Audrey Holm Wins Prestigious Award for Groundbreaking Work on Rigor in Qualitative Analysis

Assistant Professor of Human Resources and Management Audrey Holm, with her co-authors Stine Grodal of Northeastern University and Michel Anteby of Boston University, have received the 2024 Robert McDonald Advancement of Organizational Research Methodology Award for their paper on ways to improve rigor and trustworthiness in qualitative data analysis, published in the Academy of Management Review in 2021.

This prize from the Sage Publications and Academy of Management Research Methods Division awards the best paper published on research methods in management scholarship within the last five years. Specifically, it recognizes articles that create or improve methods for research design, data collection, and data analysis.

The paper, “Achieving Rigor in Qualitative Analysis: The Role of Active Categorization in Theory Building,” explores how rigor and trustworthiness can be achieved in qualitative data analysis. At its core, qualitative analysis involves organizing and categorizing information. The authors draw on categorization theory to argue that developing theory from data is an active, thoughtful process where researchers choose between different strategies to make sense of their data. They propose a framework outlining common approaches to categorizing data and show how these strategies have been used in previous research. Their main argument is that if researchers aren't clear and reflective about these processes, it becomes harder to be transparent and rigorous in their analysis.

Audrey Holm explains the impact of that research through education: "Since it was published, the paper has been added to doctoral courses and cited in and beyond management scholarship, with the promise that the active categorization framework can help make qualitative research more rigorous and transparent, improve the process of building theory from data, and encourage more diverse methods in qualitative research."