Methods, methodological challenges and lesson learned from phenomenological study about OSCE experience: Overview of paradigm-driven qualitative approach in medical education

Qualitative research approach could be as important as quantitative one, particularly in medical education, as long as it meets the common goal of both—improving the quality of education. In contrary to the end—i.e. achieving the common goals, the means of both approaches of inquiry is different. Their dissimilarity in the means or process is not confined to data collection techniques, study designs or analysis methods; but, they also differ in assumptions about the world, reality, science and knowledge. Implicitly or explicitly, these assumptions are revealed in a researcher's discussion about philosophical assumptions and research paradigms. The researcher's inclination towards any of paradigms and assumption in light of the most common philosophical concepts such as ontology, epistemology and methodology results in choice of either of the dominant research paradigms to follow such as objectivism/positivism and interpretivisim/constructivism. This is common practice in the quantitative-qualitative dichotomy of research world disregarding the emerging mixed approach with predominantly pragmatism paradigm. Besides framing the methodology of the study, researcher's explicit description of philosophical assumptions and paradigms helps readers easily understand study findings. Many authors from both dominant traditions fail to describe this important aspect of the research in their published works. In our study, the ontological and epistemological assumptions led us choose interpretivist/constructivist paradigm and phenomenological qualitative approach with Collaizi's descriptive phenomenological analysis adapted to our context. The experience and lesson learned from the study found to be worse sharing in a modified and extended construct of methodology part. Therefore, this article deals with philosophical positions, research paradigms and traditions that led to the specific qualitative approach from the perspective of methodology part in our study about objective structure clinical examination (OSCE) experience in a medical department.