Land Mines in the Field: A Modest Proposal for Improving the Craft of Qualitative Health Research

Abstract

In this commentary, the authors encourage a renewed enthusiasm for attention to quality criteria in qualitative health research by poking fun at what they understand to be patterns and themes emerging from data collected in their respective extensive “fieldwork” experiences within the genre. Conceptualizing some of the particularly problematic interpretive turns as land mines in the field (or, alternatively, missteps in the dance, cracks in the pottery, wrong turns in the journey, weeds in the garden, or dropped stitches in the quilt), they challenge researchers’ collective relationship to both factual and metaphoric empirical claims. With a warning to those unaccustomed to self-deprecating humor, the authors challenge all to pay serious heed to what does and does not constitute rigorous, high-quality, empirical science within the qualitative tradition.