Qualitative research has become essential for developing a deep, contextualized understanding of complex social phenomena, focusing on meaning, context, and lived experience rather than on numerical measurement alone. This article aims to provide early-career researchers with foundational knowledge and practical guidance for conducting ethically sound and methodologically rigorous qualitative inquiry, and to clarify the often-conflated distinction between qualitative research and qualitative data analysis. Adopting a narrative (integrative) review approach, it synthesizes foundational and contemporary literature across diverse methodological traditions. The article examines the foundations, rationale, and principal strengths and limitations of qualitative research; reviews eleven major analytical approaches together with the core techniques of data collection, coding, analysis, interpretation, and reporting; and addresses the criteria of trustworthiness, the expanding role of digital and AI-assisted tools, and key ethical considerations. It further conceptualizes qualitative analysis as an iterative, reflexive, and interpretive process that varies across approaches while sharing a commitment to meaning-making and analytical rigor, and it offers an integrative framework and decision-oriented guidance to support the selection of an appropriate analytical approach. Together, these contributions provide an accessible yet rigorous foundation for understanding and conducting qualitative research across methodological traditions.
Abdalla et al. (Mon,) studied this question.