Training students of Health Sciences in Qualitative Method: challenges and reflections from the teaching experience in Speech and Language Therapy

Abstract

To explain the scope of the qualitative approach to undergraduate students of healthcare sciences is a challenge for those of us who must translate the anthropological and social perspectives to students used to operate within nature/culture and science/belief dichotomies. This challenge involves teaching to look beyond these dichotomies and forces us, as lecturers, to overcome the barriers or limited understanding that often characterize health professionals’ relation to what qualitative approach can offer to them. Based upon the teaching experience of the authors, this article aims to reflect about the emergence of these challenges, turning, therefore, to examples of qualitative research design in the speech and hearing program at the faculty of medicine of the University of Chile. We believe that an early approach to qualitative methodologies would allow undergraduate students to develop a critical vision in relation to reductive dichotomies, in addition to promoting an understanding of health as an individual and collective phenomenon, and of medicine as a trans disciplinary field of work.