SRQR (Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research)

What it is

— SRQR (Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research) is a 21-item reporting checklist published by O'Brien, Harris, Beckman, Reed, and Cook in Academic Medicine (2014) as a synthesis of prior recommendations for reporting qualitative work. Its purpose is to make a primary qualitative study transparent and appraisable: it specifies the minimum content an author should report so that a reader can judge what was studied, how data were generated and analysed, and how the investigators arrived at and warranted their findings. Critically, SRQR is method-agnostic within qualitative research — it was written to apply across the full range of qualitative approaches (in-depth and key-informant interviews, focus groups, participant observation and ethnography, document/text analysis, grounded theory, phenomenology, narrative inquiry, and qualitative components of mixed-methods designs). It is listed and maintained as a reporting guideline within the EQUATOR Network library. SRQR is a reporting standard, not a methods textbook and not an instrument for scoring study quality.

When to use

— Use SRQR when you are reporting (or peer-reviewing, or pre-specifying the reporting of) a primary qualitative study and you want a single broad standard that fits whatever qualitative method was used. In HEOR and real-world evidence work this most often means the qualitative strand of an evidence package: patient or caregiver burden-of-disease interviews, concept-elicitation and cognitive-interview studies that underpin a patient-reported outcome (PRO) instrument, qualitative preference or treatment-experience studies feeding a value dossier or patient-focused drug development (PFDD) submission, clinician interviews characterising real-world care pathways, or a qualitative substudy nested alongside a registry or claims/EHR analysis. Decision rule for choosing among siblings: use COREQ if and only if the study is specifically interviews and/or focus groups and you want the more granular 32-item instrument that also probes researcher reflexivity and the participant relationship; use SRQR when the method is something else (ethnography, document analysis, grounded theory, narrative) or when you want one checklist that spans a multi-method qualitative project. For the qualitative component of a mixed-methods study, SRQR governs the qualitative strand but the integration of strands is the domain of mixed-methods reporting guidance (e.g., GRAMMS / O'Cathain), not SRQR alone. SRQR does not apply to quantitative observational RWE — a claims or EHR cohort is reported with STROBE/RECORD-PE (and conducted under HARPER/ENCePP), never SRQR.

What it requires

— The 21 items span the full manuscript and force authors to make their qualitative reasoning visible rather than asserted. The substantive domains include: a title and abstract that identify the work as qualitative and name the approach; a problem formulation and purpose with an explicit research question and its theoretical/conceptual grounding; a stated qualitative approach and research paradigm (e.g., grounded theory, ethnography, phenomenology) with rationale, since the approach dictates what counts as rigour; researcher characteristics and reflexivity — the investigators' backgrounds, assumptions, and relationship to participants and the topic, because the analyst is the instrument in qualitative work; context of the study; a transparent sampling strategy and rationale (purposive, theoretical, maximum variation), with sampling continued to the point of justified sufficiency/saturation; ethical issues and approvals; concrete data collection methods, instruments, and units of study (who/what, where, how many); data processing (transcription, de-identification, coding, software); a data analysis account detailed enough to be followed (coding scheme development, who coded, how disagreements were resolved, how themes were derived); and techniques to enhance trustworthiness (member checking, triangulation, audit trail, negative- case analysis). Findings must be presented with direct evidence (quotations or field-note excerpts) linked to interpretation, followed by integration with prior work, limitations, and implications. The throughline is auditability: a reader should be able to trace a finding back to data and to the analytic decisions that produced it.

When NOT to use — limitations and common misapplications

— (1) A reporting checklist is not a risk-of-bias tool or a quality score. A fully SRQR-compliant paper can still rest on a thin sample, a poorly justified approach, or over-interpreted data; completeness of reporting is necessary, not sufficient, for trustworthiness. Do not convert the 21 items into a numeric "quality" tally. (2) Wrong sibling. Using SRQR for a pure interview/focus-group study where reviewers expect COREQ's reflexivity and relationship items — or, conversely, forcing COREQ onto an ethnography or document analysis it was never designed for — is a recognisable mistake. (3) Wrong family entirely. Applying SRQR to a quantitative observational RWE study (a claims cohort, an EHR comparative-effectiveness analysis) instead of STROBE/RECORD-PE; SRQR has no items for confounding control, time-zero alignment, phenotype validation, or estimands because qualitative research does not produce those estimands. (4) Mixed-methods confusion. SRQR covers the qualitative strand only; it does not tell you how to report the integration, sequencing, or joint display of qualitative and quantitative components. (5) Checklist- as-theatre. Citing "reported per SRQR" while burying reflexivity, the analytic process, or supporting quotations defeats the standard; the value is the transparency, not the citation. (6) Reflexivity skipped. Omitting researcher characteristics and the relationship to participants — the items that most distinguish qualitative reporting from quantitative — while claiming SRQR compliance.

How it maps to this catalog

— SRQR is the reporting discipline that sits on top of the qualitative methods in this repo; each implementing concept supplies the design/analysis substance that SRQR then forces you to report transparently: - qualitative-interview — implements the data-collection, sampling, coding, and reflexivity reporting that SRQR's interview-based items demand (and the natural decision point for SRQR-vs-COREQ). - qualitative-ethnographic — the observation/field-note and context-reporting strand; a case where SRQR applies but COREQ does not. - qualitative-synthesis — qualitative evidence synthesis; SRQR governs reporting of the primary studies it aggregates (the synthesis report itself follows ENTREQ/PRISMA-family guidance). - mixed-methods — SRQR governs the qualitative strand; integration reporting lives with mixed-methods guidance. - pro-development and pro-validation — concept-elicitation and cognitive-interview work that underpins a PRO instrument is qualitative and should be reported per SRQR; the resulting instrument's psychometrics are a separate (COSMIN-type) matter. - preference-study and pro-rwe — qualitative preference and treatment-experience components feeding value and PFDD evidence are SRQR-governed. - burden-of-disease-cost-of-illness — when the burden evidence includes patient/caregiver qualitative interviews, that component is reported under SRQR. - study-protocol-or-sap-elements — supplies the pre-specification habits that make SRQR's analysis and trustworthiness items credible rather than retrofitted.

Applied note (HEOR / RWE evidence packages)

In a real-world evidence dossier the quantitative core (claims/EHR/registry comparative analyses) is reported with STROBE/RECORD-PE and conducted under HARPER/ENCePP — not SRQR. SRQR governs the qualitative components that increasingly accompany that core: PFDD-style patient- experience interviews, concept-elicitation studies for endpoint development, qualitative preference work, and clinician interviews mapping real-world treatment pathways. Reporting that qualitative strand to SRQR (with explicit approach, sampling sufficiency, reflexivity, a traceable analytic process, and quotation-anchored findings) is what lets an HTA body or regulator judge whether the patient voice in the dossier is credible rather than decorative.