Research Quality
Internationalizing the Small and Medium Sized Firm – four cases
The quality of research can be of very different kinds. In traditional quantitative studies the research quality focuses around validity and reliability. The concept of validity deals with to what extent the researcher is able to measure what he/she sets out to do and reliability is reflected in how replicable the results and studies are (Yin 1994). A case study does by traditional measures not hold especially high research quality. Therefore, many researchers do not consider the traditional measures to be the appropriate ones for qualitative studies. Instead, a high level of inter-subjectivity should be desired, i.e. if others can understand how the authors base their understanding (Glaser & Strauss 1967). In order to achieve this it is important to have a thorough description of the research process and the authors own experiences and perceptions that have influenced the interpretation of the findings.
As a conclusion about the formal quality, the authors believe to have reached an appropriate level. This has been accomplished by having a detailed description of the method used, e.g. selection of companies, data collection etc. Another important factor for the quality of the study is that all cases have been presented for each company and the remarks given by the company have been taken into consideration by the authors.
