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Albert Rose
When Dr. Domingo Palacios received the news that his name appeared in a ranking of the world's leading experts in qualitative research, he was very surprised. And is not for less. The Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Rehabilitation and Physical Medicine professor at URJC ranks 40th worldwide, 22nd in Europe and first in Spain.
The American company Expertscape has made this world ranking that orders the most outstanding experts in this type of methodology. The company places Dr. Palacios in the Top 0,023% of 172.089 authors published worldwide on Qualitative Research from 2011 to 2021 based on contributions to 46 articles on the subject.
Specifically, the researcher focuses his work on the application of this methodology in the area of health sciences. Some of his works deal with the elderly, pain and suffering in musculoskeletal pathologies, the experience of COVID-19 and post-COVID syndrome, or disease and health in vulnerable groups.
Palacios, a graduate in Nursing, a graduate in Humanities and a doctor in Health Sciences, explains that, instead of focusing on a pathology or disease, he decided to specialize in a methodology such as qualitative research to understand the different phenomena: "I specialized in qualitative to study, analyze and describe any type of health phenomenon, since it is a methodology that can be applied to everything”.
The ability to form a team as a key at work
Dr. Domingo Palacios says that one of the keys to being successful in the field of research is the ability to form work teams with specific objectives and methodology. "My trick or my work system is to form small operational groups with very specific and clear studies, with their feet on the ground and with people with a different profile from mine," explains Palacios.
The doctor is coordinator of the Consolidated Research Group in Humanities and Qualitative Research in Health Sciences at the Rey Juan Carlos University. “During all these years I realized that there were many people who wanted to use this research methodology and apply it in hospitals, but there were no references, as happened to me. We finally managed to consolidate this group in the URJC in which we are seven, but it has come to have 35 people working”.
How to apply the Humanities to the Health Sciences
In his search for a methodology capable of explaining and describing what hospitalized people experience and going deeper, Domingo Palacios decided to study Humanities after 15 years working as a nurse. “There I discovered a methodology that is widely applied in sociology, which is qualitative research and all its subtypes such as ethnography or phenomenology. I saw a world that could be applied to my field and although it was already being done in the Anglo-Saxon world, in Spain it was very little established”, recalls the researcher.
Domingo Palacios assures that both quantitative and qualitative research are equally important. “The key is versatility and knowing what type of design to use depending on the question we ask ourselves: if I want to compare whether one intervention works better than another, I need a quantitative and epidemiological design, a clinical trial. If I need to know the perspective and experience of a father when seeing his son die, I have to go to qualitative research to go deeper. Different questions, different designs”, he concludes.