Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Disclaimer The materials provided in this repository are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. This means that you are free to share, copy, and redistribute the materials in any medium or format, as well as adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material, provided that you give appropriate credit, indicate any changes made, and do not use the material for commercial purposes. In this project we made available the audit trail associated with the qualitative interview study 'Unraveling low-educated adults' motivation for second-chance education: a multidimensional perspective' published in the journal Learning & Instruction. The audit trail in this project can be seen as a workable and structured format to make implicit processes in qualitative research more explicit and to document the research process. We hope that this format will be disseminated and used, with reference to the authors of this format. The purpose of this audit trail is threefold. Firstly, we aim to be transparent about the methodological and theoretical choices that were made to enhance trustworthiness. Secondly, we want to articulate the quality checks performed in this qualitative study to enhance validity and reliability of the study. Finally, we aim to ground these choices and quality checks in the scientific literature. By being transparent about the research process, the authors are made accountable for the choices made, and it also enables other researchers to follow the decision trail to achieve comparable conclusions, given the data, the researchers' perspectives, and situation (e.g., Akkerman et al., 2006; Carcary, 2009; Koch, 2006; Olmos-Vega, 2023; Sandelowski, 1986). Making explicit the decisions made throughout the process, we acknowledge that qualitative research is interpretive and subjective in nature and therefore follow Walsham's (2006, pp. 321) statement “that we are biased by our background, knowledge, and predispositions to see things in a certain way and others not”. We therefore open the audit trail with a positionality statement of the researchers involved in this project. Since an audit trail forces researchers to make implicit interpretations and reflections explicit (Olmos-Vega, 2023), it is a challenge to present the various pieces of evidence in the audit trail in a structured and therefore understandable way for an external auditor. In the audit trail, the different phases of the research process will therefore be described chronologically using within each chronological phase a number of recurring standard questions (see reading guide). If necessary, reference will be made to documents in the appendix. In other words, the audit trail should be seen as a project folder alongside the paper.