“Trustworthiness” in Naturalistic Inquiry: Audit Trails

Of continuing debate within the evaluation community are issues related to the quality, rigor, or “trustworthiness” of qualitative evaluation results and conclusions. This debate stems in large part from the legitimized “subjectivity” of qualitative inquiry and from its common lack of “objective” numbers and statistics. The debate‘s issues include philosophical concerns about the nonfoundational nature of qualitative inquiry (and thus the impossibility of any universal criteria for judging quality; Smith, 1984) ; more value-laden and political concerns about which criteria to use (e.g., Pearsol, 1987) ; and methodological issues of how to demonstrate quality in qualitative inquiry.