Qualitative Research - Are Themes Constructed or Discovered?

Welcome to another episode of The Words Matter Podcast. 

As always, a big thank you to those of you supporting the podcast via Patreon – really takes the edge of the cost of producing these two-weekly episodes, so thank you.

The line-up for the upcoming clinical reasoning series is being finalise, covering topics such as ethics or disease, values based-practice and reasoning, thinking narratively, embodied reasoning plus cognitive perspectives such as hypothetic-deductive reasoning, pattern recognition and knowledge schema. I’ve got some wonderful guests planned, some have appeared on the podcast before while others have not and I’m super excited to talk with them all and hopefully create a rich, insightful and hopefully useful resource for clinicians and students.

A final note, Episode 21: Saying the unsayable and thinking the unthinkable - a critical look forward with Prof. David Nicholls seems to be having a resurgence over a year after it was recorded, and I’m frequently receiving messages from you saying how much the episode resonated. I’m not quite sure the reasons for this or what to make of it. As radical as Dave’s view might be i.e. to reboot physiotherapy and osteopathy and start again (see Dave's books here, here and his new one here), the idea at least seems to speak to the crises of existentialism, lack of belonging, identity and the general discomfort or dissatisfaction of where we currently find ourselves with respect to our clinical practice and profession. Anyhow, I’ll keep digging in this topic I’m with Dave again and others too and see where we arrive at and what the solutions might be. Listen to our second brilliant episode here.

So, on to your questions of which there were lots, and as usual I’ve tried to select a good spread of topics.

• I really enjoyed the qualitative research series, I was wondering how do you integrate qualitative research findings into clinical practice? See my chat with Matt Low here and Roger Kerry here for the CauseHealth Series (here).
• What was your journey from positivist research to constructionist? See here for essential social constructionism reading Ken Gergen here, Kathy Charmaz here, Berger and Luckman and Bury’s social construction of medical knowledge and see a rebuttal paper here. Plus my recent chat with Prof. Martin Kusch on Relativism here.
• What is the best paper you have read or authored? My favourite papers as a clinician here and here, as a researcher here and here and here and as an author here and here.
• In qualitative research are themes constructed or are discovered?
• Why do osteopaths and other MSK practitioners prefer guru experts over solid fundamental evidence? See recent episodes with Dr Carlo Martini on expertise here and here.
• Do you think there is anything unique about osteopathy that distinguishes it form other similar MSK professions?
• Also, as a clinician who is also a researcher, academic. Did you ever struggle with the transition? Also feeling lonely and not know how or where you fit in ? Any tips?
• As a practicing MSK clinician what is the most useful MSc/PhD?

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