Audit Trails in Qualitative Research
An audit trail is a qualitative strategy to establish the confirmability of a research study’s findings. Confirmability involves establishing that the findings are based on participants’ responses instead the researcher’s own preconceptions and biases. Audit trails are an in-depth approach to illustrating that the findings are based on the participants’ narratives and involve describing how you collected and analyzed the data in a transparent manner. Parts of an audit trail may include examples of the coding process (presented in a table), descriptions of how you worked from individual codes to themes, and rationale for what codes were clustered together to form the basis of a theme. The purpose of doing these things is to clarify to your readers why you made the decisions you did and to show that your analysis follows a logical path dependent on the participants’ narratives.
You won’t need to outline every code or theme in the results chapter but can include this information in an appendix. This is ideal for students who want to show the full process. An audit trail is valuable for critical reflection on your decisions, which is especially important in the recursive process of qualitative data analysis.
Finally, the audit trail also is helpful when presenting how you analyzed the data in either the results chapter or the methodology chapter. If you create a logical path for the data analysis, it will be that much easier to report and explain what you did.
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