qualitative research tradition definition

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Module 3 Chapter 2: Overview of Qualitative Traditions

In Chapter 1 you read about three different approaches to social work research: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches. In this chapter we examine different traditions and methods commonly utilized in qualitative approaches to research. The qualitative research literature presents a wide array of approaches: ethnography, life histories, symbolic interactionism, grounded theory, phenomenology, hermeneutics/heuristic research, interpretivism, collaborative social research, social or cognitive anthropology, case studies, narrative inquiry, critical inquiry, participatory action research, content analysis, study of artifacts, and participant observation (Creswell & Poth, 2018). Here, we examine four of the five approaches identified by Creswell and Poth (2018), as well as two other approaches. You will read about:

• Narrative research
• Phenomenological research
• Grounded theory research
• Ethnographic research
• Participatory action research
• Content/artifact analysis research

Qualitative Research Approaches

Qualitative research approaches are most appropriately used when the nature of the research questions and study goals meet certain criteria (Padgett, 2008). These include:

• Relatively little is known or understood about the topic of interest
• The topic involves stigma and/or taboos, thereby lending itself to analysis with emotional depth and sensitivity (rather than quantifiable facts)
• The goal is to study and create meaning from the perspectives of individuals who have “lived the experiences” of study interest
• The goal is to understand processes, particularly complex processes, in social work problems and practices/interventions
• The goal is to interpret quantitative research results, particularly unexpected results
• Engaging in action or participatory research, involving social action or advocacy in combination with conducting the research.

Common across qualitative approaches is employing the “researcher-as-instrument” (Padgett, 2008, p. 17). Qualitative research results are heavily influenced by the experiences, perceptions, and personal qualities of the investigator. Thus, a critical component involves the investigator being reflective about the data, participants, analysis process, and results.

Narrative Research.  Narrative research “begins with the experiences as expressed in lived and told stories of individuals” (Creswell & Poth, 2018). It is about both the nature of the expressed narratives and exploration of the contexts in which the narratives and narrators are situated. The method of gathering and interpreting these stories is called narrative inquiry . This is typically performed with one or a very few individuals being involved with any one study. The purpose is to learn the individual stories and their meaning to individuals.

Of great interest in narrative inquiry is how a story is presented by the individual: it is seldom presented in a simple, chronological manner. Instead, stories are often conveyed in terms of critical transitions or nodal events where “turning points” occur in a person’s lived experience. Narrative examples are present in biographies, autobiographies (autoethnography), and oral histories. For example, the movie documentary Whitney presents singer Whitney Houston’s stories and lived experiences as a performer, celebrity, and family member, including her relationship with alcohol and other drugs. Parts of the documentary are presented as others’ descriptions, parts are presented in her own words. The point is to better understand this person’s life.

A social work example of narrative inquiry is reported as one woman’s journey of recovery from mental illness (Thomas & Rickwood, 2016). Case interviews were conducted with a woman on three different occasions when she was (re)admitted to a residential mental health program. The woman’s narratives demonstrated changes over time in hope, self-identity, a meaningful life, and assuming responsibility for one’s own recovery. Furthermore, the investigators learned from the woman’s perspective what elements of the services provided were helpful in her road to recovery and that repeated admissions were less indicative of repeated failures and more about progress toward recovery.

Phenomenological Research . Like narrative research, phenomenological research  involves recording the stories of individuals who experience a particular phenomenon or event of interest. Unlike narrative inquiry, however, phenomenology is about deriving or constructing a shared meaning about those events among a group of participants: the goal is “meaning making” (Oktay, 2012). The emphasis in this approach is placed on identifying what the participants and their shared stories have in common. The emerging phenomenological description is a composite description of the phenomenon.

Ideally, the investigator engages with a heterogeneous group of individuals, all of whom have experienced the phenomenon of interest. For example, if the phenomenon of interest is about the experiences of siblings to persons with intellectual disabilities, the investigator would want to engage with families of different ages, social or economic standing, religious and cultural background, sibling composition (numbers, genders, and spacing of siblings), and individuals with different types or severity of disability.

One example of this type of research is a qualitative study concerned with how trafficking affects the health and health care access among 15 women engaged in sex work in the red-light district (Kamathipura) of Mumbai, India (Karandikar, Gezinski, & Kaloga, 2016). The investigators worked with transcripts of interviews with the women, preserving the voice and language of the women who participated. They identified themes and relationships between themes in their coding of the data. Three themes were discussed in their manuscript: how participants first entered into sex work (all but two reported deception by family members, friends, or acquaintances as the pathway to prostitution); health problems experienced by the women (physical violence, sexually transmitted infection, alcohol addiction, tuberculosis, HIV infection, miscarriage, abortion, cough/cold, and malaria were most frequently reported as notable events); and, disparities in access to health care resulting from being captively held in isolation or seclusion to prevent escape from trafficking and stigma attached to sex work.

Grounded Theory Research.  Grounded theory research  develops theoretical explanations about a phenomenon or process being studied—in other words, moving beyond description to generating or discovering a theory (Creswell & Poth, 2018). The theory that emerges can then be tested using other approaches and methods to determine its generalizability. The name of this approach comes from the theory being “grounded” in the data, rather than the data being used to test a theory that has been presented “off the shelf” (Creswell & Poth, 2018, p. 82). This approach, first described as a unified approach by Glaser and Strauss (1967), is particularly relevant to social work:

Because grounded theory creates theories that are derived directly from real-world settings, it has the potential to produce theories that can be used by social workers to guide practice. This theory can also be used to develop theoretically based interventions that can be tested in practice settings. In fact, when grounded theory was developed, the authors envisioned a collaborative venture between researchers and practitioners to test and adapt the theory in practice settings” (Oktay, 2012, p. 5).

Grounded theory as an approach utilizes abductive reasoning, moving back and forth in an iterative manner between data gathering and analysis processes, including inductive and deductive logic in generating and cross-checking, testing the emerging theory (Oktay, 2012). Thus, theories grow from the grounded base of real-world data. The approach is heavily influenced by the discipline of sociology, but is used to inform other professions like social work and nursing. Study participants in grounded theory research are purposively selected because of their ability to provide relevant data.

An example of the grounded theory approach in use was presented in a study of professional decision-making processes undertaken by social workers in child protection roles (Kettle, 2018). Based on 22 interviews with social workers in Scotland, the investigator explored social workers’ own perceptions of negotiating delicate balances between the interests of children and adults; the past, present, and future; functioning as an investigator versus building a relationship; getting too close versus not close enough; and, having power over versus power together. Also studied was the nature of their transactions and exchanges with other professionals. Emerging theory emphasized social workers’ internal mental processes over rational-technical solutions for practice decisions, the role of perceived responsibility in degree of cooperation between professionals, and social workers’ perceptions of different family strategies for managing closeness of and power in their relationships with the social worker.

Ethnographic Research.  Like the qualitative approaches that we have explored so far, ethnographic research aims to understand phenomena from the perspectives of those experiencing it. However, there exists a major difference: the unit of analysis in ethnographic research  is a collective group where the individuals interact with one another and have shared, common experiences. As a result, the individuals become a “culture-sharing group” by virtue of the “shared patterns of behavior, beliefs and language” that they develop (Creswell & Poth, 2018, p. 90). Ethnographic research focuses on cultural systems, “operating on several levels simultaneously to infer the tacit rules of the culture or subculture from the myriad of actions and interactions being witnessed” (Padgett, 2008, p. 32). The approach is strongly influenced by the discipline of anthropology, but is critically important as an option for social work to understand diverse populations, social work problems, and social phenomena.

Helm (2016) described an ethnographic study of how practice decisions are made within and across a team of social workers when the judgments are made under conditions of subjectivity and uncertainty, and when the available information is incomplete, inconclusive, or possibly contested. The aim of the study conducted in Scotland was to learn about “sense-making” under these circumstances, with attention directed to how this becomes a shared activity, rather than an individual activity. The study participants included a single team manager, four team leaders acting as supervisors, and six social workers from the larger team of professionals working at the study location. Data were collected through the investigator’s direct,non-participatory observation of team member behavior, including what was said in the normal course of practice ( naturalistic observation ). The observation notes were coded for themes, the two strongest being “making sense through ‘framing’ the situation” and “constructing responsibility” (Helm, 2016, p. 29). Social work practitioners were observed to discuss cases with others, usually by opening the discussion with a framing statement, which then guided the discussion; for example, framing it in terms of the worker’s own feelings about a case situation. Marked differences were noted between how social workers framed their discussions with each other, in supervision, and with clients. In addition, the social workers’ sense-making occurred within the context of reference to their perceived professional roles and responsibilities. These perceptions were observed to influence decisions and actions by the social workers. The ethnographic observations help the profession better understand how practice decisions are made in complex, under-defined situations: in sense-making, individual practitioners rely on multiple sources of information, not the least of which is provided by their understanding of the professional context (roles and responsibilities) and input from co-workers and supervisors.

Ethnography might be an important approach for social workers to better understanding diverse populations in the ability/disability arena. Consider, for example, the meaning of a deaf culture. For hearing persons, not being able to hear and communicate through spoken language might seem like an overwhelming disability. For persons who have never been part of the dominant hearing culture, living and thriving in a deaf community is important and meaningful. Deaf culture is experienced as communicating and experiencing the world differently compared to the hearing community. Members of deaf culture do not view themselves as disabled and needing to be “fixed.” Similar discussions have emerged among individuals who experience the world differently than the mainstream by virtue of their neurodiversity experience. These are individuals, many diagnosed with autism spectrum or other neurological disorders, who advocate for recognizing and appreciating variations in functioning as just that, not as mental disorders or disabilities needing to be cured. Ethnographic research helps social workers better understand their lived experiences from a strengths perspective.

Participatory Action Research.   Sometimes social workers are members of a group attempting to solve a problem or influence change at the mezzo or macro level; sometimes members of such a group engage social workers to help them promote the problem solving and change-making processes. Either way, the key stakeholders in problem solving or advocating for change may decide to integrate research methodologies into their process. The result might be a participatory action research (PAR)  scenario. This is a type of research activity where investigators are engaged in dual roles, both as researchers and change agents in the group or process under study.

PAR is conducted in the context of a non-hierarchical, democratic, engaged partnership of decision-making at every point in the process. Together, stakeholders and social workers develop the aims, questions, methods, analyses, results, and reporting of the change process. The outcomes of PAR are locally relevant solutions, developed by key stakeholders empowered to act as local experts and co-researchers supported by relevant theory and research knowledge shared by social work practitioners in a collaborative, problem-solving process. The results often include enhanced research skills among the key stakeholder partners as a form of further empowerment. What is learned through the PAR collaboration may have generalizable knowledge applicable to other communities, but the generalizability is carefully interpreted since it is, essentially, a single case study at the community level. Lawson (2015) described the relevance of PAR in community development efforts:

“Homogenization is rooted in part in mainstream researchers’ claims about the wholesale generalizability of the knowledge gained from their investigations, and it is facilitated by the worldwide movement toward evidence-based policy and practice. Granting the importance, indeed the strengths, associated with this international development, there are manifest risks and dangers when local voices, choices, and knowledge are neglected, ignored, and discounted. Under these circumstances, rigorous research knowledge has the potential to serve as an instrument for domination, marginalization, and oppression. And when these conditions prevail, research-based knowledge has the potential to cause harm in the name of doing good work. PAR’s expressly local knowledge for locally tailored solutions thus provides an important safeguard and a quality assurance mechanism for policy and practice” (Lawson, 2015, p. ix-x).

Community-based participatory research (CBPR)  is a type of participatory research involving a collaborative inquiry process. As above, local experts are “people other than formally trained researchers” engaged to share their good ideas about every aspect of the research being conducted: the questions asked, study design features, how results are interpreted, and how findings should be used (Lawson, 2015, p. xv). University-community collaborations often provide the context through which CBPR occurs.

An example of CBPR was a needs assessment concerning parenting support programs for fathers in Detroit, Michigan (Lee, Hoffman, & Harris, 2016). The key stakeholders engaged in the effort with trained social work investigators from a university’s school of social work included formal service delivery system providers, a community advisory board, other key informants, and fathers. The team proceeded through a five-stage community-engaged research process, and discussed the importance of operating as a “learning community” where team members function as both teachers and learners throughout the collaborative process.

Stage 1.  Identification and assessment was centered around locating and interviewing formal service providers in the local community. As part of the interview process, additional providers were identified by the participants.

Stage 2.  The team engaged in mapping nontraditional settings, as well. This was directed to identifying places where fathers might seek or receive parenting support outside of formal service delivery systems: barber shops, for example. They developed a map of the community served by formal and informal/nontraditional systems.

Stage 3.  This phase was labeled “engagement & relationship building” (Lee, Hoffman, & Harris, 2016, p. 78). It involved creating a project community advisory board made up of key stakeholders, and developing working connections and relationships with researchers involved with this particular community.

Stage 4.  At this point, key stakeholder and university partners collaborated to develop strategies and events to build the service providers’ capacity to provide parenting support as needed and desired by fathers in the community.

Stage 5.  The final, evaluation stage involved trained investigators coding data, then stakeholders involved in checking/confirming the themes identified in the data (called “member checking” of results). This final phase also included dissemination of the study findings.

In the end, this CBPR project identified multiple themes and at least 15 recommendations. Service providers identified service needs of the community’s fathers and strategies for engaging fathers. The fathers identified themes around engaging with children and interacting with service providers. The recommendations are specific with regards to what can change to provide support for the parenting efforts of fathers in this community, and many are relevant to consider adopting in other communities.

Content or Artifact Analysis Research .  Content analysis  is not so much a qualitative approach as it is a means of analyzing qualitative data. The important distinction lies in the sources of data compared to studies where interviews are conducted. In content or artifact analysis, the investigator’s source of information is records or artifacts previously produced during or about the phenomenon of interest. Content analysis is typically conducted on artifacts that were created for naturally occurring reasons, rather than for purposes of the study being conducted. Historically, content analysis was frequently conducted with personal diaries and letters written to family members or close associates. Examples include studies of first-hand report artifacts concerning how military personnel experienced military combat or their experiences of being separated from family members.

Given the important role of media on socialization, contents of media to which individuals are exposed might be analyzed for common themes and messages that audiences might be receiving. For example, a social worker might be concerned with learning about the contents of books commonly read to young children in families expecting a new baby. Parents read these books as a form of “bibliotherapy” to inform their children about what to expect and socialize them about how to behave in relation to the expected or new family member. A content analysis of these books divulged a common structure and theme: the new baby’s arrival is initially met with a great deal of negative affect (jealousy, feeling neglected by parents, being annoyed by the baby’s behavior), then in the end the child has an epiphany whereby the baby is fun and becomes loved (Begun, unpublished). Unfortunately, this plot structure and theme approach is adult-centric—young children learn concepts not by the logical sequencing of events but by what is most salient, affect-laden, or recent. Therefore, the message to these children could be “don’t like the baby” as much as it is “like the baby” when exposed to these books.

Recent literature includes studies relying on content presented in social media postings as the studied artifacts (Facebook, twitter, Snapchat, MySpace, and others). For example, investigators reviewed the contents of more than 1,000 MySpace comments posted by adolescents and emerging adults (aged 13-24 years) for the presence of potential suicide statements (Cash et al, 2013). The content analysis resulted in identifying 64 messages where a theme of potential suicidality was present; these statements were associated with subthemes about relationships, mental health concerns, substance misuse, and suicide methods. The lesson learned from this study is that young people are expressing themselves about suicide-related thoughts and behaviors to their social networks using social networking sites. One implication is that individuals using social network sites might need to be educated about how to recognize, interpret, and respond to these types of messages to become part of a suicide prevention network.

Chapter Summary

In this chapter you read about different traditions of qualitative research. You were introduced to narrative, phenomenological, grounded theory, ethnographic, participatory action, and content/artifact analysis research traditions. In future chapters you will learn about the specific methods involved in data collection and engaging participants in qualitative research studies.

Social Work 3401 Coursebook Copyright © by Dr. Audrey Begun is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Qualitative Research : Definition

Qualitative research is the naturalistic study of social meanings and processes, using interviews, observations, and the analysis of texts and images.  In contrast to quantitative researchers, whose statistical methods enable broad generalizations about populations (for example, comparisons of the percentages of U.S. demographic groups who vote in particular ways), qualitative researchers use in-depth studies of the social world to analyze how and why groups think and act in particular ways (for instance, case studies of the experiences that shape political views).   

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• What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

What Is Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples

Published on June 19, 2020 by Pritha Bhandari . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Qualitative research involves collecting and analyzing non-numerical data (e.g., text, video, or audio) to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. It can be used to gather in-depth insights into a problem or generate new ideas for research.

Qualitative research is the opposite of quantitative research , which involves collecting and analyzing numerical data for statistical analysis.

Qualitative research is commonly used in the humanities and social sciences, in subjects such as anthropology, sociology, education, health sciences, history, etc.

• How does social media shape body image in teenagers?
• How do children and adults interpret healthy eating in the UK?
• What factors influence employee retention in a large organization?
• How is anxiety experienced around the world?
• How can teachers integrate social issues into science curriculums?

Table of contents

Approaches to qualitative research, qualitative research methods, qualitative data analysis, advantages of qualitative research, disadvantages of qualitative research, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about qualitative research.

Qualitative research is used to understand how people experience the world. While there are many approaches to qualitative research, they tend to be flexible and focus on retaining rich meaning when interpreting data.

Common approaches include grounded theory, ethnography , action research , phenomenological research, and narrative research. They share some similarities, but emphasize different aims and perspectives.

Note that qualitative research is at risk for certain research biases including the Hawthorne effect , observer bias , recall bias , and social desirability bias . While not always totally avoidable, awareness of potential biases as you collect and analyze your data can prevent them from impacting your work too much.

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Each of the research approaches involve using one or more data collection methods . These are some of the most common qualitative methods:

• Observations: recording what you have seen, heard, or encountered in detailed field notes.
• Interviews:  personally asking people questions in one-on-one conversations.
• Focus groups: asking questions and generating discussion among a group of people.
• Surveys : distributing questionnaires with open-ended questions.
• Secondary research: collecting existing data in the form of texts, images, audio or video recordings, etc.
• You take field notes with observations and reflect on your own experiences of the company culture.
• You distribute open-ended surveys to employees across all the company’s offices by email to find out if the culture varies across locations.
• You conduct in-depth interviews with employees in your office to learn about their experiences and perspectives in greater detail.

