I really like this quote from Moss et al. on the meaning of “well done” qualitative educational research:

For qualitative research, well done means the study involved a substantial amount of time in fieldwork; careful, repeated sifting through information sources that were collected to identify “data” from them; careful, repeated analysis of data to identify patterns in them (using what some call analytic induction); and clear reporting on how the study was done and how conclusions followed from evidence. For qualitative work, reporting means narrative reporting that shows not only things that happened in the setting and the meanings of those happenings to participants, but the relative frequency of occurrence of those happenings—so that the reader gets to see rich details and also the broad patterns within which the details fit. The reader comes away both tree-wise and forest-wise—not tree-wise and forest- foolish, or vice versa.

When I say a study has an educational imagination, I mean it addresses issues of curriculum, pedagogy, and school organization in ways that shed light on—not prove but rather illuminate, make us smarter about—the limits and possibilities for what practicing educators might do in making school happen on a daily basis. Such a study also sheds light on which aims of schooling are worth trying to achieve in the first place—it has a critical vision of ends as well as of means toward ends. Educational imagination involves asking research questions that go beyond utilitarian matters of efficiency and effectiveness, as in the discourse of new public management…, especially going beyond matters of short-term “effects” that are easily and cheaply measured. (p. 504)