Assessing Trustworthiness
Lincoln and Guba (1985) described four general types of trustworthiness in qualitative research:
credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. Among the procedures
they described, those most applicable to performing data analyses include conducting peer
debriefings and stakeholder checks as part of establishing credibility and conducting a research
audit (comparing the data with the research findings and interpretations) for dependability.
Other procedures that can be used for assessing the trustworthiness of the data analysis include
consistency checks or checks of interrater reliability (e.g., having another coder take the category
descriptions and find the text that belongs in those categories) and member or stakeholder
checks (e.g., Erlandson, Harris, Skipper,&Allen, 1993, p. 142). Stakeholder or member checks
involve opportunities for people with a specific interest in the evaluation, such as participants,
service providers, and funding agencies, to comment on categories or the interpretations made.