Why would we want to waste our painstaking (inductive) analysis on some sweeping statement that our data can't justify? The logic is more about future research engaging with the ideas and improving rather than refuting them. Offering a building block rather than throwing down the gauntlet.

So yes, I'd say that falsifiability is a non-entity in qualitative research. Not because the ideas can't possibly be wrong, but because falsifiability is so strongly tied to hypothetico-deductivism that it's not so relevant outside of hypothesis-testing methods. Different starting and end points.

I think this may be because an inductive analysis starts with the data and tries to make sense of it in the best possible way. To end up with something so indefensible that it could be called false would be a comprehensive failure. All qualitative methods I know have procedures to check validity.

Even in grounded theory, as far as I understand, the aim is not to create a falsifiable theory but to refine it until it works. In interpretative methods, conclusions can of course be contested or methods compared with some quality criterion or another. But "false" is an odd word in this context.

That's tricky. The question may not make the same sense to everyone. Qualitative methods are used with different epistemologies, which may be linked to whether and how falsifiability matters. They have in common that they don't test hypotheses, so falsifiability is certainly a less central concern.

There are also ineffective systems. I get review requests practically every day. So of course I say no to most. Some are far outside my field, but the system thinks I'm an expert because I used the same method in a different field. And some are the reviews I already declined last week. Annoying.

"Compared with other European countries, the UK received the fifth largest number of asylum seekers in the year ending March 2025, and the seventeenth largest intake when measured per head of population" - Home Office data
www.gov.uk/government/s...

Boris Johnson's inept handling of Covid demonstrates why electorates living in normal times should vote for governments as if they were living in times of emergency.

Never presume you can vote for unserious people on the assumption that they will never have to make serious decisions.

Record shops, good point!

What worries me more is the reports of writers having the authenticity of their work questioned by AI "detectors" because their writing is grammatically correct and fairly formal. The attempt to push AI into every corner of our lives is poisoning everything right now.

It's because we're investing in doing things faster rather than in doing them properly.

But the pendulum will swing back. Proper cooking came back. Proper brewing came back. Proper writing will be appreciated in the future, perhaps more than today.