Table 4 Credibility, dependability, transferability, and confirmability
Credibility | Involvement of a large number of ‘informants’, peer scrutiny by a second researcher, and frequent debriefing sessions with PhD supervisors |
Dependability | Reporting of the research design and operational detail of data gathering |
Transferability | Transparency about the boundaries of the research such that the extent to which the results are transferable are clear (limitations, data collection methods and sources, number of data collection incidences, time period) |
Confirmability | Provision of an audit trail (description of the platform and search process above) and the utilisation of a large dataset with many ‘informants’ to ensure that the results reflect the data and not researcher bias |