Las estrategias para asegurar la calidad de la investigación cualitativa. El caso de los artículos publicados en revistas de educación

The use of qualitative research in Social Sciences and particularly in Education has required that it be legitimized in the face of positivist research showing its rigor in the construction of knowledge. Ensuring validity, reliability and objectivity require strategies that are particular to the nature of qualitative research, all of which should be made visible to the readers. This article presents a documentary study that explores how qualitative research considers criteria and strategies to ensure its quality. The corpus of its analysis consisted of 60 articles published in 2017 in five Education journals in Latin America. The results show that most of them (85%) do not specify which strategies they use for their results to comply with the criteria of reflexivity, credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. The strategies to ensure reflexivity and credibility such as a reference to the position of the researcher, triangulation, a review from other researchers and the return to the participants are seldom used. These data invite a reflection on the need to explain such criteria in order to demonstrate the value and integrity of qualitative research.