Qualitative researchers often consider themselves “instruments” in research because all observations, interpretations and analyses are filtered through their own personal lens.

For this reason, when writing up your methodology for qualitative research, it’s important to reflect on your approach and to thoroughly explain the choices you made in collecting and analyzing the data.

Qualitative data can take the form of texts, photos, videos and audio. For example, you might be working with interview transcripts, survey responses, fieldnotes, or recordings from natural settings.

Most types of qualitative data analysis share the same five steps:

• Prepare and organize your data. This may mean transcribing interviews or typing up fieldnotes.
• Review and explore your data. Examine the data for patterns or repeated ideas that emerge.
• Develop a data coding system. Based on your initial ideas, establish a set of codes that you can apply to categorize your data.
• Assign codes to the data. For example, in qualitative survey analysis, this may mean going through each participant’s responses and tagging them with codes in a spreadsheet. As you go through your data, you can create new codes to add to your system if necessary.
• Identify recurring themes. Link codes together into cohesive, overarching themes.

There are several specific approaches to analyzing qualitative data. Although these methods share similar processes, they emphasize different concepts.

Qualitative research often tries to preserve the voice and perspective of participants and can be adjusted as new research questions arise. Qualitative research is good for:

• Flexibility

The data collection and analysis process can be adapted as new ideas or patterns emerge. They are not rigidly decided beforehand.

• Natural settings

Data collection occurs in real-world contexts or in naturalistic ways.

• Meaningful insights

Detailed descriptions of people’s experiences, feelings and perceptions can be used in designing, testing or improving systems or products.

• Generation of new ideas

Open-ended responses mean that researchers can uncover novel problems or opportunities that they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

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Researchers must consider practical and theoretical limitations in analyzing and interpreting their data. Qualitative research suffers from:

• Unreliability

The real-world setting often makes qualitative research unreliable because of uncontrolled factors that affect the data.

• Subjectivity

Due to the researcher’s primary role in analyzing and interpreting data, qualitative research cannot be replicated . The researcher decides what is important and what is irrelevant in data analysis, so interpretations of the same data can vary greatly.

• Limited generalizability

Small samples are often used to gather detailed data about specific contexts. Despite rigorous analysis procedures, it is difficult to draw generalizable conclusions because the data may be biased and unrepresentative of the wider population .

• Labor-intensive

Although software can be used to manage and record large amounts of text, data analysis often has to be checked or performed manually.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Chi square goodness of fit test
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative research deals with words and meanings.

Quantitative methods allow you to systematically measure variables and test hypotheses . Qualitative methods allow you to explore concepts and experiences in more detail.

There are five common approaches to qualitative research :

• Grounded theory involves collecting data in order to develop new theories.
• Ethnography involves immersing yourself in a group or organization to understand its culture.
• Narrative research involves interpreting stories to understand how people make sense of their experiences and perceptions.
• Phenomenological research involves investigating phenomena through people’s lived experiences.
• Action research links theory and practice in several cycles to drive innovative changes.

Data collection is the systematic process by which observations or measurements are gathered in research. It is used in many different contexts by academics, governments, businesses, and other organizations.

There are various approaches to qualitative data analysis , but they all share five steps in common:

• Prepare and organize your data.
• Review and explore your data.
• Develop a data coding system.
• Assign codes to the data.
• Identify recurring themes.

The specifics of each step depend on the focus of the analysis. Some common approaches include textual analysis , thematic analysis , and discourse analysis .

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Qualitative Research Methods

Research methodology discloses the ways in which we approach problems and look for answers. Our assumptions, interests, and purposes influence our selection of methodology and the mode of application. Debates over methodology, therefore, are debates over assumptions and intent, ideology and perspective. No where is this more apparent than in the debates surrounding the use of quantitative versus qualitative methodologies (Harding, 1986; Keller & Longino, 1996; Kerlinger, 1992).

The debate has been largely played out in the academic arena (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). Academic resistance to qualitative research illustrates the politics and vested interests embedded in the social sciences and academic institutions. Detractors call qualitative researchers soft scientists whose work is full of bias, entirely personal, and unscientific. Proponents of qualitative methods decry quantitative research as upholding the political status quo and proclaim that the premise of qualitative research challenges the very foundations of the scientific achievements of Western civilization. They hail qualitative research as an answer in the search for knowledge that transcends opinion and personal bias, recognizes individual voices and experience, and promotes the interests of marginalized members of society (Keller & Longino, 1996). In many cases, the conflict has been greater than the need to preserve scholarship or further knowledge (Creswell, 1994; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998).

This paper will review qualitative research methodology with an emphasis on the variations among the traditions of qualitative inquiry and the consequent impact on research design.

What is Qualitative Research?

Qualitative research is a growing field of inquiry that cuts across disciplines and subject matter. It is an elaborate, and often perplexing, grouping of terms, concepts, and assumptions that include the traditions associated with positivism, post-structuralism, and many cultural, critical, and interpretive qualitative research perspectives and methods (Banister, Burman, Parker, Taylor, & Tindall, 1994). Qualitative research, by definition, does not rely on numerical measurements, and depends instead on research that produces descriptive data. It subsumes a range of perspectives, paradigms and methods and within each epistemological theory, qualitative research can mean different things (Creswell, 1998).

Because qualitative research does subsume so many traditions of inquiry, there are possibly as many misconceptions about qualitative research methodology as there are definitions (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994a). There are, however, some consistencies among the varieties of qualitative research.

Parker (1994) calls qualitative research “part of a debate, not a fixed truth” (p. 3).   This highlights the nature of qualitative research as an interactive and ongoing process between the researcher and the researched. Banister et al.(1994) define qualitative research as: “an interpretive study of a specified issue or problem in which the researcher is central to the sense that is made (p. 2).”

Denzin & Lincoln (1994b) contribute this more inclusive definition:

Qualitative research is multimethod in focus, involving an interpretive, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their actual settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. Qualitative research involves the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical materials—case study, personal experience, introspective, life story, interview, observational, historical, interactional, and visual texts—that describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in individuals’ lives. Accordingly, qualitative researchers deploy a wide range of interconnected methods, hoping always to get a better fix on the subject matter at hand (p. 2)

Qualitative versus Quantitative

King (1994) argues that the difference between qualitative and quantitative research is stylistic rather than substantive. The quality of the research, to King, lies in the underlying logic of inference, the quality of the procedure, theoretical basis, goals, and execution. As we know, there is good research that uses both approaches, just as there is bad research.

Both qualitative research and quantitative research seek to understand natural phenomena, provide new knowledge, and permit experience to be replicated in systematic ways. The major difference lies in the goals of each approach. Unlike quantitative research, qualitative research seeks to understand action and experience as a whole and in context. Qualitative research perceives the role of the investigator as integral to the data, not in the traditional view of an objective scientist looking through a telescope.

While quantitative research concentrates on measurements that operationalize constructs, qualitative research uses narrative descriptions, where the words are data and cannot be reduced to numbers. The lack of quantification eliminates the use of statistical analyses for patterns, averages, significance, and probabilities. Instead, the qualitative researcher must use literary and verbal data to reconstruct and understand experience and to identify themes in hopes that a new theory, hypothesis, or relation will be brought to light in ways that extend our understanding. The qualitative investigator is an integrator of the information, giving the data meaning and substance. As such, elimination of investigator bias may not be possible or even desirable.

Qualitative research is in a position to make a unique contribution by elaborating the nature of experience and meaning. Qualitative research has the ability to bring phenomena to life using the explanation of context, multiplicity of voices, and consideration of detail. By bringing experiences to sharp focus, qualitative research can move others to action. Qualitative research projects have triggered policy changes that support more research and better care for AIDS patients (Kazdin, 1998, p. 260), and the advancement of treatment interventions that come from a fuller understanding of lasting distress experienced by victims of childhood abuse (Morrow & Smith, 1995).

Qualitative research does not compete with or replace the value of quantitative research and analysis. Instead, qualitative research can add dimension when reductionist quantitative approaches eliminate the richness, texture, and context. The in-depth study of individuals has made major contributions to clinical psychology (Noblit & Hare, 1988) and the examination of phenomenon in depth permits the generation of hypotheses for further research in both qualitative and quantitative styles (Kazdin, 1998).

Quantitative and qualitative methodologies are framed by different traditions but can be combined to advantage (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). For example, researchers Campbell and Fisk applied both quantitative and qualitative methods to measure psychological traits. Their aim was to ensure that the variance belonged to the traits being measured, and was not due to methodology (Brewer & Hunter, 1989; cited in Creswell, 1994). Denzin (1978; cited in Janesick, 1994) uses the term triangulation, borrowed from navigation and military strategy, to argue for a combination of data sources and methodologies in the study of the same phenomenon. The concept is based on the assumption that any bias inherent in particular data sources, investigators, and methods would be exposed or neutralized when used in conjunction with other data sources, investigators, and methods (Creswell, 1994). Glaser and Strauss (1967) observe:

There is no fundamental clash between the purposes and capacities of qualitative and quantitative methods or data. What clash there is concerns the primacy of emphasis on verification or generation of theory—to which heated discussion on qualitative versus quantitative data have been linked historically. We believe that each form of data is useful for both verification and generation of theory, whatever the primacy of emphasis…   [author’s italics]

In many instances, both forms of data are necessary—not quantitative used to test qualitative, but both used as supplements, as mutual verification, and most important for us, as different forms of data on the same subject, which, when compared, will each generate theory…   (p.17-18)

History and Intellectual Heritage

Qualitative research has existed in various forms within fields of social science for almost a century (Tesch, 1990). From the inception, there has been tension between the scholars who advocated objective results that were consistent with the techniques of the natural sciences and those who felt that the phenomenon of human consciousness was too complex to be captured without a different approach (Tierney & Lincoln, 1994). Two philosophical perspectives embodying these distinctions, positivism and phenomenology, have dominated in the social sciences (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998).

From a positivist perspective, a researcher seeks facts or causes of social phenomena independent from the subjective states of individuals. Positivism and the idea of scientific research was spawned by the works of Francis Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton and dates to the 17 th century. However, it was two centuries later when “science” emerged to challenge the authority of the Bible and organized religion as the sources of knowledge (Polkinghorne, 1983, p. 16). The burgeoning of the systematic study of human phenomena in history, languages and social institutions, along with the philosophical contributions of Thomas Hobbes, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill, provided a firm philosophical and logical foundation for positivist empiricism as the basis of knowledge (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994a).

The anti-positivist response, a precursor of phenomenology, was inspired by the idealistic and Romantic legacy of philosophers such as Fichte and Schelling in Germany. Although not a unified response, there was general agreement among the anti-positivists that positivism neglected the “unique sphere of meaningful experience that was the defining characteristic of human phenomena and called attention to the sphere of reality that exists because of human beings”(Polkinghorne, 1983, p. 21). The philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, who had a prominent voice in the anti-positivist movement, was a harbinger of constructivist thought. He argued that individuals stand in a complex texture of relationships with others. Because individuals do not exist in isolation, he asserted, they cannot be studied outside of the context of their connections to cultural and social life. (Polkinghorne, 1983).

Phenomenology’s influence is great in both philosophy and sociology, where researchers were striving to understand social phenomena from the individual’s own perspective and experience. These philosophical lines of thought have nourished many themes central to qualitative research in postmodern thought, hermeneutics, and dialectics (Kvale, 1992).

Beginning in sociology, the philosophical evolution of qualitative research has been complex, intertwined with influences across disciplines and methods. Tesch (1990) articulated over twenty philosophical influences in this process, see the following flow chart. It is not surprising that there is so little agreement and clear definition in a field where individual experience is valued over reductionist uniformity.

Philosophical Heritage of Qualitative Research in Sociology and Psychology

(Source: Adapted from Tesch, 1990)

Guba & Lincoln (1994) summarize the field into four major ideological models vying for acceptance among researchers: positivism, postpositivism, critical theory (which includes related ideological positions such as feminist and Marxism), and constructivism. Postmodernism may best be viewed as a family of theories consistent with aspects of critical theory, constructivism and phenomenology (Creswell, 1998). As with the anti-positivists of the late 19 th century, postmodernists eschew the glorification of rationality and reason of the 19 th century Enlightenment. Critical of the 20 th century emphasis on technology, , universals, science, and the positivist, scientific method, postmodern thinking emerged in the humanities of the 1960s and by the 1990s has made a full scale invasion in the social sciences. Postmodern thought centers on the idea that knowledge must be defined within the context of the world today and in the multiples perspectives of race, gender, class, and other groups associations. Postmodernism is characterized by a number of interrelated characteristic and encourages the reading of qualitative narratives as rhetoric and a state of social being (Agger, 1991; in Creswell, 1998) Here is a summarized overview of Guba & Lincoln’s four models:

Overview of Qualitative Traditions

Qualitative research, though common in sociology and anthropology, had been applied in a nonsystematic and nonrigorous way and achieved little success at theory generation in the first half of the 20 th century (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Quantitative researchers, however, were making considerable progress after World War II in advancing statistical measures, producing accurate evidence, and translating theoretical concepts into testable constructs. The enthusiasm to test unconfirmed theories, relegated qualitative work to preliminary, exploratory work for starting surveys. American sociology was soon awash in the emerging systematic canons and rules of evidence of quantitative analysis, including sampling, reliability, validity, frequency distributions, hypothesis construction, and the parsimonious presentation of data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Advocates of qualitative data tried to systematize the ways in which they collected, assembled and presented data, using the verification rhetoric of quantitative methodology (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 15). Never the less, interest in qualitative methodology waned at the end of the 1940s (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998).

The end of the Cold War and the deconstruction of the Soviet Union revived nationalist and ethnic claims in almost every part of the world. In this newly decentralized world, cultural pluralism became the new shibboleth. The quandaries once posed by cultural relativism have been replaced by the questions arising out of the alleged certainties of primordial descent (Vidich & Lyman, 1994).

In spite of their history elsewhere, qualitative methods are relatively recent arrivals in psychology. They emerged initially as panoply of alternative approaches to those in the mainstream (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). As interest in qualitative research increased, acceptance of these methods in applied fields, such as program evaluation, policy research, health research, education, social work, special education, treatment outcome, and organizational research, has grown.

Qualitative research is now emerging as a dominant paradigm, consistent with the heightened social and political sensitivity to cultural, contextual, and relational issues. The editorial boards of scholarly journals, always slow to accept change, are beginning to acknowledge the role that qualitative research plays and usage, once limited to management, education, and nursing applications, is increasingly widespread.

Assumptions in Qualitative Methodology

From its inception, qualitative research has sought to provide a vehicle for interpreting another’s experience. Early qualitative researchers made two assumptions. They believed that competent observers could objectively and clearly report on their observations in the social world and on the experiences of others. Researchers also assumed that an individual is able to report on his or her experiences. By combining their observations with the observations provided by subjects through interviews, life stories, personal experiences, and other documents, qualitative researchers sought to reveal the meaning their subjects brought to their life experiences (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994a).

The advent of the postmodernism and poststructuralism has challenged these assumptions, arguing that there is no “clear window to the inner life of the individual” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b, p. 12). They assert that there are no objective observations, only observations socially situated in the worlds of the observed and the observer; no single method can grasp the subtle variation in ongoing human experience. As a consequence, qualitative researchers increasingly use a wide range of interconnected, interpretive methods, always seeking improvements in the understanding of the worlds of experience they study (Guba & Lincoln, 1994).

There are some assumptions, however, that remain fundamental to all qualitative methods. a) The researcher’s framework about the nature of reality reflects his or her history, values, class, race, culture, and ethnic perspective. b) The researcher’s perspective inspires a set of questions that are examined in specific ways. c) The relationship between the researcher and the researched reflects the researcher’s epistemological perspective. d) The examination and interpretation of observations, interviews, and other artifacts enables an emerging process of constructed meaning. (Creswell, 1998; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b).

Nearly all qualitative researchers now acknowledge that their research contains interpretive elements. Most accept the assumption that reality is mediated by many influences, such as the researcher’s bias, the context of the study, the audience for which the text is prepared, and the theoretical framework. Spindler emphasizes the need for researchers studying their own environments to accept the opposite, “making the familiar strange” to create a subjective distance (cited in Tierney & Lincoln, 1994, p. 111). Although we can never entirely step outside our selves, backing away from the data and phenomena enables us to see meanings we might miss in the context. This is well described by a quote from Margaret Mead, who said, “if a fish were to become an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water” (cited in Tierney & Lincoln, 1994, p. 111).

Methodology

Contrary to what you may have heard, qualitative research designs do exist.” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 16)

Qualitative research has evolved from the time where one went into the field and conducted fieldwork; anthropologists once believe that fieldwork was not something you could train people for, you had to do it (Tierney & Lincoln, 1994, p. 108). Now we recognize that methodological choices imply theoretical assumptions and that these assumptions influence virtually every part of the methodological undertaking. Mary Lee Smith (1987; cited in: Tierney & Lincoln, 1994) argues, for example, that different traditions also have different requirements for reliability and validity. Accordingly, in order to be an adequate judge of qualitative research, we must be aware of the questions of trustworthiness implied by each theoretical school.

Qualitative research is not a singular method, overall design strategy, or philosophical stance, even thought there are attempts to bring coherence to the differences among schools and postures. Tierny & Lincoln (1994) suggest that it is the nature of interpretation to be contradictory and have too many meanings. The process of interpretation connects us with the world, reaches into the gap between objects and our representation of them, and continues as our relationship with the world goes on.

The difference between objects and our representation of them is not unique to psychology; it appears in all sciences. Three aspects describe this disparity: a) indexicality occurs when an explanation is always tied to a particular circumstance and will change as the occasion changes; b) inconcludability occurs when supplementation to meaning causes continued mutation; and c) reflexivity describes the reciprocal influence of the way in which we model a phenomenon and our perception of the way it performs (Banister et al., 1994). These are deadly problems in quantitative research, but opportunities in qualitative inquiry. A qualitative researcher in psychology starts at the gap between the object of the study and the way we represent it; the interpretation generated closes the gap as the researcher connects and exchanges meaning with the participant.

As a set of interpretive practices, qualitative research advocates no single methodology over another. It is used in many separate disciplines and it does not belong to a single discipline (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b). Qualitative research does not have a set of methods entirely its own. Creswell summarizes traditions into five different traditions or strategies of inquiry based upon their representation in the literature–biography, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case studies (Creswell, 1998). Some authors (e.g. Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b; Guba & Lincoln, 1994) present similar summaries, while other authors do not distinguish beyond the theoretical bases, suggesting that theory provides the primary decision structure (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). Still others do not acknowledge different qualitative models of inquiry at all (Bordens & Abbott, 1996; King et al., 1994).

