Why Trustworthiness Questions Dominate Qualitative Vivas
In Malaysian qualitative postgraduate vivas, trustworthiness — the qualitative equivalent of validity and reliability — is among the most probed methodological topics. Examiners who understand qualitative methodology expect candidates to be fluent in the trustworthiness criteria developed by Lincoln and Guba, to have implemented specific strategies for each criterion, and to be able to describe those strategies with concrete examples from their own study. A candidate who can only say “I followed Lincoln and Guba’s trustworthiness criteria” without describing the specific actions taken will be probed until specific examples are provided — or until the examiner concludes the strategies were claimed rather than practised.
The Four Criteria and What Each Requires
Credibility — the qualitative equivalent of internal validity — addresses whether the findings accurately represent the participants’ experiences. Prepare to describe specific credibility-enhancing strategies: prolonged engagement with the data before analysis, triangulation across data sources or methods, and member checking with participants. For each strategy, have a concrete example ready: “I returned preliminary themes to eight participants for review. Two participants suggested that one theme I had labelled ‘institutional pressure’ more accurately reflected what they called ‘relational obligation’ — a distinction that led me to revise the theme label and refine its description.”
Transferability — the equivalent of external validity — is established through thick description rather than statistical representativeness. Prepare to describe how your study’s rich contextual description allows readers in other settings to judge whether your findings might apply to their context. Dependability — the equivalent of reliability — is established through an audit trail of your methodological decisions. Prepare to describe what documentation you kept: field notes, reflexivity journal, analytical memos, coding revision records. Confirmability — the equivalent of objectivity — is established through reflexivity. Prepare to describe how you documented and managed your own assumptions throughout the study.
Connecting Trustworthiness to Specific Analytical Decisions
The most impressive trustworthiness discussions in Malaysian qualitative vivas are those that connect a trustworthiness strategy to a specific point in the analysis where it mattered. “When peer debriefing with my colleague revealed that my initial interpretation of Theme Two was too strongly shaped by my own professional background as a supervisor rather than by what participants actually said, I revised the theme from ‘supervisor failure’ to ‘misaligned expectations’ — a label that better reflected the participants’ own framing.” This kind of specific, consequence-bearing example demonstrates that trustworthiness was an active analytical practice rather than a theoretical framework mentioned in the methodology chapter and then forgotten during the actual analysis.
