Qualitative Research: A vital resource for ethical healthcare

This is a report of a conference organised by the UK Forum for Health Care, Law and Ethics in October 1999. The meeting sought to explore how qualitative social research could be useful in multidisciplinary initiatives in biomedical ethics, and to provide insights to researchers in this field as to how they might embark on collecting qualitative evidence to complement their theoretical work.The report should also be of interest to policy makers, medical journal editors and referees of qualitative protocols and papers that are submitted to funding bodies, ethics committees and journals.

The conference organisers hope that the report will encourage its readers to approach qualitative social scientists in order to plan joint work that balances and does justice to each of the disciplines involved, and to feel confident that they know enough about key issues in social research to be able to negotiate and achieve this balance.

Download the report [PDF 364KB].