Assessing whether the research we are reading is any good is often a challenge. If we are going to use a study's findings to change how we think and how we practice, we want to have confidence in the findings.

What do you need to look for in qualitative research to show that the study is of high quality? The answer is not straightforward, even though there are many different criteria available for judging qualitative research – Dixon-Woods et al1 reports there are over 100 proposals for identifying quality in qualitative research. Spencer et al2 drew on 29 existing frameworks to produce …