Within the qualitative tradition, polarized debates arise from time to time demanding practitioners declare allegiance to one school or another (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). Differences still exit among the various theoretical perspectives today. Taylor & Bogdan (1998) summarize these perspectives around three questions: 1) What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? 2) Whose side are we on? 3) Who cares about the research?

Qualitative researchers differ on the relationship between the researcher and the researched. At one extreme are researchers who share with the positivists a belief that realist exists and can be more or less objectively known by an unbiased researcher. Whyte holds firm to the belief that social and physical facts can be objectively discovered and reported on by a conscientious researcher (Denzin, 1992). At the other end of the spectrum are some postmodernists who believe that objective reality does not exist and that all knowledge is subjective and only subjective (Cole, 1994). For example, Denzin takes the position that there is no difference between fact and fiction; from this perspective ethnography becomes autobiography (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). The views of most qualitative researchers fall somewhere between these two positions (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). Within phenomenological, symbolic interactionist, and ethnomethodological perspectives, it is taken for granted that reality is socially constructed.

Kerlinger (1992), in writing the classic, Foundations of Behavior Research , clarified and distinguished between quantitative techniques, such as ex post facto, experimental, and survey designs. His work influenced later thinking about the types of quantitative designs (Creswell, 1994). Creswell (1998) suggests that clarity and comparison are needed in qualitative inquiry, too. Comparisons facilitate understanding and contribute to more rigorous and sophisticated designs (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1997).

Research Traditions

The definitions below are intended to provide an overview of variations in perspective and approach of differing qualitative traditions. They are not intended to be inclusive of the full range of diversity within qualitative research.

Grounded Theory

Grounded theory was conceived as a research methodology for generating theory rather than accepting a priori assumptions. Where quantitative researchers are trained to research and verify facts; qualitative researchers work to generate an explanation (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Glaser & Strauss (1967) submit that this helps to eliminate opportunistic use of theories with dubious fit and working capacity.

Grounded theory is a comprehensive method of data collection, analysis and summarization in which an emergent theory is constructed from, and therefore grounded in, direct experience with the phenomena under study (Richie et al., 1997). Data collection, analysis, and theory construction occur concurrently in a reciprocal relationship (Strauss & Corbin, 1997). Grounded theory puts a high emphasis on “theory as process,” a continuously developing form that is not a perfect product (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 32). There is no formal hypotheses developed for testing. Instead, a grounded theory approach attempts to generate an emergent theory reflective of the subjects’ experiences and voice, from their own phenomenological perspectives.

Grounded theory provides a systematic approach to qualitative subject matter. There are formal guidelines for collecting information, guarding against or minimizing bias, making interpretations, checking on interpretations, and ensuring internal consistency and confirmability of findings.

Richie, Fassinger, Linn, Johnson, Prosser & Robinson (1997) used grounded theory methodology to generate theory in “Persistence, Connection, and Passion: A Qualitative Study of the Career Development of Highly Achieving African American-Black and White Women.” The research team selected a sample of eighteen prominent, highly achieving African American-Black and White women in the United States across eight occupational fields. They collected data in semistructured interviews about the women’s experiences pursuing careers and professional success. Using a twelve member research team, Richie et al. focused numerous discussions on data analysis as well as the possible power differentials among team members. Effort was taken to make sure that each member, no matter when they joined the team, was ensured of an equal voice. This view was promoted due to the belief that multiple perspectives would aid in the ongoing articulation and management of subjectivity in data analysis, which Guba and Lincoln call “peer debriefing.”(1986; cited in Greene, 1994).

Using open coding, the data was coded into approximately 3,000 separate concepts, such as early lack of self-confidence . In open coding the research team creates initial categories of information about the phenomenon of interest. Within each category, the team finds properties or subcategories, and looks for data to show the possibilities of, or dimentionalize (Creswell, 1998), each property on a continuum.

The concepts were abstracted and grouped into 123 categories, such as work attitudes and peer career support . The team used axial coding to determine relationships among the categories that emerged from open coding. In axial coding, the research team assembles the data in new ways using a coding paradigm or logic diagram in which the researchers identify a central phenomenon, explore conditions that influence the phenomenon, specifies strategies or actions that result from the phenomenon, identifies the context and intervening conditions, and delineates the outcomes (Creswell, 1998).

The axial coding was the basis for the regrouping into higher order categories, resulting in fifteen distinguishable key categories, such as wanting to change the world, (Richie et al., 1997, p. 7).

As part of the procedure, Richie et al. (1997) used a number of strategies to increase the reliability and validity of the data. The team trained interviewers and both pretested and revised the interview protocol as suggested by Kerlinger (1992). Internal consistency was enhanced by using more than one judge or analyzer of the data. Citing the work of Marshall & Rossman (1989), Richie et al. (1997) encouraged all team members to offer challenges and alternate explanations to the prevailing assumptions.

Internal validity was proposed to be high since the conclusion of the research was grounded in and emerged directly from the data. The results of the study have face validity because the data generated the results directly and created results credible to both participants and consumers of the research. The work on “validity” of narratives emerging from interpretive studies suggests the importance of “verisimilitude” (Van Maanen, 1998; cited in Miles & Huberman, 1994) and authenticity. Kvale (1996) emphasizes validity as a process of checking, questioning and theorizing, not the establishment of rule-based equivalencies with the “real world.” Kvale (1996) observes:

The complexities of validating qualitative research need not be due to an inherent weakness in qualitative methods, but may on the contrary rest on their extraordinary power to picture and to question the complexity of the social reality investigated. (p. 244)

The authors discuss potential limitations that are factors for consideration in many grounded theory based studies. These include researcher bias in interview protocol and data interpretation, although efforts were taken to account for these possibilities by using a team approach and encouraging continued discussion and arbitration of disagreements and conclusions. Richie et al. (1997) also state that the use of grounded theory has potential for individual differences among participants to dissipate once analytic procedures are set into motion. In the grounded theory approach, discrete concepts are collapsed into increasingly general, abstract categories, which are constrained by the applicability to all participants. Consequently, variant responses and unique experiences may receive scant attention. Finally, sampling restrictions may be present in the study due to geographical considerations, the self-selection of the participants, and the time constraints on high achieving women. The standard for selecting these women may have been skewed by social factors, for example, toward women who enjoyed discussing their lives, or who believe in helping other women, among many possibilities. In addition, the study excluded women who were successful outside the workforce, such as homemakers or volunteers.

Richie et al. (1997) presented their results as a central or core story category consisting of beliefs the women held about them. They suggest that comparing their model with existing vocational literature is one method in which qualitative research can be used to increase the knowledge base of theory and empirical findings. Richie et al. felt their study illustrated many ways in which women’s career development differed from men’s and confirmed the inappropriateness of using career theories based upon sample of White men to White women and people of color.

A biographical study focuses on one individual and his or her experiences as told to a researcher or found in documents and archival material. From a postmodern or constructivist perspective, all methods are biographical in the sense that they are constructed from the personal histories of the investigator and the subject. Biographies cut across all social science disciplines and takes many different forms, including objective, historical, narrative, institutional, personal, or fictional (Smith, 1994). Denzin defines the biographical method as “studied use and collection of life documents that describe turning-point moments in an individual’s life” (1989; cited in Creswell, 1998, p. 47).

The investigator begins with an objective set of experiences in the subject’s life, noting life course stages and experiences. With a focus on gathering and organizing stories, the researcher explores the meanings of the stories looking for pivotal events and multiple meanings. At the same time, the researcher must be aware of the historical context and larger structures that may contribute to meanings, such as social interactions or cultural issues (Creswell, 1998).

The biography has not been a common form of research in psychology (Smith, 1994). An exception, however, is found in work by Henry Murray. Murray published several works, including the Use of Personal Documents in Psychological Science (1942) and Letters from Jenny (1965.) The Letters are a detailed account that provide a “vivid, troubling, introspective accounts of both her [Jenny’s] life as a working woman and mother and her accompanying mental states.” (Smith, 1994, p. 297).

Phenomenology

A phenomenological study is concerned with reality-constituting interpretive practices and describes the meaning of lived experiences for several individuals about a single phenomenon. Rooted in the philosophy of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merle-Ponty (Creswell, 1998; Polkinghorne, 1983), it has been used in psychology, sociology, nursing and health sciences, and education (Tesch, 1990).

Many researchers use participant observation and interviewing as ways of investigating the interpretive practices of individuals (Holstein & Gubrium, 1994). Some investigators, more firmly grounded in the ethnomethodological tradition, argue against the use of any method as a tool that may only serve to produce verifiable findings for a given paradigm (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b).

The phenomenological approach focuses on the interpretive procedures and practices that give structure and meaning to everyday life. These form the substance and the resources for the inquiry. From this framework, knowledge is local and embedded in the culture and organizational relations. Local culture contains stereotypes and ideologies, implications for gender, race and class, and the understandings about the rules of society that can also inspire critical, feminist, and Marxist theorists (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b; Kitayama & Markus, 1995; Riger, 1995).

In a phenomenological study, researchers search for the essential or invariant structure that illuminates the underlying meaning of the experiences (Creswell, 1998). Phenomenology emphasizes the intentionality of consciousness that is expressed in both outward appearance and inward consciousness based on images, recollection, and interpretation. In phenomenology, reality is not divided into subjects and objects. Consciousness is always aimed toward an object; consequently the reality of an object is inextricably intertwined with our consciousness of it (Holstein & Gubrium, 1994). Reality only exists within the meaning of the individual’s experience.

Phenomenological data analysis employs the reduction of data, the analysis of specific passages, individual elements of discourse, and patterns, as well as a search for all possible meanings. The investigator attempts to set aside all personal judgments and expectations by bracketing his or her experiences. Bracketing is equivalent to Husserl’s notion of epoche , the suspension of “all judgments about what is real—the ‘natural attitude’—until they are founded on a more certain basis” (Creswell, 1998, p. 52).

In contrast to sociology, phenomenology in field of psychology places more importance on bracketing out prejudgments and developing universal structures. Moustakas (1994; cited in Creswell, 1998) observes that this approach focuses on the meaning of individual rather than group experiences with emphasis on:

…what an experience means for the persons who have had the experience and are able to provide a comprehensive description of it.   From the individual descriptions, general or universal meanings are derived, in other words, the essences of structures of the experience. (p. 54)

Worthen & McNeill (Worthen & McNeill, 1996) used a phenomenological approach in their investigation “A Phenomenological Investigation of ‘Good’ Supervision Events.” This study was conducted from the perspective doctoral level clinical supervisees regarding their experiences of supervision events. Worthen & McNeill established a general meaning structure for and identified the salient themes reflective of the experience of good supervision events. They interviewed eight trainees, four men and four women of European-American ethnicity. Although all interviews were conducted and taped by Worthen, a European-American, McNeill, who is of mixed Mexican-American and European-American descent, and an external auditor, participated in and reviewed the interpretive process and results. A research question was developed to guide the investigation: “Please describe for me as completely, clearly, and concretely as you can, an experience during this semester when you felt you received good psychotherapy supervision.” This was followed by prompts for clarification and elaboration as necessary with questions such as, “Can you describe what you felt like?” and “and how did he show that understanding?” (Worthen & McNeill, 1996, p. 28)

Worthen & McNeill went through the following steps, which they adapted from a pattern outlined by Giorgi (1985, 1989; cited in Worthen & McNeill, 1996).

The investigators obtained a sense of the whole from the transcript analysis by listening to the tapes and reading the transcripts several times.

They then identified meaning units by reviewing the transcripts for shifts in meaning. Meaning units represent small, more easily analyzable components. In a phenomenological study, the researcher lists the meaning units and then writes a description of the textures, or textural description, of the experience including literal examples (Creswell, 1998).

Worthen & McNeill then examined the meaning units for relevancy to the research question and discarded those deemed irrelevant.

Integration of the meaning units was achieved by creating a temporal sequence of events to more fully understand the contextual relationship.

The participants’ unanalyzed descriptions of their experiences were then translated into psychologically relevant meanings. Derived meanings were tested against raw interview data by moving back and forth from data to meanings to determine whether they were supported by the data. In the phenomenological process, the researcher reflects on his or her own description and uses “imaginative variation or structural description” to find all possible interpretations and conflicting perspectives by changing the contexts about the phenomenon and constructing a portrayal of how the phenomenon was experienced (Creswell, 1998, p. 150).

The articulated meaning units were then integrated and expressed into a meaningful description of a good supervision experience. These are termed situated meaning, which refers to meaning derived from the context of a specific situation.

From the situated meanings, the descriptions were distilled into a concise form that answered the question: “What is absolutely essential for this experience of good psychotherapy supervision, for which if it were missing this would not represent the experience of good supervision?” (Worthen & McNeill, 1996, p. 30).

The authors discussed the limitations on the generalizability of the results due to the small sample and potential cultural bias of the participants. Worthen and McNeill (1996) summarized the essence of the experience of good supervision through a series of themes–such as sensed inadequacy and sensed supervisor empathy –in the temporal order of appearance.

Ethnography

Denzin & Lincoln (1994) refer to ethnography as:

perhaps the most hotly contested site in qualitative research today. Traditionalists (positivists), postpositivists, and postmodernists compete over the definitions of this field, the criteria that are applied to its texts, and the reflexive place of the researcher in the interpretive process. (p. 203)

An ethnography is a description and interpretation of a cultural or social group or system (Creswell, 1998). The process of ethnographical research typically involves participant observation in which the researcher is immersed in the population of interest. From this vantage, he or she studies the meanings of behavior, language and the interactions of the culture-sharing group (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994). Culture has been multiply defined, but it commonly refers to the beliefs, values and attitudes that structure the behavior patterns of a specific group of people (Merriam, 1998).

Ethnography had its conception in anthropology and the studies of comparative cultures by scholars such as Mead, Malinowski, and Boas (Creswell, 1998). Atkinson & Hammersley (1994) summarize ethnographical approach based from a sociological vantage. a) There is a strong emphasis on exploring the nature of a social phenomenon. b) Ethnography has a strong tendency to work with unstructured or unanalyzed data. c) The inquiry is limited to a small number of cases or one detailed case. d) The data analysis in an ethnographic inquiry involves explicit interpretation of the meanings and function of behaviors. These can be presented as forms of verbal description and explanations.

Wilson (1997), in “Lost in the Fifties: A Study of Collected Memories,” uses an ethnographic approach to capture the culture and varied meanings of the 1950s through a series of unstructured interviews, artifacts, news media, and popular media. Creswell (1998) provides an example of an ethnographic study by Wolcott (1974; cited by Creswell, 1998) “The Elementary School Principal: Notes from a Field Study.”   This project was developed to provide an account of elementary school principalship through a series of interviews and documents.

Merriam (1998) observes that, “those with little or no preparation in qualitative research often designate the case study as a sort of catch-all for research that is not a survey or an experiment and is not statistical in nature” (p. 19).

A case study is discriminated from other types of qualitative research by the intensive focus on the description and analysis of a single unit, or bounded system (Creswell, 1998; Merriam, 1998). The object of the inquiry can be an individual, program, event, group, intervention or community, but the topic must deal with specificities not generalities. For example, a nurse may be a case, but his or her nursing lacks the specific boundaries to be called a case (Stake, 1994).

Case researchers seek out what is common and what is distinct about a case. The results, however, typically manifest something unique. Stake (1994) suggests that “uniqueness is likely to be pervasive” (p. 238) and will extend to the case’s nature, historical background, physical setting, economic, political, or aesthetic contexts, sources of information, and reference cases.

The researcher gathers information from all these areas, drawing on multiple sources such as observations, interviews, documents, audio-visual materials, and other media. The type of analysis can be either holistic, examining the entire case, or embedded analysis, which focuses on a single aspect (Yin, 1989; cited inCreswell, 1998). A detailed description is constructed and an interpretive analysis works toward emerging themes. The researcher tells the narrative using a chronology of major events followed by detailed examples, context, and interpretation. When multiple cases are presented, the researcher will typically provide a within-case analysis with a detailed description of each case, and a cross-case analysis tracing the themes throughout (Merriam, 1998).

McRae (McRae, 1994) uses a case study approach in “A Woman’s Story: E Pluribus Unum,” presenting the life of Louisa Rogers Alger. McRae traces the life of Ms. Alger through narratives, correspondence, documents, and interviews. She examines the forces, social and historical context, and experiences that shaped the identity and life of the then 93 year old Ms. Alger against a backdrop of feminist comparison and analysis (McRae, 1994)

Designing a Qualitative Project

Criteria for the selection of methodologies and traditions.

Creswell (1994) suggest several factors that need to be considered when selecting a research methodology. These include the researcher’s world view, training and experiences, psychological attributes, the nature of the problem, and the audience.

A researcher needs to be comfortable with the ontological, epistemological, axiological, rhetorical, and methodological assumptions of the qualitative traditions. Training and experiences should include literary writing skills, computer-text analysis skills, and library skills. The qualitative traditions do not provide a specific set of rules and procedures so the researcher must be willing and able to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity as well as have patience for a potentially lengthy study.

While it is debatable whether certain issues are better for qualitative or quantitative studies (Creswell, 1994; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; King et al., 1994), the nature of the problem is a significant factor. In a qualitative study, the research question needs to be explored because little information exists and the variables are mostly unknown. The investigator focuses on the context that may shape the understanding of the phenomenon being studied, rather than relying on a theoretical base that may not even exist (Creswell, 1994).

Ethical Issues in Qualitative Inquiry

Laura will thoroughly address the topic of ethics in research. I want to mention, however, a couple of issues pertaining directly to qualitative research.

Deception of subjects is both a methodological and a moral issue; it is part of the question of treating people as subjects or as peers. Psychology, due to its reflexive quality, must take a morally and politically sensitive stand. Because the participant and the researcher work together, qualitative research eliminates most concerns of personal reactivity as a threat to procedural integrity, such as demand characteristics, volunteer characteristics, or experimenter effects.

Qualitative inquiry, however, has special characteristics that create ethical questions and dilemmas that do not often arise in experimental or survey research. It is important to be aware and consider each of these issues in the planning stage of the project: a) maintaining anonymity and confidentiality while using the direct works of the respondents to tell the story; b) recognizing the potential intensity and friendships that can be generated from a face to face relationship; c) writing with balance and fairness; and d) separating from the site in ways which preserve and enhance the dignity and respect of the participants and honor the new relationships that have developed (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Josselson & Lieblich, 1996; Kazdin, 1998; Kvale, 1996).

