Layout 1 [Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare 2020; 4:9454] [page III] The works in this issue, whether directly or indirectly, speak to the invaluable role of qualitative inquiry in of- fering viable solutions or alternative affordances for the practices that are studied. In their research on assembling teams of providers, as diverse as MDs, pharmacists, psy- chologists and dieticians in medical homes devoted to treating patients for chronic inflammatory bowel disease, Ksenia Gorbenko, Eliezer Mendelev, Marla Dubinsky, and Laurie Keefer work alongside providers to understand how the holistic approach of medical homes can become a model for treating chronic illnesses that cannot be ad- dressed in the fragmentated way that is all too common in medical practice.1 Each of the five research studies demonstrates how applied knowledge is accountable knowledge, in two important meanings of the term ac- count-able. The first is that it takes experiential accounts seriously. When providers, patients or clients speak or act in qualitative in the presence of accountable qualitative researchers, their words and actions are situated in the complexity of what often are multiple and overlapping contexts: the interview, the life story, the health experi- ence, the social experience, institutional constraints, what is and what is possible. Interviewees’ voices are enmeshed and in constant dialogue and tension with those of other speakers; the researchers’ work is that of carefully teasing them out and showing the implications of how different the healthcare experience might be if speakers could hear each other and were heard across multiple contexts. This publication is itself a context where accounts are taken se- riously and accountable voices traverse contexts. The second meaning of accountable knowledge, of which the article “Using an Adapted Case Study Ap- proach to Understand Rural Veteran Experiences in Pa- tient Engagement and Patient-Centered Care Research” by Kara A. Zamora, Traci H. Abraham, Christopher J. Koenig, Coleen C. Hill, Jeffrey M. Pyne and Karen H. Seal provides a particularly good example, attends to the researchers’’ reflexivity and transparency.2 Research con- stitutes a particular universe by way of interpretation of data. Being reflexive and transparent means taking re- sponsibility for the interpretations advanced of the ac- counts of those we study, and of the universes we bring forth in our research, because it is the same universe we should wish to inhabit ourselves. Zamora and her col- leagues offer a methodologically lucid explication of how the research team arrived at the coding categories that make up their analysis, and the steps that were required of them to feel confident that they offered the most valid and compelling interpretation. The awareness that other’s accounts are not a representation of something out there, but require interpretation, and that this should be ac- counted for carefully, so that we can judge for ourselves about its validity and usefulness, is accountable knowl- edge. The researchers’ voices should not be obscured by third person passive formulations, but heard as active in- terpreters of the version of how things are and how they could be. Zamora and her co-researchers do exactly that; the study complicates the institutional definition of Vet- erans’ engagement by listening to veterans’ accounts, and analyzing them with great care. In both “Drinking as routine practice among re-inte- grating National Guard and Reservists from Arkansas”3 and “Trauma, violence and recovery in the life stories of people who have injected drugs”4 the researchers adopt a life history approach, weaving informants’ accounts about the sensitive subject matter under investigation into mul- tiple unfolding contexts of their lives. Life history inter- views, which originated to preserve the memories of Native Americans, are, as Jesse argues “particularly ben- eficial for revealing the tangle of relations and symbiotic interactions that exist between an individual’s memories and those memories that circulate in the broader cultural circuit in which individuals are embedded – referred to most commonly as collective memory” (2018, p. 2).5 They are thus occasions for the interviewees’ reflection, con- sideration, and realization of coherence of their own se- Editor’s introduction: Applied qualitative research Mariaelena Bartesaghi University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida Correspondence: Mariaelena Bartesaghi, Associate Professor, Communication, University of South Florida CIS 1040, 4202 E. Fowler Ave, Tampa, FL 33620, USA; Editor-in-Chief, Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare. E-mail: mbartesaghi@usf.edu Received for publication: 3 November 2020. Accepted for publication: 3 November 2020. