SRQR is a 21-item reporting guideline for qualitative research, published by O'Brien and colleagues in 2014. Its name stands for Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research, and it was written to fill a specific gap: the existing qualitative guidance assumed interviews and focus groups, leaving researchers doing ethnography, participant observation, document analysis or mixed qualitative work with a checklist whose items did not describe their study.
Its design philosophy differs from the more familiar COREQ as a result. Where COREQ asks a long series of concrete questions about interview logistics, SRQR asks fewer and more open ones about the reasoning behind the study. That makes it less of a form to fill in and more of a test of whether the methodological argument holds together.
Choosing between SRQR and COREQ
This is a genuine decision and it should be made on your design, not on which guideline your journal happens to mention first.
Use COREQ when your data are individual interviews or focus groups and nothing else of consequence. Its 32 items will map cleanly onto what you did, and in health research it is the more widely expected of the two. Our walkthrough of the COREQ checklist covers its three domains in detail.
Use SRQR when your design is broader or does not centre on interviews: ethnographic fieldwork, sustained observation, analysis of documents or records, case study work, or a combination. Forcing such a study through COREQ produces a checklist full of items marked not applicable, which reads as a mismatch rather than as thoroughness.
Either way, name your choice and give a reason in one clause. Reviewers accept both; what they notice is a guideline that does not fit the study.
Described in our own words, the items ask for the following. The authoritative wording sits with the guideline and on the EQUATOR Network, and should be taken from there.
Title and abstract. A title identifying the study as qualitative and, ideally, naming the approach; and an abstract summarising the key elements using the journal's format.
Introduction. The problem formulation, describing the issue and why it matters along with relevant theory and prior work; and the purpose or research question, stated explicitly.
Methods. The bulk of the guideline. It asks for the qualitative approach and research paradigm, named and justified, including the rationale for why it fits; the researcher characteristics and reflexivity, covering the researchers' backgrounds, assumptions and relationships with participants and how these may influence the work; the context of the study; the sampling strategy and how and why participants, documents or events were selected including any saturation rationale; the ethical issues and approvals; the data collection methods with enough detail and any changes over time; the data collection instruments and technologies; the units of study, meaning the number and characteristics of participants, documents or events; the data processing including transcription, anonymisation and coding; the data analysis approach with a description of how themes or categories were derived; and the techniques used to enhance trustworthiness, such as member checking, an audit trail or triangulation.
Results and discussion. The synthesis and interpretation, presenting the main findings with supporting evidence such as quotations or field note extracts and relating them to prior work or theory; links to empirical data demonstrating the analytic claims; the integration with prior work, implications, transferability and contribution; the limitations; and finally conflicts of interest and funding.
Two SRQR items carry disproportionate weight in review, and both are places where authors tend to write a label instead of an argument.
The qualitative approach and research paradigm item asks not only which approach you used but why it suits the question. This matters because the approach determines what counts as a finding. A grounded theory study is expected to produce a theoretical account; a phenomenological study is expected to produce the structure of a lived experience; a qualitative description study is expected to stay close to participants' own terms. Naming one and then producing the output of another is a coherence failure, and it is more common than it should be. If your analysis was thematic without a deeper commitment, say so plainly, since qualitative description is a legitimate approach and a better fit than an unearned claim to grounded theory.
The researcher characteristics and reflexivity item is the qualitative equivalent of declaring your instrument's calibration. It asks who the researchers were, what they brought to the topic, and what their relationship with participants was. Authors sometimes read this as a confession of bias and either skip it or reduce it to a job title. Its real function is interpretive: a reader who knows the interviewer was a senior clinician in the service being evaluated reads participants' criticism of that service differently.
SRQR asks for the techniques used to enhance trustworthiness, and the word choice is deliberate. Statements that a study was rigorous, or that findings were validated, are claims. What the item wants is the specific thing you did, and the recognised options are concrete: member checking, returning findings or transcripts to participants for comment; triangulation across data sources, methods or investigators; negative or disconfirming case analysis, actively looking for data that contradicts an emerging theme; peer debriefing, having an uninvolved colleague interrogate the analysis; an audit trail documenting analytic decisions so the route from data to conclusion can be retraced; and prolonged engagement in the setting.
Where more than one person coded, agreement can be quantified as well as described. The coefficient should match the coding design: Cohen's kappa for two coders on unordered categories, Fleiss' kappa for more, and Krippendorff's alpha where codes are ordered, coders vary, or some units were not coded by everyone. Report the statistic, its metric and an interval, and remember that agreement demonstrates consistent application of a codebook rather than the validity of the codebook itself.
A completed SRQR checklist shows your study is adequately described. It does not show it was well conducted, and it is not a quality score. The items are unweighted and were never designed to sum, so converting them into a total and comparing studies on it is a methodological error rather than a shortcut.
When appraising qualitative studies for inclusion in a synthesis, use an instrument built for appraisal such as the JBI critical appraisal tools, and keep the two judgements separate in your extraction. The same separation applies across designs, with STROBE for observational studies and CONSORT for trials. If you are synthesising qualitative evidence rather than reporting a primary study, our overview of qualitative evidence synthesis methods covers the approaches available.
Work through the 21 items against the final manuscript and record the page and section for each rather than ticking it. SRQR's items are broader than COREQ's, so a genuine not applicable is rarer; if you find yourself marking several, that is usually a sign COREQ or a synthesis-specific guideline was the better choice. Name the guideline in your methods and submit the completed checklist as a supplementary file.