The American Psychological Association (APA) Code of Ethics and the federal government regulations help protect human subjects’ privacy, confidentiality, anonymity and informed consent, but provide few guidelines for the dilemmas which might arise in the course of a qualitative research project (Keith-Spiegel & Koocher, 1995). Qualitative researchers may be subject to abuses or may subject research participants to types of vulnerability uncommon in quantitative research that require foresight and sensitivity.

Format for a Qualitative Research Design

Once the researcher establishes the framework and intent of qualitative research, the study can be designed (Miles & Huberman, 1994). The format of a qualitative study follows many of the traditional steps for presenting a research problem. However, qualitative designs have several unique features.

The researcher frames the study within the assumptions and characteristics of the qualitative approach, including an evolving design, the presentation of multiple realities, the researcher as an instrument of data collection and a focus on the participants’ views. This guides the researcher toward the identification of an appropriate tradition of inquiry and any attendant ethical issues.

The project should begin with a single, well-defined focus or issue that the researcher wants to understand with an overall strategy and rationale. The development of the statement of the problem should include examining the significance of the study. A literature review is used to develop interview questions and concepts, compare the constructs in the literature with those from emerging data, as well as to compare the final results with existing constructs. This facilitates refocusing and refining the research questions and aids in determining the significance and limitations of the study.

The research design includes a description of the specific setting, population or phenomenon and a detail plan of tasks, schedules, and deadlines. The project can be designed as emergent to respond to patterns and data as they occur, but it is critical to have plans and procedures in place (Creswell, 1998; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Merriam, 1998; Miles & Huberman, 1994). Everything from the gathering and recording of fieldnotes, a plan for data management, data coding and retrieval systems, reflexive logs or journals, to a system of ongoing analysis needs to be thought through and clearly articulated. Computer software is now available for the process of data management, making connections, and interpreting data. There are several varieties of programs with different capabilities. These include word processors (Microsoft Word, WordPerfect), database managers (Access, FilemakerPro, Quattro), and text analysis and theory-building programs (QUALPRO, NUD*IST, AQUAD) (Tesch, 1990) as well as a new generation of  text analyzers with visual simulators (Leximancer, Dedoose, etc.). Software is very helpful and powerful; some programs display information in graphical hierarchies, as narratives, as selected word and meaning groups, and even highlight possible patterns (Tesch, 1990). Underlying assumptions shape each program, however, so it is important to be knowledgeable about your research problem and intentions in order to assure a useful software match.

The Quality of Data

Verification is an important issue in qualitative research. Tierney & Lincoln note that “the final report can not be better than the original data” (Tierney & Lincoln, 1994, p. 117). The goal of research is to provide information that has validity. In qualitative research, validity is determined by internal replicability; whether the analysis has some truth or confirmability. This includes coherence of interpretation, agreement among others including the participants, and the consensus that understanding is enhanced as a result of the analysis and that the analysis is salient (Kazdin, 1998, p. 253).

Reliability refers to the methods of studying the data, such as determining in what manner the themes and categories were developed. Reliability focuses on internal consistency. Qualitative research uses many other terms to describe the quality of the data. Trustworthiness refers primarily to credibility and to transferability (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). Credibility describes the appropriateness of the methods and subjects to the goals. Transferability indicates the contextual limitations of the data. Dependability pertains to the quality of the conclusions and data evaluations that framed them, Confirmability indicates the ability of an outside reviewer to audit the procedures and analysis and reach the same conclusions (Creswell, 1994; Kazdin, 1998)

Richie et al. (1997) discussed various measures taken to improve confirmability and transferability in the study on career development. For example, specific wording was chosen that would minimize response bias due to preconceptions of constructs already in psychological literature. The word handle was used instead of cope , believe internally replaced references to self-efficacy or attributions . (Richie et al., 1997, p. 5) .

Presentation

In the last few years, new attention has been paid to text creation. This follows logically from the idea that reality is socially constructed. If observed situations are cultural constructions, then so is the presentation of the text. The role of the researcher is defined by the theoretical orientation and that is reflected in the portrayal and interpretation of the data.

A qualitative research report can have many different forms or formats and the reader and writer may enter the narrative from many different perspectives and value points. Clandinin and Connelly (Tierney & Lincoln, 1994) discuss the potential interpretative differences and inconsistencies in the “text” in qualitative research. They note the difference in audience and potential author bias when compiling field text, which is all the materials from the context, compared with compiling research text, which is prepared to address the research community. There is considerably more literary freedom in the presentation of a case study where the researcher tells a narrative, formed and shaped by the story which the researcher is trying to represent. The narrative is enhanced and brought to life by findings, the authorial voice, voices of research respondents, and the original questions more than by reporting conventions.

Qualitative research is designed to describe, interpret and understand human experience. Though qualitative research is frequently defined by how it measures up to the quantitative methods that have played such a central role in psychological research, it has earned its acceptance in the social sciences the hard way—it earned it. At the same time, viewing qualitative research and quantitative research as diametrically opposed devalues them both. There are times when a qualitative researcher will choose to summarize data numerically just as there are times when a quantitative researcher will choose to include descriptive information to facilitate the presentation of statistical data. Qualitative research can open vistas of uncharted territory for further research; quantitative research can add powerful dimensions that come from an assessment of large populations.

A method is the way to a goal (Kvale, 1996), and not the goal itself. The selection of a methodology should not be determined by political or emotional preference, but by the thematic content and purpose of the investigation.

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Pamela Rutledge, PhD

Historical Overview of Qualitative Research in the Social Sciences

Qualitative research does not represent a monolithic, agreed-on approach to research but is a vibrant and contested field with many contradictions and different perspectives. To respect the multivoicedness of qualitative research, this chapter will approach its history in the plural—as a variety of histories. The chapter will work polyvocally and focus on six histories of qualitative research, which are sometimes overlapping, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes even incommensurable. They can be considered articulations of different discourses about the history of the field, which compete for researchers’ attention. The six histories are: (a) the conceptual history of qualitative research, (b) the internal history of qualitative research, (c) the marginalizing history of qualitative research, (d) the repressed history of qualitative research, (e) the social history of qualitative research, and (f) the technological history of qualitative research.

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Ethnography

Ethnography (Understanding Qualitative Research) provides a comprehensive guide to understanding, conceptualizing, and critically assessing ethnographic research and its resultant texts. Through a series of discussions and illustrations, utilizing both classic and contemporary examples, the book highlights distinct features of ethnography as both a research methodology and a writing tradition. It emphasizes the importance of training—including familiarity with culture as an anthropologically derived concept and critical awareness of the history of ethnography. To this end, it introduces the notion of ethnographic comportment, which serves as a standard for engaging and gauging ethnography. Indeed, ethnographic comportment issues from a familiarity with ethnography’s problematic past and inspires a disposition of accountability for one’s role in advancing ethnographic practices. Following an introductory chapter outlining the emergence and character of ethnography as a professionalized field, subsequent chapters conceptualize ethnographic research design, consider the practices of representing research methodologies, discuss the crafting of accurate and evocative ethnographic texts, and explain the different ways in which research and writing gets evaluated. While foregrounding interpretive and literary qualities that have gained prominence since the late twentieth century, the book properly situates ethnography at the nexus of the social sciences and the humanities. Ethnography (Understanding Qualitative Research) presents novice ethnographers with clear examples and illustrations of how to go about conducting, analyzing, and representing their research; its primary purpose, however, is to introduce readers to effective practices for understanding and evaluating the quality of ethnography.

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ERRATUM. The brief notice which appears in vol. 10, no. 3 (p. 491) should be headed CHRISTOPHER HOOKWAY and PHILIP PETTIT (eds.), Action & interpretation: Studies in the philosophy of the social sciences. Cambridge University Press, 1980. Paperback.The notice for the Klar et al. book is as follows: Contains a number of good short studies, including, of special interest here, a valuable and cogent paper, “How languages die: A social history of unstable bilingualism among the Eastern Porno” by S. McLendon, 137–50. Language in Society regrets the error.

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Mead, Dewey, and Their Influence in the Social Sciences

This chapter traces novel aspects of the relationship between George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. It identifies major aspects of Dewey’s reception in and engagement with the social sciences. Dewey’s influence in the social sciences is closely connected with Mead, both in the sense that Dewey’s ideas relevant to the social sciences have been developed in substantial collaboration with Mead and in the sense that Dewey has been interpreted by later social scientists primarily through Mead’s work and the work of Mead’s students and colleagues. Dewey and Mead worked to develop functional and later social psychology, social reform efforts, educational theory, the social history of thought, and other aspects of pragmatist philosophy. Dewey also had moderate influence on the sociologists and anthropologists at Columbia, institutional economists at Chicago and elsewhere, and later European social theorists, and his publications and correspondence about Mead after the latter’s death influenced Mead’s own legacy.

Qualitative Research and Speech-Language Pathology

As an analytic paradigm, qualitative research offers much to clinical speech-language pathology. This paradigm has a long history of use in the social sciences, and it is well suited to address the complex issues of speech, language, and communication. As an introduction to this forum on qualitative research, this article provides an operational definition of qualitative research, discusses the primary distinguishing traits of this research paradigm, and describes six viable traditions of inquiry for our application. Additionally, numerous qualitative studies within our field are considered, and five potential reasons for the increased use of qualitative research studies in our discipline are discussed.

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What is Qualitative in Qualitative Research

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• Published: 27 February 2019
• Volume 42 , pages 139–160, ( 2019 )

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What is qualitative research? If we look for a precise definition of qualitative research, and specifically for one that addresses its distinctive feature of being “qualitative,” the literature is meager. In this article we systematically search, identify and analyze a sample of 89 sources using or attempting to define the term “qualitative.” Then, drawing on ideas we find scattered across existing work, and based on Becker’s classic study of marijuana consumption, we formulate and illustrate a definition that tries to capture its core elements. We define qualitative research as an iterative process in which improved understanding to the scientific community is achieved by making new significant distinctions resulting from getting closer to the phenomenon studied. This formulation is developed as a tool to help improve research designs while stressing that a qualitative dimension is present in quantitative work as well. Additionally, it can facilitate teaching, communication between researchers, diminish the gap between qualitative and quantitative researchers, help to address critiques of qualitative methods, and be used as a standard of evaluation of qualitative research.

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If we assume that there is something called qualitative research, what exactly is this qualitative feature? And how could we evaluate qualitative research as good or not? Is it fundamentally different from quantitative research? In practice, most active qualitative researchers working with empirical material intuitively know what is involved in doing qualitative research, yet perhaps surprisingly, a clear definition addressing its key feature is still missing.

To address the question of what is qualitative we turn to the accounts of “qualitative research” in textbooks and also in empirical work. In his classic, explorative, interview study of deviance Howard Becker ( 1963 ) asks ‘How does one become a marijuana user?’ In contrast to pre-dispositional and psychological-individualistic theories of deviant behavior, Becker’s inherently social explanation contends that becoming a user of this substance is the result of a three-phase sequential learning process. First, potential users need to learn how to smoke it properly to produce the “correct” effects. If not, they are likely to stop experimenting with it. Second, they need to discover the effects associated with it; in other words, to get “high,” individuals not only have to experience what the drug does, but also to become aware that those sensations are related to using it. Third, they require learning to savor the feelings related to its consumption – to develop an acquired taste. Becker, who played music himself, gets close to the phenomenon by observing, taking part, and by talking to people consuming the drug: “half of the fifty interviews were conducted with musicians, the other half covered a wide range of people, including laborers, machinists, and people in the professions” (Becker 1963 :56).

Another central aspect derived through the common-to-all-research interplay between induction and deduction (Becker 2017 ), is that during the course of his research Becker adds scientifically meaningful new distinctions in the form of three phases—distinctions, or findings if you will, that strongly affect the course of his research: its focus, the material that he collects, and which eventually impact his findings. Each phase typically unfolds through social interaction, and often with input from experienced users in “a sequence of social experiences during which the person acquires a conception of the meaning of the behavior, and perceptions and judgments of objects and situations, all of which make the activity possible and desirable” (Becker 1963 :235). In this study the increased understanding of smoking dope is a result of a combination of the meaning of the actors, and the conceptual distinctions that Becker introduces based on the views expressed by his respondents. Understanding is the result of research and is due to an iterative process in which data, concepts and evidence are connected with one another (Becker 2017 ).

Indeed, there are many definitions of qualitative research, but if we look for a definition that addresses its distinctive feature of being “qualitative,” the literature across the broad field of social science is meager. The main reason behind this article lies in the paradox, which, to put it bluntly, is that researchers act as if they know what it is, but they cannot formulate a coherent definition. Sociologists and others will of course continue to conduct good studies that show the relevance and value of qualitative research addressing scientific and practical problems in society. However, our paper is grounded in the idea that providing a clear definition will help us improve the work that we do. Among researchers who practice qualitative research there is clearly much knowledge. We suggest that a definition makes this knowledge more explicit. If the first rationale for writing this paper refers to the “internal” aim of improving qualitative research, the second refers to the increased “external” pressure that especially many qualitative researchers feel; pressure that comes both from society as well as from other scientific approaches. There is a strong core in qualitative research, and leading researchers tend to agree on what it is and how it is done. Our critique is not directed at the practice of qualitative research, but we do claim that the type of systematic work we do has not yet been done, and that it is useful to improve the field and its status in relation to quantitative research.

The literature on the “internal” aim of improving, or at least clarifying qualitative research is large, and we do not claim to be the first to notice the vagueness of the term “qualitative” (Strauss and Corbin 1998 ). Also, others have noted that there is no single definition of it (Long and Godfrey 2004 :182), that there are many different views on qualitative research (Denzin and Lincoln 2003 :11; Jovanović 2011 :3), and that more generally, we need to define its meaning (Best 2004 :54). Strauss and Corbin ( 1998 ), for example, as well as Nelson et al. (1992:2 cited in Denzin and Lincoln 2003 :11), and Flick ( 2007 :ix–x), have recognized that the term is problematic: “Actually, the term ‘qualitative research’ is confusing because it can mean different things to different people” (Strauss and Corbin 1998 :10–11). Hammersley has discussed the possibility of addressing the problem, but states that “the task of providing an account of the distinctive features of qualitative research is far from straightforward” ( 2013 :2). This confusion, as he has recently further argued (Hammersley 2018 ), is also salient in relation to ethnography where different philosophical and methodological approaches lead to a lack of agreement about what it means.

Others (e.g. Hammersley 2018 ; Fine and Hancock 2017 ) have also identified the treat to qualitative research that comes from external forces, seen from the point of view of “qualitative research.” This threat can be further divided into that which comes from inside academia, such as the critique voiced by “quantitative research” and outside of academia, including, for example, New Public Management. Hammersley ( 2018 ), zooming in on one type of qualitative research, ethnography, has argued that it is under treat. Similarly to Fine ( 2003 ), and before him Gans ( 1999 ), he writes that ethnography’ has acquired a range of meanings, and comes in many different versions, these often reflecting sharply divergent epistemological orientations. And already more than twenty years ago while reviewing Denzin and Lincoln’ s Handbook of Qualitative Methods Fine argued:

While this increasing centrality [of qualitative research] might lead one to believe that consensual standards have developed, this belief would be misleading. As the methodology becomes more widely accepted, querulous challengers have raised fundamental questions that collectively have undercut the traditional models of how qualitative research is to be fashioned and presented (1995:417).

According to Hammersley, there are today “serious treats to the practice of ethnographic work, on almost any definition” ( 2018 :1). He lists five external treats: (1) that social research must be accountable and able to show its impact on society; (2) the current emphasis on “big data” and the emphasis on quantitative data and evidence; (3) the labor market pressure in academia that leaves less time for fieldwork (see also Fine and Hancock 2017 ); (4) problems of access to fields; and (5) the increased ethical scrutiny of projects, to which ethnography is particularly exposed. Hammersley discusses some more or less insufficient existing definitions of ethnography.

The current situation, as Hammersley and others note—and in relation not only to ethnography but also qualitative research in general, and as our empirical study shows—is not just unsatisfactory, it may even be harmful for the entire field of qualitative research, and does not help social science at large. We suggest that the lack of clarity of qualitative research is a real problem that must be addressed.

Towards a Definition of Qualitative Research

Seen in an historical light, what is today called qualitative, or sometimes ethnographic, interpretative research – or a number of other terms – has more or less always existed. At the time the founders of sociology – Simmel, Weber, Durkheim and, before them, Marx – were writing, and during the era of the Methodenstreit (“dispute about methods”) in which the German historical school emphasized scientific methods (cf. Swedberg 1990 ), we can at least speak of qualitative forerunners.

Perhaps the most extended discussion of what later became known as qualitative methods in a classic work is Bronisław Malinowski’s ( 1922 ) Argonauts in the Western Pacific , although even this study does not explicitly address the meaning of “qualitative.” In Weber’s ([1921–-22] 1978) work we find a tension between scientific explanations that are based on observation and quantification and interpretative research (see also Lazarsfeld and Barton 1982 ).

If we look through major sociology journals like the American Sociological Review , American Journal of Sociology , or Social Forces we will not find the term qualitative sociology before the 1970s. And certainly before then much of what we consider qualitative classics in sociology, like Becker’ study ( 1963 ), had already been produced. Indeed, the Chicago School often combined qualitative and quantitative data within the same study (Fine 1995 ). Our point being that before a disciplinary self-awareness the term quantitative preceded qualitative, and the articulation of the former was a political move to claim scientific status (Denzin and Lincoln 2005 ). In the US the World War II seem to have sparked a critique of sociological work, including “qualitative work,” that did not follow the scientific canon (Rawls 2018 ), which was underpinned by a scientifically oriented and value free philosophy of science. As a result the attempts and practice of integrating qualitative and quantitative sociology at Chicago lost ground to sociology that was more oriented to surveys and quantitative work at Columbia under Merton-Lazarsfeld. The quantitative tradition was also able to present textbooks (Lundberg 1951 ) that facilitated the use this approach and its “methods.” The practices of the qualitative tradition, by and large, remained tacit or was part of the mentoring transferred from the renowned masters to their students.

