Qualitative Methods of Data Generation and Analysis

Qualitative research methods have been used quite extensively by human rights researchers. However, there is mixed evidence of their use by academics researching human rights. The chapter begins by describing the challenges of undertaking a scoping review of published qualitative research on human rights deriving from the contested nature of the concept and the fluid empirical boundaries between human rights and other concepts. The chapter then limits the scope of the review to research published in the top four specialist human rights journals to publish the most qualitative research from 1976-2022. The review finds an exponential increase in the quantity of and innovation in published qualitative human rights research. The chapter discuss exemplars identified from the review to present good practice of qualitative human rights research in generating data using focus groups, constructing a longitudinal qualitative dataset, and using grounded theory in the analysis of data.