The Evaluation of Quality in Qualitative Research: The Principles and Strategies Of Validation and Generalization

Due to the historical domination of the positivist-quantitative approach over the major part of theories and methods in social sciences, it has been often assumed that the qualitative research is based an unstructured and unorganized methodology. As a result, the qualitative arguments and findings were considered to be not so confident and well-documented. In addition, it is simply supposed that the qualitative methodology has no standards and strategies for evaluation and validation. Therefore, qualitative methodologists have recently attempted to provide a large numbers of validation and evaluation standards and strategies for qualitative research which have more variation and precision in comparison with its quantitative counterpart.In other words, the aim of this paper is to investigate the evaluation of quality in qualitative research and to introduce the strategies and principles of validation and generalization in this methodology. In this respect, while introducing a variety of validation and generalization criterions, some of the most important ones have been discussed.