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial 4.0 License (CC BY-NC 4.0). ©Copyright: the Author(s), 2020 Licensee PAGEPress, Italy Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare 2020; 4:III-IV doi:10.4081/qrmh.2020.9454 Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare 2020; volume 4:III-IV No n- co mm er cia l u se on ly quential accounts in terms of life at the time of the inter- view for the purpose of telling the story, and therefore making sense, of their drinking and their drug use in the historical and social context of the questioning. Re- searcher and interviewee work together to create a version of life for the research project that will be able to make a difference, not just for the parties involved in the ques- tioning dynamic, but for the larger discourses elicited and indexed by the research question at hand; in this case, re- shaping the meanings of drinking and drug use. In their life-history study of drinking as routine practice among reintegrating military, Traci H. Abraham, Ann M. Cheney, Geoffrey M. Curran, and Karen L. Drummond do just that. By understanding drinking as habitual practice: an acceptable and ratified way for active military to cope with the demands and incredible stress placed on them, the researchers trace the trajectory of how part of a sol- dier’s social capital, a “learned behavior that is rewarded and valorized during military service”3 turns into addic- tion and isolation in the context of the new story needed for life as civilians. This leads the researchers to recom- mend that the practice of drinking be addressed during ac- tive service much with much greater attention; in other words, that the life histories of the men they interview be the impetus for a new social history. Similarly, the study by Richard Hammersley, Marie Reid, Phil Dalgarno, Jason Wallace, and Dave Liddell de- centers the master narrative of drug use from the psycho- logical version of individual failing (or predisposition) to the stories of users’ lives.4 In these stories, we hear how drug use, just like drinking is for men in military service, a coherent and meaningful act in the midst of systemic vi- olence, which drugs may both help alleviate for the user and, tragically, add to the users’ precarious lives. Recon- structing addiction in this way points to very different so- cial interventions than those that have to do with users’ mental fallibility. The closing article, “A focused ethnography of en- doscopy practitioners utilisation of capnography in se- dated patients” by Deemah Aldossary and Sherran Milton takes us to the practice of anesthesia in endoscopy and the accounts of practitioners and nurses about the technology of capnography.6 Capnography, which is the monitoring of the patient’s respiratory status during sedation means quite different things for medical staff and nurses who are engaged in its practice, albeit as part of different health- care cultures. While to the first group capnography means attention to the data and its monitoring, to nurses it means following the physicians’ orders while keeping their at- tention focused on the patient. I found this fascinating, not just for this particular case and what it means for integrat- ing the practice of capnography, but for what qualitative research can do to understand practices by simply asking those who engage in them routinely to account for their own meanings. And how methodological reflexiveness and transparency can make sure that our approaches to understanding what is important about healthcare prac- tices can put forth significant applications for more pro- ductive, efficient, sensitive, destigmatizing, inclusive ways of practicing healthcare. References 1. Gorbenko K, Mendelev E, Dubinsky M, Keefer L. Estab- lishing a medical home for patients with inflammatory bowel diseases: a qualitative study. Qual Res Med Health- care 2020;4:75-82. 2. Zamora KA, Abraham TH, Koenig CJ, Hill CC, Pyne JM, Seal KH. Using an Adapted Case Study Approach to Under- stand Rural Veteran Experiences in Patient Engagement and Patient-Centered Care Research. Qual Res Med Healthcare 2020;4:54-64. 3. Abraham TH, Cheney AM,Curran GM, & Drummond KL. Drinking as routine practice among re-integrating National Guard and Reservists from Arkansas. Qual Res Med Health- care 2020;4:43-53. 4. Hammersley R, Reid M, Dalgarno P, Wallace J, Liddell D. Trauma, violence and recovery in the life stories of people who have injected drugs. Qual Res Med Healthcare 2020;4:65-74. 5. Jessee E. The Life History Interview. In: Liamputtong P. (ed.). Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sci- ences. Springer, Singapore; 2018. Pp. 1-17. doi:10.1007 /978-981-10-2779-6_80-1 6. Aldossary DN & Milton S. A focused ethnography of how endoscopy practitioners utilize capnography in sedated pa- tients. Qual Res Med Healthcare 2020;4:83-93. [page IV] [Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare 2020; 4:9454] Editorial No n- co mm er cia l u se on ly