How to Survive in a Research Minefield. Challenges and Advice for Rookie Qualitative Researchers

The need to adapt in the field to the interlocutors, especially to their accessibility and competences;

Logistical, organizational problems, especially in unfamiliar territory

The difficulty of synthesizing, selecting and structuring the material from various sources, especially for a novice researcher, being often stressful or even “paralyzing” (especially with limited time to complete the research and the limited volume of the future PhD thesis);

A large amount of material in the form of transcripts that demands tedious, long and often difficult working with words. At the same time, working with words, although labor-intensive, was perceived by novice researchers as inspiring and satisfying.

Lack of theoretical and practical knowledge of how to meet the criteria of methodological rigor – lack of opportunities to acquire this knowledge in the course of doctoral studies;

Many doubts during the field research, potentially reducing the credibility of the research—related to ethical issues, the quality of the interview conducted (e.g., did the interviewees properly understand the question? If not, what could be the consequences? Were the identities of other interviewees accidentally revealed – did the interviewee guess who the researcher had spoken to earlier? Were answers not suggested by the interviewer?, etc.);

Difficulty for novice researchers of applying triangulation of research methods in the field – difficult to focus simultaneously on observation and interviewing, which can also reduce the credibility of the research;

Difficulty in ensuring credibility by providing faithful transcriptions—due to limited time for PhD thesis preparation, outsourcing transcriptions that are not always faithful to the original;

Difficulty in ensuring trustworthiness of the research, especially dependability and confirmability, due to doubts of inexperienced researchers in carrying out the research procedure at later stages—especially at the stage of data analysis and presentation, e.g., doubts about the way of coding the material, selection of citations accurately reflecting the studied phenomenon, etc.;

Difficulty in ensuring trustworthiness of the research, especially confirmability, due to the need for constant reflection by the researcher regarding his/her relationship with the studied subjects and social context (reflexivity) at each stage of the research, which distinguishes quantitative from qualitative research and for inexperienced/less experienced researchers constitutes an additional difficulty (reflexivity as a process based on experience that novice researchers lack).

Uncertainty resulting from the frequent lack of hypotheses, causing the researcher to never know where the study will go or how long it will last (when the saturation effect will occur)

Numerous twists and turns due to the iterative nature of qualitative research and the emerging character of the findings, i.e., the need to revisit previous steps of the research procedure, e.g., re-coding, going back to the literature, emergence of new themes from interviews that the researcher previously considered irrelevant to the topic, etc.