Trustworthiness as Inferential Accountability in Qualitative Research

Trustworthiness is a cornerstone of qualitative research rigor, yet it is frequently operationalized as a procedural checklist rather than as a coherent logic for justifying qualitative knowledge claims. As a result, qualitative studies often demonstrate methodological diligence without fully explicating how empirical materials warrant the interpretations advanced or how the scope of those interpretations should be bounded. The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize trustworthiness as inferential accountability, understood as a governing evaluative principle for qualitative inquiry that provides a coherent and contemporary framework for the justification, evaluation, and delimitation of qualitative claims. The paper adopts a conceptual and theory-of-methods approach, drawing on established qualitative methodology to critically re-examine the foundations of trustworthiness. It systematically reframes credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability as interdependent inferential safeguards operating within a unified evaluative system rather than as isolated procedural criteria, situating trustworthiness within an integrated inferential logic that spans the qualitative research process. The analysis demonstrates that trustworthiness functions most effectively when understood as a system that regulates the generation, justification, and delimitation of qualitative inferences. By foregrounding inferential accountability, the framework constrains interpretive excess while preserving methodological flexibility by making transparent the links between data, analysis, and claims. This reconceptualization is particularly salient in contemporary qualitative research contexts characterized by methodological hybridity, collaborative analysis, and digitally mediated or AI-supported analytic practices, where inferential decisions are increasingly distributed across researchers, tools, and stages of inquiry. The paper advances qualitative methodology by shifting the evaluation of rigor from compliance with techniques to epistemic responsibility. By conceptualizing trustworthiness as inferential accountability, it provides researchers, reviewers, and editors with a principled framework for assessing qualitative claims based on the coherence, transparency, and defensibility of interpretive reasoning. In doing so, the paper strengthens the evaluative foundations of qualitative research and supports more cumulative, credible, and intelligible qualitative scholarship.