This glimpse into history leads us back to the lack of a coherent account condensed in a definition of qualitative research. Many of the attempts to define the term do not meet the requirements of a proper definition: A definition should be clear, avoid tautology, demarcate its domain in relation to the environment, and ideally only use words in its definiens that themselves are not in need of definition (Hempel 1966 ). A definition can enhance precision and thus clarity by identifying the core of the phenomenon. Preferably, a definition should be short. The typical definition we have found, however, is an ostensive definition, which indicates what qualitative research is about without informing us about what it actually is :

Qualitative research is multimethod in focus, involving an interpretative, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. Qualitative research involves the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical materials – case study, personal experience, introspective, life story, interview, observational, historical, interactional, and visual texts – that describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in individuals’ lives. (Denzin and Lincoln 2005 :2)

Flick claims that the label “qualitative research” is indeed used as an umbrella for a number of approaches ( 2007 :2–4; 2002 :6), and it is not difficult to identify research fitting this designation. Moreover, whatever it is, it has grown dramatically over the past five decades. In addition, courses have been developed, methods have flourished, arguments about its future have been advanced (for example, Denzin and Lincoln 1994) and criticized (for example, Snow and Morrill 1995 ), and dedicated journals and books have mushroomed. Most social scientists have a clear idea of research and how it differs from journalism, politics and other activities. But the question of what is qualitative in qualitative research is either eluded or eschewed.

We maintain that this lacuna hinders systematic knowledge production based on qualitative research. Paul Lazarsfeld noted the lack of “codification” as early as 1955 when he reviewed 100 qualitative studies in order to offer a codification of the practices (Lazarsfeld and Barton 1982 :239). Since then many texts on “qualitative research” and its methods have been published, including recent attempts (Goertz and Mahoney 2012 ) similar to Lazarsfeld’s. These studies have tried to extract what is qualitative by looking at the large number of empirical “qualitative” studies. Our novel strategy complements these endeavors by taking another approach and looking at the attempts to codify these practices in the form of a definition, as well as to a minor extent take Becker’s study as an exemplar of what qualitative researchers actually do, and what the characteristic of being ‘qualitative’ denotes and implies. We claim that qualitative researchers, if there is such a thing as “qualitative research,” should be able to codify their practices in a condensed, yet general way expressed in language.

Lingering problems of “generalizability” and “how many cases do I need” (Small 2009 ) are blocking advancement – in this line of work qualitative approaches are said to differ considerably from quantitative ones, while some of the former unsuccessfully mimic principles related to the latter (Small 2009 ). Additionally, quantitative researchers sometimes unfairly criticize the first based on their own quality criteria. Scholars like Goertz and Mahoney ( 2012 ) have successfully focused on the different norms and practices beyond what they argue are essentially two different cultures: those working with either qualitative or quantitative methods. Instead, similarly to Becker ( 2017 ) who has recently questioned the usefulness of the distinction between qualitative and quantitative research, we focus on similarities.

The current situation also impedes both students and researchers in focusing their studies and understanding each other’s work (Lazarsfeld and Barton 1982 :239). A third consequence is providing an opening for critiques by scholars operating within different traditions (Valsiner 2000 :101). A fourth issue is that the “implicit use of methods in qualitative research makes the field far less standardized than the quantitative paradigm” (Goertz and Mahoney 2012 :9). Relatedly, the National Science Foundation in the US organized two workshops in 2004 and 2005 to address the scientific foundations of qualitative research involving strategies to improve it and to develop standards of evaluation in qualitative research. However, a specific focus on its distinguishing feature of being “qualitative” while being implicitly acknowledged, was discussed only briefly (for example, Best 2004 ).

In 2014 a theme issue was published in this journal on “Methods, Materials, and Meanings: Designing Cultural Analysis,” discussing central issues in (cultural) qualitative research (Berezin 2014 ; Biernacki 2014 ; Glaeser 2014 ; Lamont and Swidler 2014 ; Spillman 2014). We agree with many of the arguments put forward, such as the risk of methodological tribalism, and that we should not waste energy on debating methods separated from research questions. Nonetheless, a clarification of the relation to what is called “quantitative research” is of outmost importance to avoid misunderstandings and misguided debates between “qualitative” and “quantitative” researchers. Our strategy means that researchers, “qualitative” or “quantitative” they may be, in their actual practice may combine qualitative work and quantitative work.

In this article we accomplish three tasks. First, we systematically survey the literature for meanings of qualitative research by looking at how researchers have defined it. Drawing upon existing knowledge we find that the different meanings and ideas of qualitative research are not yet coherently integrated into one satisfactory definition. Next, we advance our contribution by offering a definition of qualitative research and illustrate its meaning and use partially by expanding on the brief example introduced earlier related to Becker’s work ( 1963 ). We offer a systematic analysis of central themes of what researchers consider to be the core of “qualitative,” regardless of style of work. These themes – which we summarize in terms of four keywords: distinction, process, closeness, improved understanding – constitute part of our literature review, in which each one appears, sometimes with others, but never all in the same definition. They serve as the foundation of our contribution. Our categories are overlapping. Their use is primarily to organize the large amount of definitions we have identified and analyzed, and not necessarily to draw a clear distinction between them. Finally, we continue the elaboration discussed above on the advantages of a clear definition of qualitative research.

In a hermeneutic fashion we propose that there is something meaningful that deserves to be labelled “qualitative research” (Gadamer 1990 ). To approach the question “What is qualitative in qualitative research?” we have surveyed the literature. In conducting our survey we first traced the word’s etymology in dictionaries, encyclopedias, handbooks of the social sciences and of methods and textbooks, mainly in English, which is common to methodology courses. It should be noted that we have zoomed in on sociology and its literature. This discipline has been the site of the largest debate and development of methods that can be called “qualitative,” which suggests that this field should be examined in great detail.

In an ideal situation we should expect that one good definition, or at least some common ideas, would have emerged over the years. This common core of qualitative research should be so accepted that it would appear in at least some textbooks. Since this is not what we found, we decided to pursue an inductive approach to capture maximal variation in the field of qualitative research; we searched in a selection of handbooks, textbooks, book chapters, and books, to which we added the analysis of journal articles. Our sample comprises a total of 89 references.

In practice we focused on the discipline that has had a clear discussion of methods, namely sociology. We also conducted a broad search in the JSTOR database to identify scholarly sociology articles published between 1998 and 2017 in English with a focus on defining or explaining qualitative research. We specifically zoom in on this time frame because we would have expect that this more mature period would have produced clear discussions on the meaning of qualitative research. To find these articles we combined a number of keywords to search the content and/or the title: qualitative (which was always included), definition, empirical, research, methodology, studies, fieldwork, interview and observation .

As a second phase of our research we searched within nine major sociological journals ( American Journal of Sociology , Sociological Theory , American Sociological Review , Contemporary Sociology , Sociological Forum , Sociological Theory , Qualitative Research , Qualitative Sociology and Qualitative Sociology Review ) for articles also published during the past 19 years (1998–2017) that had the term “qualitative” in the title and attempted to define qualitative research.

Lastly we picked two additional journals, Qualitative Research and Qualitative Sociology , in which we could expect to find texts addressing the notion of “qualitative.” From Qualitative Research we chose Volume 14, Issue 6, December 2014, and from Qualitative Sociology we chose Volume 36, Issue 2, June 2017. Within each of these we selected the first article; then we picked the second article of three prior issues. Again we went back another three issues and investigated article number three. Finally we went back another three issues and perused article number four. This selection criteria was used to get a manageable sample for the analysis.

The coding process of the 89 references we gathered in our selected review began soon after the first round of material was gathered, and we reduced the complexity created by our maximum variation sampling (Snow and Anderson 1993 :22) to four different categories within which questions on the nature and properties of qualitative research were discussed. We call them: Qualitative and Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, Fieldwork, and Grounded Theory. This – which may appear as an illogical grouping – merely reflects the “context” in which the matter of “qualitative” is discussed. If the selection process of the material – books and articles – was informed by pre-knowledge, we used an inductive strategy to code the material. When studying our material, we identified four central notions related to “qualitative” that appear in various combinations in the literature which indicate what is the core of qualitative research. We have labeled them: “distinctions”, “process,” “closeness,” and “improved understanding.” During the research process the categories and notions were improved, refined, changed, and reordered. The coding ended when a sense of saturation in the material arose. In the presentation below all quotations and references come from our empirical material of texts on qualitative research.

Analysis – What is Qualitative Research?

In this section we describe the four categories we identified in the coding, how they differently discuss qualitative research, as well as their overall content. Some salient quotations are selected to represent the type of text sorted under each of the four categories. What we present are examples from the literature.

Qualitative and Quantitative

This analytic category comprises quotations comparing qualitative and quantitative research, a distinction that is frequently used (Brown 2010 :231); in effect this is a conceptual pair that structures the discussion and that may be associated with opposing interests. While the general goal of quantitative and qualitative research is the same – to understand the world better – their methodologies and focus in certain respects differ substantially (Becker 1966 :55). Quantity refers to that property of something that can be determined by measurement. In a dictionary of Statistics and Methodology we find that “(a) When referring to *variables, ‘qualitative’ is another term for *categorical or *nominal. (b) When speaking of kinds of research, ‘qualitative’ refers to studies of subjects that are hard to quantify, such as art history. Qualitative research tends to be a residual category for almost any kind of non-quantitative research” (Stiles 1998:183). But it should be obvious that one could employ a quantitative approach when studying, for example, art history.

The same dictionary states that quantitative is “said of variables or research that can be handled numerically, usually (too sharply) contrasted with *qualitative variables and research” (Stiles 1998:184). From a qualitative perspective “quantitative research” is about numbers and counting, and from a quantitative perspective qualitative research is everything that is not about numbers. But this does not say much about what is “qualitative.” If we turn to encyclopedias we find that in the 1932 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences there is no mention of “qualitative.” In the Encyclopedia from 1968 we can read:

Qualitative Analysis. For methods of obtaining, analyzing, and describing data, see [the various entries:] CONTENT ANALYSIS; COUNTED DATA; EVALUATION RESEARCH, FIELD WORK; GRAPHIC PRESENTATION; HISTORIOGRAPHY, especially the article on THE RHETORIC OF HISTORY; INTERVIEWING; OBSERVATION; PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT; PROJECTIVE METHODS; PSYCHOANALYSIS, article on EXPERIMENTAL METHODS; SURVEY ANALYSIS, TABULAR PRESENTATION; TYPOLOGIES. (Vol. 13:225)

Some, like Alford, divide researchers into methodologists or, in his words, “quantitative and qualitative specialists” (Alford 1998 :12). Qualitative research uses a variety of methods, such as intensive interviews or in-depth analysis of historical materials, and it is concerned with a comprehensive account of some event or unit (King et al. 1994 :4). Like quantitative research it can be utilized to study a variety of issues, but it tends to focus on meanings and motivations that underlie cultural symbols, personal experiences, phenomena and detailed understanding of processes in the social world. In short, qualitative research centers on understanding processes, experiences, and the meanings people assign to things (Kalof et al. 2008 :79).

Others simply say that qualitative methods are inherently unscientific (Jovanović 2011 :19). Hood, for instance, argues that words are intrinsically less precise than numbers, and that they are therefore more prone to subjective analysis, leading to biased results (Hood 2006 :219). Qualitative methodologies have raised concerns over the limitations of quantitative templates (Brady et al. 2004 :4). Scholars such as King et al. ( 1994 ), for instance, argue that non-statistical research can produce more reliable results if researchers pay attention to the rules of scientific inference commonly stated in quantitative research. Also, researchers such as Becker ( 1966 :59; 1970 :42–43) have asserted that, if conducted properly, qualitative research and in particular ethnographic field methods, can lead to more accurate results than quantitative studies, in particular, survey research and laboratory experiments.

Some researchers, such as Kalof, Dan, and Dietz ( 2008 :79) claim that the boundaries between the two approaches are becoming blurred, and Small ( 2009 ) argues that currently much qualitative research (especially in North America) tries unsuccessfully and unnecessarily to emulate quantitative standards. For others, qualitative research tends to be more humanistic and discursive (King et al. 1994 :4). Ragin ( 1994 ), and similarly also Becker, ( 1996 :53), Marchel and Owens ( 2007 :303) think that the main distinction between the two styles is overstated and does not rest on the simple dichotomy of “numbers versus words” (Ragin 1994 :xii). Some claim that quantitative data can be utilized to discover associations, but in order to unveil cause and effect a complex research design involving the use of qualitative approaches needs to be devised (Gilbert 2009 :35). Consequently, qualitative data are useful for understanding the nuances lying beyond those processes as they unfold (Gilbert 2009 :35). Others contend that qualitative research is particularly well suited both to identify causality and to uncover fine descriptive distinctions (Fine and Hallett 2014 ; Lichterman and Isaac Reed 2014 ; Katz 2015 ).

There are other ways to separate these two traditions, including normative statements about what qualitative research should be (that is, better or worse than quantitative approaches, concerned with scientific approaches to societal change or vice versa; Snow and Morrill 1995 ; Denzin and Lincoln 2005 ), or whether it should develop falsifiable statements; Best 2004 ).

We propose that quantitative research is largely concerned with pre-determined variables (Small 2008 ); the analysis concerns the relations between variables. These categories are primarily not questioned in the study, only their frequency or degree, or the correlations between them (cf. Franzosi 2016 ). If a researcher studies wage differences between women and men, he or she works with given categories: x number of men are compared with y number of women, with a certain wage attributed to each person. The idea is not to move beyond the given categories of wage, men and women; they are the starting point as well as the end point, and undergo no “qualitative change.” Qualitative research, in contrast, investigates relations between categories that are themselves subject to change in the research process. Returning to Becker’s study ( 1963 ), we see that he questioned pre-dispositional theories of deviant behavior working with pre-determined variables such as an individual’s combination of personal qualities or emotional problems. His take, in contrast, was to understand marijuana consumption by developing “variables” as part of the investigation. Thereby he presented new variables, or as we would say today, theoretical concepts, but which are grounded in the empirical material.

Qualitative Research

This category contains quotations that refer to descriptions of qualitative research without making comparisons with quantitative research. Researchers such as Denzin and Lincoln, who have written a series of influential handbooks on qualitative methods (1994; Denzin and Lincoln 2003 ; 2005 ), citing Nelson et al. (1992:4), argue that because qualitative research is “interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counterdisciplinary” it is difficult to derive one single definition of it (Jovanović 2011 :3). According to them, in fact, “the field” is “many things at the same time,” involving contradictions, tensions over its focus, methods, and how to derive interpretations and findings ( 2003 : 11). Similarly, others, such as Flick ( 2007 :ix–x) contend that agreeing on an accepted definition has increasingly become problematic, and that qualitative research has possibly matured different identities. However, Best holds that “the proliferation of many sorts of activities under the label of qualitative sociology threatens to confuse our discussions” ( 2004 :54). Atkinson’s position is more definite: “the current state of qualitative research and research methods is confused” ( 2005 :3–4).

Qualitative research is about interpretation (Blumer 1969 ; Strauss and Corbin 1998 ; Denzin and Lincoln 2003 ), or Verstehen [understanding] (Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias 1996 ). It is “multi-method,” involving the collection and use of a variety of empirical materials (Denzin and Lincoln 1998; Silverman 2013 ) and approaches (Silverman 2005 ; Flick 2007 ). It focuses not only on the objective nature of behavior but also on its subjective meanings: individuals’ own accounts of their attitudes, motivations, behavior (McIntyre 2005 :127; Creswell 2009 ), events and situations (Bryman 1989) – what people say and do in specific places and institutions (Goodwin and Horowitz 2002 :35–36) in social and temporal contexts (Morrill and Fine 1997). For this reason, following Weber ([1921-22] 1978), it can be described as an interpretative science (McIntyre 2005 :127). But could quantitative research also be concerned with these questions? Also, as pointed out below, does all qualitative research focus on subjective meaning, as some scholars suggest?

Others also distinguish qualitative research by claiming that it collects data using a naturalistic approach (Denzin and Lincoln 2005 :2; Creswell 2009 ), focusing on the meaning actors ascribe to their actions. But again, does all qualitative research need to be collected in situ? And does qualitative research have to be inherently concerned with meaning? Flick ( 2007 ), referring to Denzin and Lincoln ( 2005 ), mentions conversation analysis as an example of qualitative research that is not concerned with the meanings people bring to a situation, but rather with the formal organization of talk. Still others, such as Ragin ( 1994 :85), note that qualitative research is often (especially early on in the project, we would add) less structured than other kinds of social research – a characteristic connected to its flexibility and that can lead both to potentially better, but also worse results. But is this not a feature of this type of research, rather than a defining description of its essence? Wouldn’t this comment also apply, albeit to varying degrees, to quantitative research?

In addition, Strauss ( 2003 ), along with others, such as Alvesson and Kärreman ( 2011 :10–76), argue that qualitative researchers struggle to capture and represent complex phenomena partially because they tend to collect a large amount of data. While his analysis is correct at some points – “It is necessary to do detailed, intensive, microscopic examination of the data in order to bring out the amazing complexity of what lies in, behind, and beyond those data” (Strauss 2003 :10) – much of his analysis concerns the supposed focus of qualitative research and its challenges, rather than exactly what it is about. But even in this instance we would make a weak case arguing that these are strictly the defining features of qualitative research. Some researchers seem to focus on the approach or the methods used, or even on the way material is analyzed. Several researchers stress the naturalistic assumption of investigating the world, suggesting that meaning and interpretation appear to be a core matter of qualitative research.

We can also see that in this category there is no consensus about specific qualitative methods nor about qualitative data. Many emphasize interpretation, but quantitative research, too, involves interpretation; the results of a regression analysis, for example, certainly have to be interpreted, and the form of meta-analysis that factor analysis provides indeed requires interpretation However, there is no interpretation of quantitative raw data, i.e., numbers in tables. One common thread is that qualitative researchers have to get to grips with their data in order to understand what is being studied in great detail, irrespective of the type of empirical material that is being analyzed. This observation is connected to the fact that qualitative researchers routinely make several adjustments of focus and research design as their studies progress, in many cases until the very end of the project (Kalof et al. 2008 ). If you, like Becker, do not start out with a detailed theory, adjustments such as the emergence and refinement of research questions will occur during the research process. We have thus found a number of useful reflections about qualitative research scattered across different sources, but none of them effectively describe the defining characteristics of this approach.

Although qualitative research does not appear to be defined in terms of a specific method, it is certainly common that fieldwork, i.e., research that entails that the researcher spends considerable time in the field that is studied and use the knowledge gained as data, is seen as emblematic of or even identical to qualitative research. But because we understand that fieldwork tends to focus primarily on the collection and analysis of qualitative data, we expected to find within it discussions on the meaning of “qualitative.” But, again, this was not the case.

