Rethinking ‘validity’ and ‘trustworthiness’ in qualitative inquiry: how might we judge the quality of qualitative research in sport and exercise sciences?

One position to evaluate qualitative research is what has been termed a ‘criteriological approach’ (Sparkes & Smith, 2009, 2014). This approach parallels the dominant positivist, postpositivist and neo-realist (see also Chapters 1 and 10) views of what constitutes rigour in quantitative research and advocates the necessity of adopting pre-determined criteria to discern whether a study is of value (Hammersley, 2007). A criteriologist believes that the quality of any study can only be judged against a set of external criteria that are comprehensive enough to assess all aspects of methodological rigour in advance of any study being carried out. In this way, a qualitative criteriologist believes that all genres and forms of qualitative inquiry (e.g. phenomenology (see Chapter 2), discourse analysis (see Chapter 18), narrative study (see Chapters 4 and 20), autoethnography (see Chapter 23) can be evaluated using fixed, universal criteria (Gergen, 2014; Smith & Hodkinson, 2005, 2009). Firmly located in what

is known as a foundational orientation, determining what constitutes good-and poor-quality work therefore involves readily identifiable markers of quality via a search for an objective reality and the truth. The majority of qualitative researchers in SES adopt this ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to ascertain the quality of their work.