What Does Validity Have To Do With It?

The topic of validity causes great internal consternation among qualitative researchers. Maxwell (2013) articulates the evolution of historical arguments for or against recognizing validity in the social constructionist tradition of conducting research. Some abandoned validity as a necessary component of investigation, arguing that it was too closely tethered to postpositivist approaches to research. Although Maxwell and I disagree on how the term “validity” in research should be construed, I agree there is an inherent need to rethink the role of validity in qualitative research.

Maxwell (2013) broadly characterized validity as the “the correctness or credibility of a description, conclusion, explanation, interpretation, or other sort of account” (p. 122). Because a subjective or objective truth never emerges in research, the “correctness” criterion is only highly theoretical in nature and can never be accurately estimated with any level of precision. The“credibility” criterion (i.e., truthfulness and functional expertise of the research) too liberally confounds validity with methodology. Instead, I would advocate for a view of validity in research as the extent to which our conclusions or explanations are what we say they are. Although this may appear to be a nuanced difference between Maxwell’s definition and the one presented here, I would contend that the differences are critical.

Validity is an inherently polarizing artifact in qualitative research because the inconsistent applications of different methodologies implicate validity indiscriminately. In strict constructionist ontology and subjectivist epistemology, a recognition of the constant flux of phenomena in a given participant is exercised. The dynamic variance of interpretations, explanations, and descriptions on any topic is captured at the exact moment of the interview between a specific researcher and the subject under investigation. The results naturally cannot extend to other situations or scenarios given that they are subjective interpretations contained or delimited by time. So, validity is only an existential issue because, so long as all biases and anomalies of the research are made apparent, the research is considered“valid” at that time point between the two interactants. The issue at hand is whether validity means anything under these conditions.

One could argue that because qualitative researchers make interpretation based on their own subjective experiences with the respondent at a given time, their subjective interpretation, in every instance, meets the established criteria of validity. Indeed the disseminated results are reporting what they are purportedly reporting for the given researcher at the given time. No one then but the researcher can say that the results or the methodology are invalid because even if something were inconsistent with previous literature (i.e., externally inconsistent), the anomaly may have happened at the time unique to the relationship fostered between the subject and researcher. So, we can expect that case studies and other small sample qualitative methods make a lot of what quantitative researchers would call“Type 1 error” because no systematic consistencies can be ascertained. Type 1 error asks the question of whether the results in the sample are consistent with reality. Again, this is likely not a concern for strict constructionist researchers because the sample need not mirror an objective reality given that no objective reality exists. So, what does validity have anything to do with research critique in qualitative methods apart from something researchers should abstractly consider at the outset of a study?