Why Member Checking Questions Come Up in Qualitative Vivas
Member checking — the process of sharing your interpretations, themes, or findings with research participants and asking them to verify whether these interpretations accurately represent their experiences — is one of the most frequently asked-about trustworthiness strategies in Malaysian postgraduate vivas for qualitative research. Examiners ask about it because it is a strategy that is frequently mentioned in methodology chapters but rarely described in enough detail to evaluate whether it was genuinely implemented or merely claimed. Preparing to answer member checking questions in your viva requires specific, concrete accounts of what you shared, with whom, how they responded, and how their feedback influenced your analysis.
What to Describe When Discussing Member Checking
When an examiner asks “can you describe your member checking process?”, your answer should cover four specific elements. First, what was shared with participants — full transcripts, summary interpretations of what participants said, or the overall themes developed from the data? These represent different types of member checking with different purposes and different validity implications. Sharing transcripts checks transcription accuracy. Sharing summary interpretations checks whether you understood participants’ intended meaning. Sharing themes checks whether the patterns you identified resonate with participants’ broader understanding of their experience.
Second, how the sharing was done — by email, in a follow-up meeting, through an online platform, or by some other means. Third, how many participants participated in member checking and whether all or only some were approached. Fourth and most importantly, how participant feedback was incorporated into the analysis — did any participant’s response lead you to revise an interpretation, nuance a theme, or identify an aspect of their experience that your initial analysis had missed?
Honest Responses When Member Checking Was Limited
Not every qualitative thesis conducts member checking in an ideal form. Sometimes participants are difficult to re-contact after data collection. Sometimes the timeline between data collection and analysis does not allow for a second round of engagement. Sometimes participants decline to engage with the verification process. If your member checking was limited, be honest about this rather than overstating what was done: “I was able to conduct member checking with eight of the sixteen participants. For the remaining eight, follow-up contact was not possible due to scheduling constraints. This is a limitation I have acknowledged in the conclusion chapter.”
This honest, specific response is more credible than a vague claim that member checking was conducted without details. It demonstrates awareness of the limitation and shows that you understand what a complete member checking process would have involved. Preparing for member checking questions in your Malaysian viva by being specific about what actually happened — rather than describing an idealised process — is the kind of scholarly honesty that examiners respect and that reflects the genuine rigour of your qualitative research practice.
