Blackwell Reference Online

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The notion of auditing is associated with social science methodology and with social theory. Generally defined, auditing is a procedure whereby an independent third party systematically examines the evidence of adherence of some practice to a set of norms or standards for that practice and issues a professional opinion. Thus, for example, financial auditors examine a corporation's financial statements against a set of standards for generally accepted accounting practices and issue a professional opinion (called an attestation) as to the dependability, integrity, and veracity of those statements. This general idea has been borrowed from the discipline of accounting and adopted in discussions of social science method. An auditing procedure has been suggested as a means to verify the dependability (cf. reliability) and confirmability (cf. warrantability) of claims made in a qualitative study ( Lincoln & Guba 1985 ; Schwandt & Halpern 1989 ). The researcher is advised to maintain an audit trail (a systematically organized documentation system) of evidence including the data, processes, and product (claims, findings) of the inquiry. A third-party inquirer then examines that audit trail to attest to the appropriateness, integrity, and dependability of the inquiry process and the extent to which claims made are reasonably grounded in the data. In the field of social program evaluation, ... log in or subscribe to read full text