Summary
The episode works through what each family of qualitative data collection is evidence of, starting from a Toronto hospital study in which hand hygiene dispensers were used roughly three times as often when an auditor was in view. Sarah and Kiffer read an invented spot-observation result from a long-term care lounge, separate description from interpretation in an invented field note, and compare what verbatim, intelligent verbatim and clean verbatim transcripts preserve, including the defaults and errors of automatic transcription. Sarah drafts a probe for an invented interview excerpt, recognizes that it is leading, and replaces it with silent, echo and tell-me-more probes. A harder worked example shows how an interview guide can manufacture an apparent theme in a secondary dataset, and how Canadian research ethics policy governs secondary use of data. The hosts close by debating whether focus groups belong in loneliness research and agree on a rule for matching the method to the level of disclosure a question needs.