Instead, we found material on the history of this approach (for example, Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias 1996 ; Atkinson et al. 2001), including how it has changed; for example, by adopting a more self-reflexive practice (Heyl 2001), as well as the different nomenclature that has been adopted, such as fieldwork, ethnography, qualitative research, naturalistic research, participant observation and so on (for example, Lofland et al. 2006 ; Gans 1999 ).

We retrieved definitions of ethnography, such as “the study of people acting in the natural courses of their daily lives,” involving a “resocialization of the researcher” (Emerson 1988 :1) through intense immersion in others’ social worlds (see also examples in Hammersley 2018 ). This may be accomplished by direct observation and also participation (Neuman 2007 :276), although others, such as Denzin ( 1970 :185), have long recognized other types of observation, including non-participant (“fly on the wall”). In this category we have also isolated claims and opposing views, arguing that this type of research is distinguished primarily by where it is conducted (natural settings) (Hughes 1971:496), and how it is carried out (a variety of methods are applied) or, for some most importantly, by involving an active, empathetic immersion in those being studied (Emerson 1988 :2). We also retrieved descriptions of the goals it attends in relation to how it is taught (understanding subjective meanings of the people studied, primarily develop theory, or contribute to social change) (see for example, Corte and Irwin 2017 ; Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias 1996 :281; Trier-Bieniek 2012 :639) by collecting the richest possible data (Lofland et al. 2006 ) to derive “thick descriptions” (Geertz 1973 ), and/or to aim at theoretical statements of general scope and applicability (for example, Emerson 1988 ; Fine 2003 ). We have identified guidelines on how to evaluate it (for example Becker 1996 ; Lamont 2004 ) and have retrieved instructions on how it should be conducted (for example, Lofland et al. 2006 ). For instance, analysis should take place while the data gathering unfolds (Emerson 1988 ; Hammersley and Atkinson 2007 ; Lofland et al. 2006 ), observations should be of long duration (Becker 1970 :54; Goffman 1989 ), and data should be of high quantity (Becker 1970 :52–53), as well as other questionable distinctions between fieldwork and other methods:

Field studies differ from other methods of research in that the researcher performs the task of selecting topics, decides what questions to ask, and forges interest in the course of the research itself . This is in sharp contrast to many ‘theory-driven’ and ‘hypothesis-testing’ methods. (Lofland and Lofland 1995 :5)

But could not, for example, a strictly interview-based study be carried out with the same amount of flexibility, such as sequential interviewing (for example, Small 2009 )? Once again, are quantitative approaches really as inflexible as some qualitative researchers think? Moreover, this category stresses the role of the actors’ meaning, which requires knowledge and close interaction with people, their practices and their lifeworld.

It is clear that field studies – which are seen by some as the “gold standard” of qualitative research – are nonetheless only one way of doing qualitative research. There are other methods, but it is not clear why some are more qualitative than others, or why they are better or worse. Fieldwork is characterized by interaction with the field (the material) and understanding of the phenomenon that is being studied. In Becker’s case, he had general experience from fields in which marihuana was used, based on which he did interviews with actual users in several fields.

Grounded Theory

Another major category we identified in our sample is Grounded Theory. We found descriptions of it most clearly in Glaser and Strauss’ ([1967] 2010 ) original articulation, Strauss and Corbin ( 1998 ) and Charmaz ( 2006 ), as well as many other accounts of what it is for: generating and testing theory (Strauss 2003 :xi). We identified explanations of how this task can be accomplished – such as through two main procedures: constant comparison and theoretical sampling (Emerson 1998:96), and how using it has helped researchers to “think differently” (for example, Strauss and Corbin 1998 :1). We also read descriptions of its main traits, what it entails and fosters – for instance, an exceptional flexibility, an inductive approach (Strauss and Corbin 1998 :31–33; 1990; Esterberg 2002 :7), an ability to step back and critically analyze situations, recognize tendencies towards bias, think abstractly and be open to criticism, enhance sensitivity towards the words and actions of respondents, and develop a sense of absorption and devotion to the research process (Strauss and Corbin 1998 :5–6). Accordingly, we identified discussions of the value of triangulating different methods (both using and not using grounded theory), including quantitative ones, and theories to achieve theoretical development (most comprehensively in Denzin 1970 ; Strauss and Corbin 1998 ; Timmermans and Tavory 2012 ). We have also located arguments about how its practice helps to systematize data collection, analysis and presentation of results (Glaser and Strauss [1967] 2010 :16).

Grounded theory offers a systematic approach which requires researchers to get close to the field; closeness is a requirement of identifying questions and developing new concepts or making further distinctions with regard to old concepts. In contrast to other qualitative approaches, grounded theory emphasizes the detailed coding process, and the numerous fine-tuned distinctions that the researcher makes during the process. Within this category, too, we could not find a satisfying discussion of the meaning of qualitative research.

Defining Qualitative Research

In sum, our analysis shows that some notions reappear in the discussion of qualitative research, such as understanding, interpretation, “getting close” and making distinctions. These notions capture aspects of what we think is “qualitative.” However, a comprehensive definition that is useful and that can further develop the field is lacking, and not even a clear picture of its essential elements appears. In other words no definition emerges from our data, and in our research process we have moved back and forth between our empirical data and the attempt to present a definition. Our concrete strategy, as stated above, is to relate qualitative and quantitative research, or more specifically, qualitative and quantitative work. We use an ideal-typical notion of quantitative research which relies on taken for granted and numbered variables. This means that the data consists of variables on different scales, such as ordinal, but frequently ratio and absolute scales, and the representation of the numbers to the variables, i.e. the justification of the assignment of numbers to object or phenomenon, are not questioned, though the validity may be questioned. In this section we return to the notion of quality and try to clarify it while presenting our contribution.

Broadly, research refers to the activity performed by people trained to obtain knowledge through systematic procedures. Notions such as “objectivity” and “reflexivity,” “systematic,” “theory,” “evidence” and “openness” are here taken for granted in any type of research. Next, building on our empirical analysis we explain the four notions that we have identified as central to qualitative work: distinctions, process, closeness, and improved understanding. In discussing them, ultimately in relation to one another, we make their meaning even more precise. Our idea, in short, is that only when these ideas that we present separately for analytic purposes are brought together can we speak of qualitative research.

Distinctions

We believe that the possibility of making new distinctions is one the defining characteristics of qualitative research. It clearly sets it apart from quantitative analysis which works with taken-for-granted variables, albeit as mentioned, meta-analyses, for example, factor analysis may result in new variables. “Quality” refers essentially to distinctions, as already pointed out by Aristotle. He discusses the term “qualitative” commenting: “By a quality I mean that in virtue of which things are said to be qualified somehow” (Aristotle 1984:14). Quality is about what something is or has, which means that the distinction from its environment is crucial. We see qualitative research as a process in which significant new distinctions are made to the scholarly community; to make distinctions is a key aspect of obtaining new knowledge; a point, as we will see, that also has implications for “quantitative research.” The notion of being “significant” is paramount. New distinctions by themselves are not enough; just adding concepts only increases complexity without furthering our knowledge. The significance of new distinctions is judged against the communal knowledge of the research community. To enable this discussion and judgements central elements of rational discussion are required (cf. Habermas [1981] 1987 ; Davidsson [ 1988 ] 2001) to identify what is new and relevant scientific knowledge. Relatedly, Ragin alludes to the idea of new and useful knowledge at a more concrete level: “Qualitative methods are appropriate for in-depth examination of cases because they aid the identification of key features of cases. Most qualitative methods enhance data” (1994:79). When Becker ( 1963 ) studied deviant behavior and investigated how people became marihuana smokers, he made distinctions between the ways in which people learned how to smoke. This is a classic example of how the strategy of “getting close” to the material, for example the text, people or pictures that are subject to analysis, may enable researchers to obtain deeper insight and new knowledge by making distinctions – in this instance on the initial notion of learning how to smoke. Others have stressed the making of distinctions in relation to coding or theorizing. Emerson et al. ( 1995 ), for example, hold that “qualitative coding is a way of opening up avenues of inquiry,” meaning that the researcher identifies and develops concepts and analytic insights through close examination of and reflection on data (Emerson et al. 1995 :151). Goodwin and Horowitz highlight making distinctions in relation to theory-building writing: “Close engagement with their cases typically requires qualitative researchers to adapt existing theories or to make new conceptual distinctions or theoretical arguments to accommodate new data” ( 2002 : 37). In the ideal-typical quantitative research only existing and so to speak, given, variables would be used. If this is the case no new distinction are made. But, would not also many “quantitative” researchers make new distinctions?

Process does not merely suggest that research takes time. It mainly implies that qualitative new knowledge results from a process that involves several phases, and above all iteration. Qualitative research is about oscillation between theory and evidence, analysis and generating material, between first- and second -order constructs (Schütz 1962 :59), between getting in contact with something, finding sources, becoming deeply familiar with a topic, and then distilling and communicating some of its essential features. The main point is that the categories that the researcher uses, and perhaps takes for granted at the beginning of the research process, usually undergo qualitative changes resulting from what is found. Becker describes how he tested hypotheses and let the jargon of the users develop into theoretical concepts. This happens over time while the study is being conducted, exemplifying what we mean by process.

In the research process, a pilot-study may be used to get a first glance of, for example, the field, how to approach it, and what methods can be used, after which the method and theory are chosen or refined before the main study begins. Thus, the empirical material is often central from the start of the project and frequently leads to adjustments by the researcher. Likewise, during the main study categories are not fixed; the empirical material is seen in light of the theory used, but it is also given the opportunity to kick back, thereby resisting attempts to apply theoretical straightjackets (Becker 1970 :43). In this process, coding and analysis are interwoven, and thus are often important steps for getting closer to the phenomenon and deciding what to focus on next. Becker began his research by interviewing musicians close to him, then asking them to refer him to other musicians, and later on doubling his original sample of about 25 to include individuals in other professions (Becker 1973:46). Additionally, he made use of some participant observation, documents, and interviews with opiate users made available to him by colleagues. As his inductive theory of deviance evolved, Becker expanded his sample in order to fine tune it, and test the accuracy and generality of his hypotheses. In addition, he introduced a negative case and discussed the null hypothesis ( 1963 :44). His phasic career model is thus based on a research design that embraces processual work. Typically, process means to move between “theory” and “material” but also to deal with negative cases, and Becker ( 1998 ) describes how discovering these negative cases impacted his research design and ultimately its findings.

Obviously, all research is process-oriented to some degree. The point is that the ideal-typical quantitative process does not imply change of the data, and iteration between data, evidence, hypotheses, empirical work, and theory. The data, quantified variables, are, in most cases fixed. Merging of data, which of course can be done in a quantitative research process, does not mean new data. New hypotheses are frequently tested, but the “raw data is often the “the same.” Obviously, over time new datasets are made available and put into use.

Another characteristic that is emphasized in our sample is that qualitative researchers – and in particular ethnographers – can, or as Goffman put it, ought to ( 1989 ), get closer to the phenomenon being studied and their data than quantitative researchers (for example, Silverman 2009 :85). Put differently, essentially because of their methods qualitative researchers get into direct close contact with those being investigated and/or the material, such as texts, being analyzed. Becker started out his interview study, as we noted, by talking to those he knew in the field of music to get closer to the phenomenon he was studying. By conducting interviews he got even closer. Had he done more observations, he would undoubtedly have got even closer to the field.

Additionally, ethnographers’ design enables researchers to follow the field over time, and the research they do is almost by definition longitudinal, though the time in the field is studied obviously differs between studies. The general characteristic of closeness over time maximizes the chances of unexpected events, new data (related, for example, to archival research as additional sources, and for ethnography for situations not necessarily previously thought of as instrumental – what Mannay and Morgan ( 2015 ) term the “waiting field”), serendipity (Merton and Barber 2004 ; Åkerström 2013 ), and possibly reactivity, as well as the opportunity to observe disrupted patterns that translate into exemplars of negative cases. Two classic examples of this are Becker’s finding of what medical students call “crocks” (Becker et al. 1961 :317), and Geertz’s ( 1973 ) study of “deep play” in Balinese society.

By getting and staying so close to their data – be it pictures, text or humans interacting (Becker was himself a musician) – for a long time, as the research progressively focuses, qualitative researchers are prompted to continually test their hunches, presuppositions and hypotheses. They test them against a reality that often (but certainly not always), and practically, as well as metaphorically, talks back, whether by validating them, or disqualifying their premises – correctly, as well as incorrectly (Fine 2003 ; Becker 1970 ). This testing nonetheless often leads to new directions for the research. Becker, for example, says that he was initially reading psychological theories, but when facing the data he develops a theory that looks at, you may say, everything but psychological dispositions to explain the use of marihuana. Especially researchers involved with ethnographic methods have a fairly unique opportunity to dig up and then test (in a circular, continuous and temporal way) new research questions and findings as the research progresses, and thereby to derive previously unimagined and uncharted distinctions by getting closer to the phenomenon under study.

Let us stress that getting close is by no means restricted to ethnography. The notion of hermeneutic circle and hermeneutics as a general way of understanding implies that we must get close to the details in order to get the big picture. This also means that qualitative researchers can literally also make use of details of pictures as evidence (cf. Harper 2002). Thus, researchers may get closer both when generating the material or when analyzing it.

Quantitative research, we maintain, in the ideal-typical representation cannot get closer to the data. The data is essentially numbers in tables making up the variables (Franzosi 2016 :138). The data may originally have been “qualitative,” but once reduced to numbers there can only be a type of “hermeneutics” about what the number may stand for. The numbers themselves, however, are non-ambiguous. Thus, in quantitative research, interpretation, if done, is not about the data itself—the numbers—but what the numbers stand for. It follows that the interpretation is essentially done in a more “speculative” mode without direct empirical evidence (cf. Becker 2017 ).

Improved Understanding

While distinction, process and getting closer refer to the qualitative work of the researcher, improved understanding refers to its conditions and outcome of this work. Understanding cuts deeper than explanation, which to some may mean a causally verified correlation between variables. The notion of explanation presupposes the notion of understanding since explanation does not include an idea of how knowledge is gained (Manicas 2006 : 15). Understanding, we argue, is the core concept of what we call the outcome of the process when research has made use of all the other elements that were integrated in the research. Understanding, then, has a special status in qualitative research since it refers both to the conditions of knowledge and the outcome of the process. Understanding can to some extent be seen as the condition of explanation and occurs in a process of interpretation, which naturally refers to meaning (Gadamer 1990 ). It is fundamentally connected to knowing, and to the knowing of how to do things (Heidegger [1927] 2001 ). Conceptually the term hermeneutics is used to account for this process. Heidegger ties hermeneutics to human being and not possible to separate from the understanding of being ( 1988 ). Here we use it in a broader sense, and more connected to method in general (cf. Seiffert 1992 ). The abovementioned aspects – for example, “objectivity” and “reflexivity” – of the approach are conditions of scientific understanding. Understanding is the result of a circular process and means that the parts are understood in light of the whole, and vice versa. Understanding presupposes pre-understanding, or in other words, some knowledge of the phenomenon studied. The pre-understanding, even in the form of prejudices, are in qualitative research process, which we see as iterative, questioned, which gradually or suddenly change due to the iteration of data, evidence and concepts. However, qualitative research generates understanding in the iterative process when the researcher gets closer to the data, e.g., by going back and forth between field and analysis in a process that generates new data that changes the evidence, and, ultimately, the findings. Questioning, to ask questions, and put what one assumes—prejudices and presumption—in question, is central to understand something (Heidegger [1927] 2001 ; Gadamer 1990 :368–384). We propose that this iterative process in which the process of understanding occurs is characteristic of qualitative research.

Improved understanding means that we obtain scientific knowledge of something that we as a scholarly community did not know before, or that we get to know something better. It means that we understand more about how parts are related to one another, and to other things we already understand (see also Fine and Hallett 2014 ). Understanding is an important condition for qualitative research. It is not enough to identify correlations, make distinctions, and work in a process in which one gets close to the field or phenomena. Understanding is accomplished when the elements are integrated in an iterative process.

It is, moreover, possible to understand many things, and researchers, just like children, may come to understand new things every day as they engage with the world. This subjective condition of understanding – namely, that a person gains a better understanding of something –is easily met. To be qualified as “scientific,” the understanding must be general and useful to many; it must be public. But even this generally accessible understanding is not enough in order to speak of “scientific understanding.” Though we as a collective can increase understanding of everything in virtually all potential directions as a result also of qualitative work, we refrain from this “objective” way of understanding, which has no means of discriminating between what we gain in understanding. Scientific understanding means that it is deemed relevant from the scientific horizon (compare Schütz 1962 : 35–38, 46, 63), and that it rests on the pre-understanding that the scientists have and must have in order to understand. In other words, the understanding gained must be deemed useful by other researchers, so that they can build on it. We thus see understanding from a pragmatic, rather than a subjective or objective perspective. Improved understanding is related to the question(s) at hand. Understanding, in order to represent an improvement, must be an improvement in relation to the existing body of knowledge of the scientific community (James [ 1907 ] 1955). Scientific understanding is, by definition, collective, as expressed in Weber’s famous note on objectivity, namely that scientific work aims at truths “which … can claim, even for a Chinese, the validity appropriate to an empirical analysis” ([1904] 1949 :59). By qualifying “improved understanding” we argue that it is a general defining characteristic of qualitative research. Becker‘s ( 1966 ) study and other research of deviant behavior increased our understanding of the social learning processes of how individuals start a behavior. And it also added new knowledge about the labeling of deviant behavior as a social process. Few studies, of course, make the same large contribution as Becker’s, but are nonetheless qualitative research.

Understanding in the phenomenological sense, which is a hallmark of qualitative research, we argue, requires meaning and this meaning is derived from the context, and above all the data being analyzed. The ideal-typical quantitative research operates with given variables with different numbers. This type of material is not enough to establish meaning at the level that truly justifies understanding. In other words, many social science explanations offer ideas about correlations or even causal relations, but this does not mean that the meaning at the level of the data analyzed, is understood. This leads us to say that there are indeed many explanations that meet the criteria of understanding, for example the explanation of how one becomes a marihuana smoker presented by Becker. However, we may also understand a phenomenon without explaining it, and we may have potential explanations, or better correlations, that are not really understood.

We may speak more generally of quantitative research and its data to clarify what we see as an important distinction. The “raw data” that quantitative research—as an idealtypical activity, refers to is not available for further analysis; the numbers, once created, are not to be questioned (Franzosi 2016 : 138). If the researcher is to do “more” or “change” something, this will be done by conjectures based on theoretical knowledge or based on the researcher’s lifeworld. Both qualitative and quantitative research is based on the lifeworld, and all researchers use prejudices and pre-understanding in the research process. This idea is present in the works of Heidegger ( 2001 ) and Heisenberg (cited in Franzosi 2010 :619). Qualitative research, as we argued, involves the interaction and questioning of concepts (theory), data, and evidence.

