Community Validation as a Method to Establish Trustworthiness in Qualitative LIS Research

A core aspect of the scientific process is the verification of the credibility of findings. In research with a qualitative and mixed methods approach, there is ongoing discussion on the most effective method to validate results. Discussed in this poster is the efficacy of community validation as a novel method to determine trustworthiness of research findings. This involved research with ‘not‐yet‐participants’ to explore the accuracy of researcher findings from analysis of interview data collected in an earlier exercise from a different, but related, community of informants. The use of community validation here resulted in increased interpretive power of initial results, and of new results to develop understanding of the topic. It is concluded that community validation expands upon current methods of determining trustworthiness in research with a qualitative approach. It is particularly useful for research with participants who are not the population of direct interest, but informants who supply data based on their own observations of the members of the target population, such as Library and Information Science (LIS) practitioners.