Prolonged involvement refers to the length of time of the researcher’s involvement in the study, including involvement with the environment and the studied participants. So, what are these strategies and how can you apply them in your research? Robson (2002) suggested a number of strategies aimed at addressing these threats to validity, namely prolonged involvement, triangulation, peer debriefing, member checking, negative case analysis and keeping an audit trail. Researcher bias refers to any kind of negative influence of the researcher’s knowledge, or assumptions, of the study, including the influence of his or her assumptions of the design, analysis or, even, sampling strategy. Reactivity, in turn, refers to a possible influence of the researcher himself/herself on the studied situation and people. Respondent bias refers to a situation where respondents do not provide honest responses for any reason, which may include them perceiving a given topic as a threat, or them being willing to ‘please’ the researcher with responses they believe are desirable. What seems more relevant when discussing qualitative studies is their validity, which very often is being addressed with regard to three common threats to validity in qualitative studies, namely researcher bias, reactivity and respondent bias (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).

In qualitative interviews, this issue relates to a number of practical aspects of the process of interviewing, including the wording of interview questions, establishing rapport with the interviewees and considering ‘power relationship’ between the interviewer and the participant (e.g. Reliability in qualitative studies is mostly a matter of “being thorough, careful and honest in carrying out the research” (Robson, 2002: 176). Things are slightly different, however, in Qualitative research. In Quantitative research, reliability refers to consistency of certain measurements, and validity – to whether these measurements “measure what they are supposed to measure”. What are Validity and Reliability in Qualitative research?

Reliability of quantitative data