Ragin ( 2004 :22) points out that “a good definition of qualitative research should be inclusive and should emphasize its key strengths and features, not what it lacks (for example, the use of sophisticated quantitative techniques).” We define qualitative research as an iterative process in which improved understanding to the scientific community is achieved by making new significant distinctions resulting from getting closer to the phenomenon studied. Qualitative research, as defined here, is consequently a combination of two criteria: (i) how to do things –namely, generating and analyzing empirical material, in an iterative process in which one gets closer by making distinctions, and (ii) the outcome –improved understanding novel to the scholarly community. Is our definition applicable to our own study? In this study we have closely read the empirical material that we generated, and the novel distinction of the notion “qualitative research” is the outcome of an iterative process in which both deduction and induction were involved, in which we identified the categories that we analyzed. We thus claim to meet the first criteria, “how to do things.” The second criteria cannot be judged but in a partial way by us, namely that the “outcome” —in concrete form the definition-improves our understanding to others in the scientific community.

We have defined qualitative research, or qualitative scientific work, in relation to quantitative scientific work. Given this definition, qualitative research is about questioning the pre-given (taken for granted) variables, but it is thus also about making new distinctions of any type of phenomenon, for example, by coining new concepts, including the identification of new variables. This process, as we have discussed, is carried out in relation to empirical material, previous research, and thus in relation to theory. Theory and previous research cannot be escaped or bracketed. According to hermeneutic principles all scientific work is grounded in the lifeworld, and as social scientists we can thus never fully bracket our pre-understanding.

We have proposed that quantitative research, as an idealtype, is concerned with pre-determined variables (Small 2008 ). Variables are epistemically fixed, but can vary in terms of dimensions, such as frequency or number. Age is an example; as a variable it can take on different numbers. In relation to quantitative research, qualitative research does not reduce its material to number and variables. If this is done the process of comes to a halt, the researcher gets more distanced from her data, and it makes it no longer possible to make new distinctions that increase our understanding. We have above discussed the components of our definition in relation to quantitative research. Our conclusion is that in the research that is called quantitative there are frequent and necessary qualitative elements.

Further, comparative empirical research on researchers primarily working with ”quantitative” approaches and those working with ”qualitative” approaches, we propose, would perhaps show that there are many similarities in practices of these two approaches. This is not to deny dissimilarities, or the different epistemic and ontic presuppositions that may be more or less strongly associated with the two different strands (see Goertz and Mahoney 2012 ). Our point is nonetheless that prejudices and preconceptions about researchers are unproductive, and that as other researchers have argued, differences may be exaggerated (e.g., Becker 1996 : 53, 2017 ; Marchel and Owens 2007 :303; Ragin 1994 ), and that a qualitative dimension is present in both kinds of work.

Several things follow from our findings. The most important result is the relation to quantitative research. In our analysis we have separated qualitative research from quantitative research. The point is not to label individual researchers, methods, projects, or works as either “quantitative” or “qualitative.” By analyzing, i.e., taking apart, the notions of quantitative and qualitative, we hope to have shown the elements of qualitative research. Our definition captures the elements, and how they, when combined in practice, generate understanding. As many of the quotations we have used suggest, one conclusion of our study holds that qualitative approaches are not inherently connected with a specific method. Put differently, none of the methods that are frequently labelled “qualitative,” such as interviews or participant observation, are inherently “qualitative.” What matters, given our definition, is whether one works qualitatively or quantitatively in the research process, until the results are produced. Consequently, our analysis also suggests that those researchers working with what in the literature and in jargon is often called “quantitative research” are almost bound to make use of what we have identified as qualitative elements in any research project. Our findings also suggest that many” quantitative” researchers, at least to some extent, are engaged with qualitative work, such as when research questions are developed, variables are constructed and combined, and hypotheses are formulated. Furthermore, a research project may hover between “qualitative” and “quantitative” or start out as “qualitative” and later move into a “quantitative” (a distinct strategy that is not similar to “mixed methods” or just simply combining induction and deduction). More generally speaking, the categories of “qualitative” and “quantitative,” unfortunately, often cover up practices, and it may lead to “camps” of researchers opposing one another. For example, regardless of the researcher is primarily oriented to “quantitative” or “qualitative” research, the role of theory is neglected (cf. Swedberg 2017 ). Our results open up for an interaction not characterized by differences, but by different emphasis, and similarities.

Let us take two examples to briefly indicate how qualitative elements can fruitfully be combined with quantitative. Franzosi ( 2010 ) has discussed the relations between quantitative and qualitative approaches, and more specifically the relation between words and numbers. He analyzes texts and argues that scientific meaning cannot be reduced to numbers. Put differently, the meaning of the numbers is to be understood by what is taken for granted, and what is part of the lifeworld (Schütz 1962 ). Franzosi shows how one can go about using qualitative and quantitative methods and data to address scientific questions analyzing violence in Italy at the time when fascism was rising (1919–1922). Aspers ( 2006 ) studied the meaning of fashion photographers. He uses an empirical phenomenological approach, and establishes meaning at the level of actors. In a second step this meaning, and the different ideal-typical photographers constructed as a result of participant observation and interviews, are tested using quantitative data from a database; in the first phase to verify the different ideal-types, in the second phase to use these types to establish new knowledge about the types. In both of these cases—and more examples can be found—authors move from qualitative data and try to keep the meaning established when using the quantitative data.

A second main result of our study is that a definition, and we provided one, offers a way for research to clarify, and even evaluate, what is done. Hence, our definition can guide researchers and students, informing them on how to think about concrete research problems they face, and to show what it means to get closer in a process in which new distinctions are made. The definition can also be used to evaluate the results, given that it is a standard of evaluation (cf. Hammersley 2007 ), to see whether new distinctions are made and whether this improves our understanding of what is researched, in addition to the evaluation of how the research was conducted. By making what is qualitative research explicit it becomes easier to communicate findings, and it is thereby much harder to fly under the radar with substandard research since there are standards of evaluation which make it easier to separate “good” from “not so good” qualitative research.

To conclude, our analysis, which ends with a definition of qualitative research can thus both address the “internal” issues of what is qualitative research, and the “external” critiques that make it harder to do qualitative research, to which both pressure from quantitative methods and general changes in society contribute.

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Acknowledgements

Financial Support for this research is given by the European Research Council, CEV (263699). The authors are grateful to Susann Krieglsteiner for assistance in collecting the data. The paper has benefitted from the many useful comments by the three reviewers and the editor, comments by members of the Uppsala Laboratory of Economic Sociology, as well as Jukka Gronow, Sebastian Kohl, Marcin Serafin, Richard Swedberg, Anders Vassenden and Turid Rødne.

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Aspers, P., Corte, U. What is Qualitative in Qualitative Research. Qual Sociol 42 , 139–160 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-019-9413-7

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12 Ethnography

Anthony Kwame Harrison, Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech

• Published: 02 September 2020
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This chapter introduces ethnography as a distinct research and writing tradition. It opens with a discussion of ethnography’s current fashionability within transdisciplinary academic spaces and some of the associated challenges. The next section provides a historical overview of ethnography’s emergence as a professionalized research practice within the fields of anthropology and sociology. Focusing on ethnography as a research methodology, the chapter outlines several key attributes that distinguish it from other forms of participant observation–oriented research; provides a general overview of the central paradigms that ethnographers claim and/or move between; and spotlights three principal research methods that most ethnographers utilize—namely, participant observation, field-note writing, and ethnographic interviewing. The final section of the chapter introduces a research disposition called ethnographic comportment , defined as a politics of positionality that reflects both ethnographers’ awarenesses of and their accountabilities to the research tradition they participate in.

Introduction

In a classic 1929 American Mercury article on racial passing and investigating lynchings, the future executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Walter White, opened with an observation:

In any American village, North or South, East or West, there is no problem which cannot be solved in half an hour by the morons who lounge about the village store. World peace, or the lack of it, the tariff, sex, religion, the settlement of the war debts, short skirts, Prohibition, the carryings-on of the younger generation, the superior moral rectitude of country people over city dwellers (with a wistful eye on urban sins)—all these controversial subjects are disposed of quickly and finally by the bucolic wise men. (White, 1929 , p. 77)

Ethnographers are neither morons nor bucolic wise men. If called on, they may supply truncated answers to difficult questions. But they do this with an understanding that they are merely scratching the surface or offering something along the lines of sweeping tendencies regarding what are typically complicated and often contradictory aspects of human organization and social relations. The closer and deeper one looks, the more one sees. For this reason, ethnography is not particularly well suited for the kinds of business or policy-oriented research that requires statistically verifiable findings or strict evidentiary bases for direct and uncomplicated action plans (Jones, 2010 ). Still, references to ethnography and/or ethnographic thisses-and-thats increasingly appear in these and numerous other settings. To fully appreciate the value of ethnographies, it is important to read them in their entirety. Ethnographies are not built for efficiency in research practice or in communicating research results.

As a reflexive, intersubjective research tradition—that speaks to audiences’ hearts as well as to their minds—ethnography is most at home in spaces where complexity, nuance, and betwixt-and-betweenness are valued. Thus, there is a palpable tension between this research methodology—founded on patience and aspirations for comprehensive understandings—and the increasingly neoliberal academic environments, where the practices of ethnography have historically been nurtured and where a majority of practicing ethnographers continue to reside, settings where, increasingly, time, volume of output, and tangibility of results are key factors determining what is valued. We see this among graduate students of the early 21st century, who are progressively more pressured to have solid publication records upon completing their degrees—a practice that encourages some advisors to discourage students from pursuing ethnographic research. Another consequence of this development is the gradual erosion of ethnographic standards as shorter durations of research and shortened pathways to confirmable findings are accepted, if not heralded, as measures of competency. Under such conditions, the invisible work of ethnography (Forsythe, 1999 ), and the associated belief that anyone can do it, amplifies its current fashionability in problematic ways.

This chapter provides a foundation for understanding ethnography as a research methodology and genre of research reporting. While celebrating ethnography’s flexibility and generative potential—indeed, its refusal to be contained within fixed definitions—I also present it as a distinct research tradition, guided by a series of evolving conventions and commitments. This emphasis on precision is motivated by what I see as a multipronged crisis within the transforming field of ethnographic research. Factors influencing this crisis include but are not limited to: (a) ethnography’s place within neoliberal universities and associated spaces where efforts toward increasing efficiency reign; (b) a “transdisciplinary romance with ethnography” (Kazubowski-Houston & Magnat, 2017 ) that, too often, leads undertrained and underinvested researchers to claim the label—thus, in my view, doing violence to ethnography in both a figurative and a literal sense (Ingold, 2014 ); and (c) increased institutional surveillance and “methodological conservatism,” which creates hostile environments for ethnographers seeking to have their work approved by oversight bodies and agencies (Lincoln, 2005 ). At the same time, ethnography has qualities that make it particularly well suited for grasping and representing complex social phenomena and the contentious bases of knowing during these difficult times. Methodologically, ethnography flourishes in the liminal spaces between research design and improvisation. Through their critical engagements with its sometimes troubled history, trained ethnographers tend to align with marginalized perspectives and the communities they emanate from. Representationally, ethnography refuses to reduce the social world to simplistic binaries or neatly bracketed findings. In the following pages, I elaborate on these and other qualities of the ethnographic enterprise. Specifically, I present ethnography as a distinct methodology—rooted in the professionalization of anthropology and, to a lesser degree, sociology as academic fields—with a particular set of defining attributes, paradigmatic observances, and research conventions.

Defining Ethnography

The term ethnography references both a research and an inscription (i.e., writing process to written product) practice. Ethnography is research in that it describes a methodology (distinguished from a research method in the section Ethnography as Methodology) usually conceptualized as involving participant observations within a community or field of study. 1 Thus, a person can speak of doing ethnographic research among Vermont maple sugarers (Lange, 2017 ) or among people participating in a translocal cultural phenomenon who may not even consciously identify as a group (Amit, 2000 ). At the same time, it is an inscription practice in that the products of ethnographic research—typically books like Edmund Leach’s classic Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) or Riché J. Daniel Barnes’s Raising the Race (2016)—are referred to as ethnographies. 2

Typically, greater academic attention is given to discussions of ethnography as research. However, to the extent that evaluations of and inferences about research are derived from the resulting written account, this focus on ethnography as research may be overblown. Indeed, since at least its postmodern turn (see Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ; Marcus & Fischer, 1986 ), considerable attention has fallen on ethnography as a literary convention. Scholars have additionally argued that writing practices are integral to ethnographic data collection and analysis and therefore should not be treated separately (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011 ; Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005 ; Sanjeck, 1990 ). 3 Elaborating on a concept that I call ethnographic comportment , toward the close of this chapter, I argue that most researchers are guided by a “textual awareness” (Van Maanen, 2011 , p. 158)—an imagined end product that they are working toward—that influences them variously throughout all stages of an ethnographic project, from conception to publication. Nevertheless, if one is looking for a standard definition of ethnography, a research-oriented definition such as the one offered by Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson (1995) is quite typical:

[Ethnography involves] participating, overtly or covertly in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions … [and] collecting whatever [other] data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research. (p. 1)

Such a simple, straightforward definition highlights ethnography’s resemblance to “the routine ways in which people make sense of the world everyday” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995 , p. 2)—thus making it appear to be something anyone can do. But to paraphrase something my colleague Carol A. Bailey once told me, no one would think of doing multiple linear regressions without statistical data analysis training, yet, quite regularly, people with no background in qualitative research claim to be doing ethnography (see also Schwandt, 2000 , p. 206n3). Commenting on the popularity of ethnography in consumer research, Patricia L. Sunderland and Rita M. Denny ( 2007 ) remarked,

A myriad of research techniques … (from the few-minute in-store intercept interview, to the one-hour “depth interview,” to the online focus group) have become redefined as “ethnographic” with barely any change in the underlying assumptions regarding method or analysis. Researchers have transformed themselves into “ethnographers” with few changes in practice beyond the name. (pp. 13–14)

Although these observations are specific to a single nonacademic arena, I argue that, even within the academy, the proliferation of ethnography warrants similar sentiments. In his book The Cosmopolitan Canopy (2011), Elijah Anderson defined folk ethnography as “a form of people watching that allows individuals informally to gather evidence in social interactions that supports their own viewpoints or transforms their commonsense understandings of social life” (p. xv). Although Anderson views this as a positive development, it concerns me that the distinction between folk ethnography and ethnography is blurring. In this chapter, I argue against the notion of ethnography as a qualitative research free-for-all, open for anyone, regardless of background or training, to undertake. As Diana E. Forsythe ( 1999 ) asserted, it is not “just a matter of common sense” (p. 130). Ethnography is a specific approach to research and writing about it, with a rich history and established yet evolving set of guiding principles. For those of us who take ethnography seriously, it involves training (usually through advanced coursework and mentorship), reflection, and accountability.

Historical Foundations of Ethnography

As a research tradition, ethnography’s roots are most firmly planted in the fields of anthropology and qualitative sociology: the former most often credited to the innovations of Polish-born, British-trained Bronislaw Malinowski and the latter usually attributed to a collection of researchers associated with the University of Chicago—commonly referred to as the Chicago School. Though these origin myths have been widely discussed and debated, and some treatments suggest ethnography began as early as the Greeks and Romans (Wax, 1971 ), I nevertheless cast ethnography as a relatively recent methodology, which came of age with the professionalization of both disciplines during the early decades of the 20th century.

In my chapter for the first edition of the Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research , I discussed this history in great detail (see Harrison, 2014 ) and will therefore offer only a truncated version here. 4 During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic, the nascent academic field of social/cultural anthropology crystallized around a reorientation away from the traditional model of armchair theorizing and toward a serious investment in ways of going about collecting and using data. 5 The various learned societies dedicated to anthropological interests that emerged during the 19th century relied primarily on the reports of colonial administrators, military officers, missionaries, traders, and other travelers for their information. The new class of professional anthropological intellectuals who came into being through these organizations prioritized the need for more formal—and less prejudiced, sensationalized, and unequivocally racist—standards of scientific reporting. In this interest, various sets of anthropological questionnaires and field guides were developed, initially for untrained travelers but, over time, increasingly toward the goal of fostering the most “precise and exacting” methods among field anthropologists (Urry, 1972 , p. 51). The most famous of these was Notes and Queries on Anthropology , which appeared in six iterations between 1874 and 1951 (Urry, 1972 ). Another effort to circumvent the limitations of untrained, biased, and otherwise disinterested reporting involved expeditions featuring teams of specialized experts—most notably the Cambridge Torres Straits expedition of 1898 (Stocking, 1983a ) and a series of privately funded and Bureau of American Ethnology–sponsored expeditions to the American Southwest occurring throughout the late 19th century (Judd, 1967 ).

Malinowski, the famed “founding father” of ethnography (Jones, 2010 ), came to anthropology after earning a doctorate in physics and mathematics from Jagiellonian University in Poland. He arrived in England—one of the key centers of anthropological thought—at precisely the right moment to benefit from the decades-long debates regarding appropriate ethnographic data collection methods that had been taking place. A year before his arrival, in a 1909 meeting of the principals from Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics, it was decided that the term ethnography would be used in specific reference to “descriptive accounts of non-literate peoples”—as distinct from the historical and comparative-based term ethnology (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952 , p. 276). We can thus mark this meeting as arguably the first collective effort to delineate ethnography as the principle data collection method within the rapidly professionalizing field. 6

Arriving in England, Malinowski immediately connected with a small circle of scholars, dedicated to anthropological interests, calling themselves the Cambridge School. This group included Alfred Cort Haddon, William H. R. Rivers, and Charles Seligman, all of whom had participated in the 1898 Torres Straits expedition. The quality of the various anthropological writing projects Malinowski had undertaken prior to landing in England—including what would become his first book, The Family among the Australian Aborigines (1913/1963)—undoubtedly facilitated his acceptance into this distinguished group. Still, Malinowski’s emergence as the most recognized figure in the development of ethnography can largely be attributed to timing. At the time of his arrival, members of the Cambridge School were already grappling with many of the ethnographic revelations that Malinowski would eventually put forward in his seminal work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922/1966). Malinowski can be distinguished as the last member of the Cambridge School to conduct fieldwork prior to the outbreak of World War I (Stocking, 1983b , p. 82) and the first professionally trained anthropologist to carry out research according to the most recent methodological advances of the time (Kuper, 1996 , p. 7). Consequently, when Argonauts was published a few years after the war, it stood alone as an implementation and representation of the culmination of prewar Cambridge School theorizing.

