Submissions for The Qualitative Report’s 17th Annual Conference
Trust is required everywhere. We must trust other drivers, those who provide our food, those who perform services for us, and it is central to our personal and professional lives. Trust is not always easy to build, it can be fragile, and very difficult to rebuild once lost. Barbara Kingsolver reminds us that “trust only grows out of trusting.” We set the tone for trust in our lives and work.
Trust is also foundational to qualitative research. Without trust, nothing can be believed. Without a measure of trustworthiness, research findings are suspect, and their impact will likely be unrealized.
Trustworthiness goes way beyond minimally meeting the criteria of credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. Qualitative researchers are attentive to issues of trust throughout the entire process of their work: conceiving, conducting, and writing up their research; evaluating the trustworthiness of the published research upon which our studies are built, compared, and contrasted; and establishing trust with co-researchers, Institutional Review Boards, participants, reviewers and editors, and readers of our work. There is no phase of qualitative research that does not involve elements of trust.
Showcasing the title “A Matter of Trust” is our attempt to foreground the virtue of trust in qualitative research. For our 2026 conference, we invite you to join us in exploring how trust can be addressed in all aspects of qualitative research. Where do you find trust in qualitative research? How do you build it? Show us how you embrace it.
Please submit your presentation ideas here and join us next March online for TQR2026! The deadline for submissions is July 31, 2025. Please note, we have added virtual poster presentations as a presentation option for the conference.
Over the next few weeks, we will share more details about TQR2026 on the conference’s web site. As always, please let us know your questions and comments by sending us your emails to tqr@nova.edu.