Cultural consensus on qualitative health research among clinical postgraduate faculty and students

Abstract

Introduction: Although qualitative research (QR) is key to understanding the human dimensions of healthcare, its availability in undergraduate clinical training is limited.
Objective: To understand cultural conceptions of QR in health among faculty and students in clinical postgraduate programs in Cali, Colombia.
Method: Exploratory qualitative study grounded in cognitive anthropology, focused on how people acquire, process, and use information. A total of 89 professionals participated (49 students and 40 faculty) selected through convenience sampling. We used free listing and pile sorting. Analysis included processual and prototypical approaches, pairwise comparisons, and distance indices, conducted with Visual Anthropac 1.0.

Results: The central core of the cultural conception of QR clustered around the terms "subjective," "descriptive," and "non-quantifiable," while the peripheral system grouped "difficult," "unreliable," "imprecise," "individual," and "unknown." Narratives reflected appreciation for QR's potential to access experiences and contexts, alongside mistrust due to the absence of numerical metrics and a perceived lower reproducibility and rigor compared with quantitative approaches. These perceptions were more pronounced among students, who reported less curricular exposure to QR; faculty acknowledged its usefulness for understanding human dimensions of healthcare while noting challenges for clinical applicability.
Conclusions: Within this academic collective, a cultural consensus predominates that associates QR with subjectivity and description, accompanied by doubts about its reliability and precision. This pattern—consistent with the hegemony of the positivist paradigm in clinical training—constrains its adoption in practice and in postgraduate curricula.