Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

The general view of descriptive research as a lower level form of inquiry has influenced some researchers conducting qualitative research to claim methods they are really not using and not to claim the method they are using: namely, qualitative description. Qualitative descriptive studies have as their goal a comprehensive summary of events in the everyday terms of those events. Researchers conducting qualitative descriptive studies stay close to their data and to the surface of words and events. Qualitative descriptive designs typically are an eclectic but reasonable combination of sampling, and data collection, analysis, and re-presentation techniques. Qualitative descriptive study is the method of choice when straight descriptions of phenomena are desired.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/1098-240X%28200008%2923%3A4%3C334%3A%3AAID-NUR9%3E3.0.CO%3B2-G

Whatever happened to qualitative description

How to Do Things With Words

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Exome sequencing is an innovative next-generation sequencing technology that examines the majority of disease-causing genes with a single test. Physicians and patients resort to exome sequencing to probe for a genetic cause of disease. The technology produces about 20,000 variants and many are of uncertain clinical relevance. Drawing from ethnographic field notes and audio recordings of over 1,500 patient cases discussed at genetic data board meetings over a three-year period, this article reports on how a collective of laboratory scientists and clinicians contend practically and conceptually with variants of uncertain significance (VUS). Rather than standardizing the inclusion criteria for a VUS, the collective contextualizes each VUS with its own evidentiary narrative. The VUS then becomes subject to revision based on evolving evidence, further testing, and updated interpretations. We argue that the epistemic uncertainty of VUS becomes productive; it indicates future causality and suggests that genetic causes can explain patients’ symptoms even if no known pathogenic variants could be located.

Narrating uncertainty: Variants of uncertain significance (VUS) in clinical exome sequencing

Social scientists and ethicists often blame the increased use of advanced medical technologies for the undignified character of contemporary dying. Based on ethnographic material and in-depth interviews with health-care providers, the author analyses how resuscitation technology shapes sudden death in emergency departments. First, he examines the extent to which the course of resuscitative efforts is a consequence of technological factors or of health care system characteristics. Second, he looks at how resuscitation technologies indirectly offer an opportunity to face pending death. In the last part, he investigates how this opportunity can be fostered when the emergency department staff takes the needs of relatives and friends in consideration

Resuscitation Technology in the Emergency Department: Towards a Dignified Death

In his classic Passing On, David Sudnow described how the presumed social value of patients affects whether the staff will attempt to revive them. Since this study was published, the health care fi...

Social Death as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: David Sudnow's Passing On Revisited

Clinical trials as treatment option: bioethics and health care disparities in substance dependency.

Clinical exome sequencing is a genetic technology making the transition from a laboratory research tool to a routine clinical technique used to diagnose patients. Standards help make this transition by offering authoritative shortcuts for time-intensive tasks, but each shortcut means that something is lost during abstraction. In clinical exome sequencing, reliance on standards may obscure the match between a patient’s phenotype and genotype. Based on three years of observations, I show how a clinical exome sequencing team decides when to trust standards and when to develop workarounds. I argue that the match between phenotype and genotype is circumscribed by the team’s reliance on specific standards and that trusting in standards means trusting in experts’ appropriate use of standards, generating a workflow of reflexive standardization.

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Stefan Timmermans

Papers

Narrating uncertainty: Variants of uncertain significance (VUS) in clinical exome sequencing

Resuscitation Technology in the Emergency Department: Towards a Dignified Death

Social Death as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: David Sudnow's Passing On Revisited

Clinical trials as treatment option: bioethics and health care disparities in substance dependency.

Trust in standards: Transitioning clinical exome sequencing from bench to bedside