Document analysis in health policy research: the READ approach

Document Analysis as a Qualitative Research Method

This article examines the function of documents as a data source in qualitative research and discusses document analysis procedure in the context of actual research experiences. Targeted to research novices, the article takes a nuts‐and‐bolts approach to document analysis. It describes the nature and forms of documents, outlines the advantages and limitations of document analysis, and offers specific examples of the use of documents in the research process. The application of document analysis to a grounded theory study is illustrated.

Conducting a Qualitative Document Analysis

Document analysis has been an underused approach to qualitative research. This approach can be valuable for various reasons. When used to analyze pre-existing texts, this method allows researchers to conduct studies they might otherwise not be able to complete. Some researchers may not have the resources or time needed to do field research. Although videoconferencing technology and other types of software can be used to reduce some of the obstacles qualitative researchers sometimes encounter, these tools are associated with various problems. Participants might be unskillful in using technology or may not be able to afford it. Conducting a document analysis can also reduce some of the ethical concerns associated with other qualitative methods. Since document analysis is a valuable research method, one would expect to find a wide variety of literature on this topic. Unfortunately, the literature on documentary research is scant. This paper is designed to close the gap in the literature on conducting a qualitative document analysis by focusing on the advantages and limitations of using documents as a source of data and providing strategies for selecting documents. It also offers reasons for using reflexive thematic analysis and includes a hypothetical example of how a researcher might conduct a document analysis.

Language Access in Healthcare — Discourse Graph

An open, AI-assisted evidence synthesis of how language concordance — matching patients with providers or interpreters who share their language — affects healthcare outcomes. Every question, claim, evidence item, caveat, and source is its own addressable node.

US Domestic Policy Dashboard - Impact Counter | Impact Counter

Explore US domestic policies and their impact on public health across all branches of government.

Qualitative research: standards, challenges, and guidelines

Qualitative research methods could help us to improve our understanding of medicine. Rather than thinking of qualitative and quantitative strategies as incompatible, they should be seen as complementary. Although procedures for textual interpretation differ from those of statistical analysis, because of the different type of data used and questions to be answered, the underlying principles are much the same. In this article I propose relevance, validity, and reflexivity as overall standards for qualitative inquiry.

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AI linked to explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers

Analysis flags hundreds of studies that seem to follow a template, reporting correlations between complex health conditions and single variables based on publicly available data sets.

The words we choose matter: recognising the importance of language in decolonising global health

Recognition of the relevance of colonial history to the contemporary practice of global health is not new, but the recent increase in visibility and prominence given to it by global health institutions and flagship journals is welcome when accompanied by meaningful reflection and action.1

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The Good Docs Project educates and empowers people to create high-quality documentation by providing them with templates, resources, best practices, and tools to enhance their documentation in open...

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datasetpapers — a public research experiment

An experimental approach to versioned, forkable, machine-readable analyses. A prototype, not a product or service.

datasetpapers — a public research experiment

An experimental approach to versioned, forkable, machine-readable analyses. A prototype, not a product or service.

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The Medium is the Message: How Non-Clinical Information Shapes Clinical Decisions in LLMs | Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

There has been a growing interest in the HCI community to study Health, with particular focus in understanding healthcare practices and designing technologies to support and to enhance these practices. A majority of current health studies in HCI have ...