15 STEPS TO UNDERSTANDING A QUALITATIVE RESEARCH REPORT

Record notes only in enough detail to support recall in the absence of the original
document. Except for No. 1, use abbreviations, diagrams, shorthand, and a careful
selection of only what is essential to the study. The report should take only two pages
(except for #14 and #15); don't be tempted to run onto additional pages or to make the font
any smaller than 12 point. When you finish save this file as "YourLastName Collaborator
lastname Qual.doc" and post this file to the Assignments link of Moodle. If you need a
little more room, you may delete these instructions (as long as you follow them!)
Your name (put the names of both collaborators here): Jennifer Cadenhead
1.

What study report is this? (Record a FULL reference citation in APA format)

Bottorff, J. L., Johnson, J. L., Irwin, L. G. & Ratner, P. A. (2000) Narratives of

smoking relapse: The stories of postpartum women.
Research in Nursing and Health, 23, 126 134.
2.

Who is the investigator? Include personal history, particularly as related to the

purpose, participants, or site of the study.

?
3.

If made explicit, what type of qualitative research is this? Is the author working from
a feminist, Marxist, interpretivist, symbolic interactionist, critical theorist, or other
vantage point?

Narrative research
4. What is the purpose of the study? What are the focusing questions (if any)?
To better understand why women who were pregnant and stopped smoking during their
pregnancies restarted smoking after their children were born.
5. Where does the study take place and who are the participants? Describe the general
physical and social context of the setting and salient characteristics of the main actors.
If this is not a field study, describe the setting and participants presented in the
secondary data source.
Large urban setting, not sure where exactly, in a city that encourages limits to smoking. Most
(24/27) of the participants are former participants of a prior smoking cessation program. All
women are in the postpartum period, had discontinued smoking during pregnancy and then
resumed smoking after the birth of the child. Interviews took place either at the study
participants home or by phone. Nurses conducted the interviews.
6. How were data collected? Was recording done through observation and field notes,
taped interviews with transcription, document analysis with record forms, or some
combination?
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Data was collected by tape recording the open-ended, interviews lasting apx 1 hr, then
transcribed using a multistep process.
7. If this was a field study, what was the author's role while collecting data?
Not sure
8.

What procedures were used for analysis of data? Was constant comparison used,
were categories developed inductively, were themes constructed, was computer
software employed?
Made summaries of each participants stories. Then developed a pictorial diagram to determine
each participants decision making process.
9.

What were the results? In general terms, what is the answer to the question, "What
was going on there?"
A mixture of five different themes, meaning each woman had some individualized combination
of the five key findings:
(1) controlling ones smoking (starting with a puff and consciously restricting the amount
smoked); (2) being vulnerable to smoking (relapsing because of an inability to resist
cigarettes); (3) nostalgia for ones former self (relapsing to recapture feelings of freedom and
happier times); (4) smoking for relief (relapsing to manage emotions and stress); and (5) never really having quit (relapsing because they did not quit for themselves).

10. How are design or research methods used to enhance the credibility (trustworthiness
and believability) of the study?

According to the authors, the trustworthiness of the study is through the persuasiveness
of the arguments that the participants make using evidence of their accounts, along with
global coherence (connecting their stories to their motives), as well as by making
apparent the way that the interpretations were produced. In addition, credibility is
enhanced when others view the findings useful to understanding smoking relapse post
partum, which seems to be a different process for different populations. l
11. What parts of the study did you find powerful or particularly instructive? What was
moving or striking and what provided new insight?
The personal narrative. Some of the reasoning made me think of the parallels to drug use and
addiction.
12. Was one or more theoretical frameworks discussed as being related to the study or the
findings? If so, describe.

13. Terms that you didnt understand or questions you have. (Optional)
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14. Write a brief critique of this study as a qualitative study. Be sure to mention its
strengths and its weaknesses. You may use a third page for this, but no more than about
half of a page if you need to.
Strengths: Advances the field in proposing that new

Weaknesses: Not sure how much the study should have done to define what roles the
authors played.
15. Using a flow chart, describe the sequence of the major elements of the study method.
Include the timing, frequency, order, and relationships used in organizing the study. You
can put this after #14 or on an additional page.