In the development of qualitative research design, the Total Quality Framework (TQF) plays an essential role towards maintaining a focus on quality standards. The TQF is also vital to fostering critical thinking skills when evaluating studies in the literature. The use of the TQF in literature reviews has been discussed elsewhere in Research Design Review – see “Evaluating Quality Standards in a Qualitative Research Literature Review” and “The TQF Qualitative Research Proposal: Background & Literature Review.”

These articles present a method for assessing the quality of published qualitative studies, with a focus on the Literature Review Reference Summary Evaluation Table. This matrix enables the researcher to think carefully about each relevant study from the standpoint of Credibility, Analyzability, Transparency, and Usefulness. In this way, the evaluation table “is predicated on the idea that not all qualitative research studies are equally reliable and valid.”

A qualitative content analysis study published in Autism (Jones et al., 2023) utilized the idea of the evaluation table but took it a step further. The authors collected 14 articles in the literature that addressed the research question, “How accurate and/or authentic are fictional media portrayals of autism?” To assess the quality of each study, the authors employed an “adapted version” of the TQF evaluation table. As shown in the authors’ Supplementary File 2 (see below and available open access), there are many ways that the sampled articles from the literature did or did not satisfy (or partially satisfied) the authors’ scrutiny of quality. In their evaluation, the authors considered 10 aspects of Credibility (5 for Scope, 5 for Data Gathering), 2 components of Analyzability (1 for Processing, 1 for Verification),  3 determinants of Transparency, and 3 for Usefulness.

A TQF approach to qualitative content analysis is discussed fully in “A Quality Approach to Qualitative Content Analysis: Similarities and Differences Compared to Other Qualitative Methods” (Roller 2019).

Jones, S. C., Gordon, C. S., & Mizzi, S. (2023). Representation of autism in fictional media: A systematic review of media content and its impact on viewer knowledge and understanding of autism. Autism. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231155770

Roller, Margaret R. (2019). A Quality Approach to Qualitative Content Analysis: Similarities and Differences Compared to Other Qualitative Methods. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, [S.l.], v. 20, n. 3, sep. 2019. ISSN 1438-5627.