A Content Analysis of 100 Qualitative Health Research Articles to Examine Researcher-Participant Relationships and Implications for Data Sharing. Int J Qual Methods 2022;21
Date
01/01/2022Pubmed ID
38404360Pubmed Central ID
PMC10888521DOI
10.1177/16094069221105074Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85131337335 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 4 CitationsAbstract
We conducted a qualitative content analysis of health science literature (N = 100) involving qualitative interviews or focus groups. Given recent data sharing mandates, our goal was to characterize the nature of relationships between the researchers and participants to inform ethical deliberations regarding qualitative data sharing and secondary analyses. Specifically, some researchers worry that data sharing might harm relationships, while others claim that data cannot be analyzed absent meaningful relationships with participants. We found little evidence of relationship building with participants. The majority of studies involve single encounters (95%), lasting less than 60 min (59%), with less than half of authors involved in primary data collection. Our findings suggest that relationships with participants might not pose a barrier to sharing some qualitative data collected in the health sciences and speak to the feasibility in principle of secondary analyses of these data.
