ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the evolutionary pressure exerted by academic environments on qualitative methodology, and defines the qualitative research analogous structure (QRAS), which is the template for a significant number of qualitative studies. Given that most students obtained their first degree in nursing or some other health-related field, it must be possible to design the study, and to analyse the findings, in the absence of any grounding in relevantly adjacent disciplines such as psychology or sociology. The chapter expresses that qualitative research, in any field, cannot be done adequately if the researcher does not have some familiarity with cognitive and social psychology or an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms. QRAS is the retrospective description of experience and meaning through small-sample interviewing, both data collection and analysis being carried out in the absence of theoretical preconceptions, with the implicit aim of inductively generalizing to a population while explicitly disowning the concept of generalization.
