Getting out of our heads through qualitative research in healthcare

Welcome to Volume 8 of Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare. Reading through each article, I am struck by a conundrum that, in a way, defines qualitative research. Qualitative research generally takes a phenomenological perspective, presenting and analyzing the "lived experience" of participants—a term that I see more and more and chafe against every time I read it. How can we really present the experience of anyone while necessarily imposing a variety of filters required to present that experience to our readers? That includes determining which topics are worthy of studying, what questions we ask, who our participants are, and how and what to analyze. Furthermore, we are constrained by traditions and biases in our various academic disciplines. I would even go so far as to say that even autoethnography is necessarily distanced from experience, if only by the slippage imposed by written language. ...