Almost every qualitative researcher I have met tells the same story, and none of them tell it on purpose.

Ask how they ended up doing this work, and you will hear some version of: it just happened, and I found myself in qualitative research. I believed this was true in a general, anecdotal way for years. Three weeks ago, it stopped being anecdotal.

I had joined a read-a-thon for a colleague’s book, The Qual African by Mpho Mpofu, going through a chapter in which contributors from across the continent were asked the same question: how did you become a qualitative researcher?

The answers were strikingly similar. Almost none of us had chosen qualitative research on purpose.

We had arrived there through accidents, invitations, detours, and (often) a person who saw something in us before we could see it ourselves. This is mine, and what I think it actually teaches about how researchers get made.

The question that named it

During my MSc at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in collaboration with the Ifakara Health Institute (IHI); my supervisor (Prof. Dickson Lweitoijera) asked me a deceptively simple question: “What’s your plan after completing the programme? And what’s your research focus?”

Truthfully, I had no clear answer. Not wanting to sound clueless, I answered quickly: “I think I will stick with research, specifically quantitative research.”

At the time, I had absorbed an unspoken hierarchy among junior researchers: quantitative work looked rigorous and difficult; qualitative research was sometimes dismissed as “soft,” as if talking to people carried less intellectual weight than statistics, experiments, or code.

It was a strange assumption for someone who had always enjoyed connecting ideas and people, but I had absorbed it anyway, the way you absorb most hierarchies you did not choose, simply by being around people who repeated them.

My supervisor asked: “You are very good at connecting with people and ideas. Why not focus on qualitative research?”

I resisted. I told myself qualitative research was hard, exhausting, and full of endless talk “blah blah blah…”. He laughed and told me to stop making excuses.

Looking back, he was not really giving me a new direction. He was helping me name one that was already there.

The hierarchy I had absorbed, and why It was wrong

It is worth pausing on that assumption, because it is not unique to me, and it is not harmless.

The idea that quantitative work is “rigorous” and qualitative work is “soft” tends to survive because it is rarely examined directly; it circulates as tone, in the way people talk about their own work, more than as an argument anyone actually defends.

But sit with what qualitative research actually demands: the discipline to hold a discussion guide loosely enough to follow where a participant’s meaning actually goes; the judgment to know when silence needs space and when it needs a gentle prompt; the analytical patience to sit with pages of transcript until a pattern earns its name, rather than assigning one too early.

None of that is soft. It is a different kind of rigor; one that is harder to standardize, which is precisely why it gets mistaken for being less exacting.

I did not arrive at that understanding through argument. I arrived at it through repetition: three separate people, in three separate contexts, noticing the same thing about me before I noticed it myself.

Three signals I almost missed

I had received an earlier version of my supervisor’s message from Dr. Sally Mtenga during a practical session on moderating focus group discussions (FGDs): “You will make a good qualitative researcher.” I laughed then. I did not believe her.

The same pattern appeared during hands-on NVivo training with Ms. Jitahada Baraka. I was unusually engaged.

Looking back at it honestly, the projects I had worked on most (and genuinely enjoyed) up to that point were already leaning qualitative. I had simply not connected the pattern to a professional identity.

Three people, three settings, one observation, repeated back to me until I stopped being able to dismiss it as flattery. That is what strikes me now: none of these were dramatic interventions.

They were small, specific comments, made in passing, by people who had no particular reason to say them except that they were true.

What you do once the resistance stops

Once I stopped resisting, everything changed. I found my lane and went all in; relearning research design, qualitative methodology, facilitation, analysis, reflexivity, and the discipline of listening closely enough to understand what people are actually saying, not merely what our research questions expect them to say.

The focus that initially felt like a concession became one of the clearest decisions of my career.

It opened more doors than I expected (even my first big consultancy was as a qualitative researcher) not because qualitative research is easier to build a career on.

But, because it was finally the actual shape of what I was good at, rather than the shape I had assumed a “serious” researcher was supposed to have.

That is what struck me most during the read-a-thon: our “accidents” were rarely accidental. Often, they were the moment a mentor, professor, or colleague named a strength we had not yet learned to claim.

An accident implies nobody was paying attention. What actually happened, in story after story in that chapter, was the opposite; someone was paying very close attention, and said so.

The journey continued through the CREMES Research Mentorship Program, led by Dr. Catherine Kahabuka and the team. Over seven consecutive months, I deepened my understanding of qualitative research and stayed the course to the end.

I was later recognized as Best Mentee in Tanzania and ranked second overall among mentees from the five participating countries.

That recognition mattered. The deeper lesson mattered more: a research career is not built only by choosing the right method.

It is built by learning to recognize what kind of questions you are naturally drawn to, whose experiences you are willing to sit with, and what kind of evidence you want to help bring into the world. For me, qualitative research became that space.

What this means for mentors, education and research institutions

If naming did this much work for me, it is worth asking what would happen if institutions treated it as a deliberate practice rather than a lucky accident that happens to some students and not others.

A few implications follow directly from this experience, for anyone supervising, mentoring, or designing research training programs:

• Notice aloud, early. All three people who shaped my direction said something short, direct, and unprompted, often in the middle of an unrelated task. None of it required a formal mentorship structure, it required someone willing to say what they saw.
• Do not let “soft” language go unchallenged. If a training program or department still talks about qualitative work as less rigorous than quantitative work, that framing will quietly push capable researchers away from the method they would actually excel at.
• Build structured mentorship as a complement to informal noticing, not a replacement for it. The CREMES Research Mentorship Program deepened and formalized what individual mentors had already started; it did not initiate the shift on its own.
• Treat the moment of resistance as normal, not disqualifying. I resisted three separate signals before I accepted any of them. A student’s initial “no” is not evidence that the observation was wrong.
• If you are the one choosing, pay attention to your own resistance. Notice which projects you keep enjoying regardless of what the method is officially called, and don’t let a hierarchy you didn’t choose talk you out of the shape of work you are actually good at. It took me three tries to accept what three different people saw in me; yours does not have to take that long.

That is also why I try to play my part in improving the visibility of qualitative research and qualitative researchers, this piece is one small part of that.

My wish is that we reach a point where "qualitative researcher" becomes one of the answers Tanzanian children (and eventually children everywhere) give when asked what they want to be when they grow up. It is a long way to go, but we will get there.