing plans and how would we go about it? How can we be transparent about changes and present them as an integral part of the research design, rather than as flaws in planning or execution?
Links:
Materials of the Symposium: Events | Community Of Practice (for slide decks) and Events | Community Of Practice (for recordings)
Library used for the mentioned review on reproducibility of qualitative research: A context-consent meta-framework for designing open (qualitative) data studies | Reproducibility of qualitative research – an integrative review | Zotero