Malinowski embarked on his South Pacific fieldwork in 1914—carrying with him the 1912 edition of Notes and Queries , which had been considerably revised by Rivers (Myers, 1923 ). After a 6-month “apprentice’s trail run” on the island of Mailu in southern New Guinea (Kuper, 1996 , p. 12), the young researcher would more famously carry out two extensive periods—of a year each, 1915–1916 and 1917–1918—in the Trobriand Islands. During his initial Mailu fieldwork, Malinowski realized that his research became more productive when isolated from the prejudicial influences of the European administrators, missionaries, and traders who were also present on the island. Writing about this experience in Argonauts , he recounted, “It was not until I was alone in the district that I began to make some headway” (Malinowski, 1922/1966 , p. 6). This revelation sparked one of Malinowski’s most notable contributions to the practice of ethnography, which George Stocking ( 1983b ) described as “a shift in the primary locus of investigation, from the deck of the mission ship or the verandah of the mission station to the teeming center of the village” (p. 93). Such a positional shift facilitated a corresponding adjustment to his ethnographic posture:

In this type of work, it is good for the Ethnographer sometimes to put aside camera, note book and pencil, and to join in himself in what is going on. 7 … Out of such plunges into the life of the native … I have carried away a distinct feeling that their behavior, their manner of being, in all sorts of tribal transactions, became more transparent and easily understandable than it had before. (Malinowski, 1922/1966 , pp. 21–22)

In his preface to Argonauts of the Western Pacific , esteemed anthropologist James George Frazier hailed it as a “remarkable record of anthropological research” by someone who had “lived as a native among the natives” (J. G. Frazier, 1922 / 1966 , p. vii). For his part, Malinowski was exceedingly deliberate in foregrounding his methodological “innovations.” Thus, the myth of Malinowski—as the first field researcher to voluntarily remove himself from colonial quarters, (essentially) cut off all ties with “civilization,” and immerse himself in the world of “savages” as a methodological imperative for understanding their world—soon took legs. His prescriptive methods for doing this included long-term residence by a trained researcher; learning the local language rather than relying on interpreters; collecting as much data as possible on as wide a range of activities as possible—from the spectacular and ceremonial to the everyday and mundane—and taking copious field notes; and, when possible, partaking in social activities as a participant observer.

One of the most rehearsed explanations of ethnography, contained within the pages of Argonauts , is Malinowski’s oft-cited goal of “grasp[ing] the native’s point of view” (Malinowski, 1922/1966 , p. 25). This decree to recognize and (to some degree) prioritize the subjectivity of non-Western peoples marked a transformative moment in how anthropology was practiced. No longer simply viewed as the objects of study, the perspectives of rational native actors provided the platform for developing anthropology’s relativist doctrines. By advocating for the internal logics underlying each culture, anthropology came to serve a critical role in exposing the prejudice and racism surrounding evaluations of cultural difference (Baker, 2010 ). 8 Together, Malinowski’s prescriptions amounted to a methodological manifesto (Strathern, 1987 ) that championed experiential modes of understanding, contextualization, and the distinction between ideal and actual behavior as signaling the capacity for agency within social structures.

In the most celebrated histories of anthropology, the idea of participant observation–based fieldwork, which is at the core of modern ethnography, came into being through these methodological advancements. Yet, the myth of the “Malinowskian Revolution” (Kuper, 1996 , p. 32) belies the tremendous effort and attention toward refining anthropological research methods that were taking place prior to his arrival in England, as well as across the Atlantic among Franz Boas and his students (see Harrison, 2014 ; Lassiter & Campbell, 2010 ). Although Malinowski was not singly responsible for inventing these ethnographic standards, his archetype status has been significant to their reification. Furthermore, his position during the interwar period as England’s “only master ethnographer” helped him to further cement his progenitor status (Kuper, 1996 , p. 1). 9 For most of the 20th century and now continuing into the 21st, the image of “going off” to a fieldwork site far removed from the university community one is a part of, for a minimum of 1 year, has been a rite of passage within sociocultural anthropology; and for much of this time, the importance of conducting research in non-Western societies—what some have critiqued as anthropology’s intrinsic process of Othering (Deloria, 1969 ; Magubane & Faris, 1985 )—was rationalized as “absolutely essential” to the development of an anthropological perspective (Mead, 1952 , p. 346).

Far and away the most celebrated ethnographic conventions practiced outside anthropology came from a collection of researchers associated with the University of Chicago’s department of sociology. Generally speaking, the Chicago School 10 formed through the combined influences of Malinowskian fieldwork methodologies and German phenomenological theory (Jones, 2010 ). Through their conceptualization of urban life as an assemblage of “natural areas” or “little communities,” researchers affiliated with the Chicago school, under the direction of Robert E. Park, imagined the city as a social laboratory through which to examine secular differences—primarily oriented around ethnicity and various forms of civic otherness. With an extensive background in newspaper work and having served as “a sort of secretary” to Tuskegee Institute founder and notable African American spokesman Booker T. Washington (Faris, 1967 , p. 28), Park arrived in Chicago in 1913 with keen interests in issues surrounding urban life, race relations, ethnic heterogeneity, and processes of assimilation. Soon thereafter, Park dedicated himself to training graduate students and, indeed, several of the most significant works to come out of the program during the interwar period were authored by his students (Blumer, 1998 ). 11

While ethnography has long-standing roots in sociology, its centrality to the discipline has never matched its position as the “hallmark methodology” of anthropology (Sunderland & Denny, 2007 , p. 13). From the outset, sociology’s ethnographic efforts were firmly intertwined with anthropology. 12 Thus, although Chicago sociologists gave a good deal of attention to particular aspects of methodological training, their most inspired forays into fieldwork were often characterized as a closer-to-home version of what anthropologists do. 13 We can see this in Park’s justifications for the kinds of research he was most interested in advancing. In an important essay advocating for the scientific value of researching the city, Park explained:

Anthropology, the science of man, has been mainly concerned up to the present with the study of primitive peoples. But civilized man is quite as interesting an object of investigation.… The same patient methods of observation which anthropologists like Boas and Lowie have expended on the study of the life and manners of the North American Indian might be even more fruitfully employed in the investigation of the customs, beliefs, social practices, and general conceptions of life prevalent in Little Italy on the lower North Side in Chicago, or in recording the more sophisticated folkways of the inhabitants of Greenwich Village and the neighborhood of Washington Square, New York. (Park, 1925/1967 , p. 3)

Years later, in describing his own attraction to this ethnographic tradition, Howard S. Becker ( 1999 ) explained, “You had all the romance of anthropology but could sleep in your own bed and eat decent food” (p. 8).

Still, the model of urban-based fieldwork put forth by Chicago School sociologists was an important predecessor to the way ethnography is thought of and practiced today. For much of the 20th century, anthropological field research focused on small, isolated communities where it was possible to get to know most members, map out kinship relations, and, at least, imagine that one was getting a comprehensive portrayal of society. 14 In the early 21st century, virtually all ethnographers adopt a topic-oriented approach, which focuses on one or more specified aspects of and/or social networks within what are understood to be much more complex and globally interconnected societies. As a result of the metropolitan settings of their research, urban sociologists, unlike their colleagues in anthropology, were compelled to acknowledge that they were dealing with specific dimensions of social life and/or subcultures that were situated within larger societal contexts.

The origins of ethnography as a professionalized methodological (research) and representational (writing) practice are most squarely situated within the discipline of anthropology. Recognizing these foundations in no way implies that ethnography is the exclusive purview of anthropology or, for that matter, that anthropologists should have exclusive right in determining what does and does not qualify as ethnography (Atkinson, 2017 ). Indeed, some of the most significant methodological considerations leading up to ethnography’s now-standard insistence on reflexivity (see the section Ethnographic Comportment) issued from the application of sociology’s symbolic interactionist theories to circumstances surrounding the ethnographic encounter (Berreman, 1962 ; Junker, 1960 ); and today many of the most exciting works surrounding ethnography issue from transdisciplinary spaces. I therefore echo Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Virginie Magnat’s ( 2017 ) call for “coalition and collaboration between like-minded ethnographers across the social-sciences, the arts, and the humanities” (p. 11). Yet these historical foundations continue to serve as methodological anchors for ethnographers.

Ethnography as Methodology

In discussing ethnography, commentators sometimes incorrectly treat it as a method rather than a methodology. The difference is significant. A method is simply a tool or technique used to collect and/or analyze data. Ethnographers typically utilize a variety of tools and techniques during the course of their research, including but not limited to establishing rapport; selecting informants; using a range of interview and/or focus group forms; making observations—both participatory and nonparticipatory—and writing field notes based on them; conducting surveys, genealogies, and domain analyses; mapping fields; transcribing texts; and coding data. 15 In contrast, methodologies are established norms of inquiry that are by and large adhered to within distinct research traditions. A methodology, therefore, involves theoretical, ethical, political, and at times moral orientations to research, which guide the decisions researchers make, including their choice of methods. Accordingly, it can be thought of as a philosophy of research practice, analysis, and description. Later in the chapter, I detail three of the most fundamental methods that ethnographers commonly utilize—namely, participant observation, field-note writing, and ethnographic interviews. However, first I outline several key attributes that, in my view, contribute to any instance of research being ethnographic and then highlight three philosophical positions—or what I call paradigms —that ethnographers orient themselves in relation to when conducting research.

Ethnographic Attributes

In this section I outline five essential priorities that distinguish ethnography. I offer these, in part, as a corrective to what I regard as the casual and commonplace misappropriation of it as a stand-in for all types of qualitative research (Kazubowski-Houston & Magnat, 2017 ). Building on my earlier definition, these attributes should be regarded as important orienting principles that scholars trained in ethnography and aware of its historicity hold in common.

Ethnography and Culture

Harry F. Wolcott asserted that the critical attribute distinguishing ethnography from other forms of qualitative research is a focus on describing and interpreting cultural behavior. In other words, at its core an ethnography must include an intentional engagement with and “working resolution” toward understanding culture (Wolcott, 1987 , p. 45). Wolcott called this ethnographic intent . The specifics of this “working resolution” may vary. Culture, according to Stephen A. Tyler ( 1969 ), provides the framework for recognizing and describing how “people make order out of what appears … to be utter chaos” (p. 6). Yet for the inquiring ethnographer, culture might be conceptualized as being revealed through people’s behaviors, the expressed ideals that guide such behaviors, or the discovery of underlying frameworks through which situational choices are made. Each of these, or some combination, can have implications for how ethnographic researchers go about their craft.

Debates over a precise definition of culture notwithstanding, ethnography has traditionally rested on a principle of cultural comparison, perhaps best reflected in the anthropological maxim of “making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” For earlier generations of ethnographers—primarily anthropologists and sociologists (see the section Historical Foundations of Ethnography)—this was accomplished by traveling to starkly different social settings, which brought about the inevitable comparisons with the home “culture” (as the term was then understood 16 ). As the lens of ethnographic inquiry expanded to include spaces and places that did not initially appear to be particularly distinct from the ethnographer’s home (Messerschmidt, 1981 ), this comparative mode of sense-making became more implicit than explicit. The native ethnographer, for instance, conducting research in her own community, would appear to start from the same cultural foundations as the people she (participant) observes. Yet, as a trained ethnographer—someone who has read cultural theory and been exposed to several cross-cultural ethnographic studies—she makes sense of her observations in relation to the wealth of documented scholarship on cultural diversity. 17 Thus, she is less likely to generalize distinct cultural practices as the “normal way” people do things and more apt to frame her observations and understandings in conversation with foundational and recent thinking about culture.

Ethnography and Contextualization

Ethnographies prioritize contextualization, meaning that particular people and the situations they find themselves in are best understood in relation to broader factors that impact them—including, but not limited to, historical, local, political, economic, and religious factors. Anthropology, in particular, has historically recognized interconnections and mutual influences between various aspects of social life—or what anthropologists call holism . Following from this, ethnographers take an open-minded, inductive approach to what might potentially be considered data. In other fields of research where deductive reasoning —that is, the idea that truth follows from a sequence of conditional premises that can be empirically verified—is prioritized, efforts are made to silence external noises in the interest of focusing on what researchers determine are the most salient factors and variables. The inductive reasoning that guides ethnographic research starts from the assumption that such noises have consequence—they not only impact social conditions but also, at times, reflect deeper structural workings of culture.

Contextualization also impacts situational constructions of meaning. To illustrate what I mean here, I turn to the work of Clifford Geertz ( 1973 ), who famously defined ethnography as “an elaborate venture in … ‘thick description’ ” (p. 6). Referencing a thought experiment conducted by philosopher Gilbert Ryle ( 1971 ), Geertz elaborated on thick description through the example of a rapidly contracting eyelid. Whether such action amounts to an involuntary twitch of the eye or a “conspiratorial signal to a friend” (i.e., a wink) is entirely contextual. Accordingly, a thin description of behavior—“her left eye blinked”—tells us very little. Through understanding such things as the circumstances under which the blink occurred, the intention of the blinker, the prevalent social codes that may or may not mark the blink as meaningful, and whether this meaning was received and understood, we get a better sense of what is going on. Thick description, then, in the words of anthropologist Karin Narayan ( 2012 ), can be summarized as “layering meaning into closely observed details” (p. 8). Noticing and describing something as subtle and instantaneous as a blink requires careful attention to detail; it means observing social life with the same heightened sensitivity that we use when perceiving works of art (Willis, 2000 ). Yet, without proper contextualization, such descriptions have limited ethnographic value.

Ethnography as Iterative

In addition to being governed by inductive principles—meaning that research “starts from the data rather than from a hypothesis to be tested, or even from a fixed research question” (Hammersley, 2008 , p. 69)—ethnography proceeds as an iterative mode of inquiry. By this I mean that ethnographers continually re-engage with their research questions, fundamental assumptions, methods of inquiry, and accumulated data toward the goal of refining their work—which can sometimes include making a radical change in direction. Consequently, ethnographic research designs must be flexible enough to allow for the expected surprises and misadventures that arise when an individual (serving as a research instrument) engages in the daily lives of other people—who are inevitably continuing along the unforeseeable journeys that are their lives—for a prolonged period of time. Even at its most scientific, ethnography is resolutely a human science conducted in a real-world laboratory. As such, the ethnographic enterprise is saturated with circumstances, situations, and personalities that are unanticipated and often uncontrollable. Barbara Tedlock ( 2000 ) elaborated:

No matter how much care the ethnographer devotes to the project, its success depends upon more than individual effort. It is tied to outside forces, including local, national, and sometimes even international relationships that make research possible as well as to a readership that accepts the endeavor as meaningful. (p. 466)

Indeed, one of the most predictable aspects of ethnographic research is its unpredictability, so much so that statements along the lines of “I began my research intending to study X but wound up studying Y ” are now standard ethnographic writing conventions. I would go so far as to suggest that an absence of such sentiments (i.e., everything working out according to plan) is greeted with more suspicion than their presence.

Recognizing how ethnographic data and interpretation evolve simultaneously, James Spradley ( 1980 ) offered a cyclical model of ethnographic inquiry—what he calls the ethnographic research cycle —as distinct from the linear research models (i.e., define the problem, formulate hypotheses, gather and analyze data, draw conclusions) found in the other social sciences. According to Spradley ( 1980 ), each phase of ethnographic inquiry (data collection and analysis) informs new questions:

The cycle cannot wait until you have collected a large amount of data.… You need to analyze your fieldnotes after each period of fieldwork in order to know what to look for during the next period of participant observation. (pp. 33–34)

As such, a strict sequence of prescribed methods will not suffice. Ethnography achieves virtue and vitality through its lack of prescription, by continuously straddling the line between structured research design and improvised inquisitive adventure. Gary Alan Fine and James G. Deegan ( 1996 ) described ethnography as “a puzzle of mysterious design” that is “only known when the researcher has decided that it is close enough to completion” (p. 441). Through iterative processes of tacking back and forth between experiences and reflections, ethnographers piece together their research projects.

Ethnography then should be thought of as involving iterative–inductive–inscription practices . 18 It is iterative in the sense that it involves recurrently engaging with theory, data, and analysis (O’Dell & Willim, 2011 ); it is inductive in that ethnographers approach this engagement with open minds and few preconceptions about where data will lead them; and it is inscriptive in foregrounding writing as its principal mode of recording data, analyzing data, and representing social life (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005 ).

Ethnography and Empathy

The ethnographic project is variously empathetic. Through intersubjective engagements—most notably via participant observation—ethnographers aspire to “imaginatively experience the feelings, thoughts, and situation” (Davis, 2014 , p. 6) of people they work among. As such, ethnography encourages a degree of intimacy between researcher and researched that, at its best, recognizes and appreciates their mutual implication in the production of knowledge (Lassiter, 2005 ; Sluka & Robben, 2012 ). Ethnographers’ commitments to the people and communities they conduct research among are both moral and political. Academically situated ethnographers—on the basis of their training, disciplinary identities, and institutional affiliations—are mandated to protect the interests of the people and communities they work among by following institutional and disciplinary guidelines surrounding research, most notably those pertaining to informed consent, deception , and confidentiality . 19 In addition, trained and invested ethnographers recognize their charge to reveal, unsettle, and at times undermine the institutions and forces through which social inequalities are maintained and perpetuated. Thus, ethnographers are consistently attentive to the interests of disempowered groups. When working among such groups, these commitments to social justice result in alliances and recognitions of researched communities’ roles in evaluating the quality of ethnographies (Harrison, 2018 ). In contrast, when working among power-wielding groups—what Laura Nader ( 1972 ) called studying up —ethnographers should feel some obligation to use their position and access to uncover and even disrupt the workings of power. This can take many forms. However, its absence—for example, using conventional ethnographic methods for the explicit purpose of perpetuating social inequalities—in these enlightened times 20 is simply not ethnography.

This notion of ethnographic empathy also pertains to the reception of works ethnographers produce. Ethnographic authors write toward the of goal of enabling their readers to envision themselves walking in someone else’s shoes and, what is more, to grasp people’s perspectives and understand their behaviors as resulting from alternative (or previously unrecognized) cultural logics. Ethnographers’ written accounts communicate person-to-person sentiments—inviting readers to imagine the situated interests and actions of someone else. Resembling, to some degree, how a politician might use a handful of personal stories to communicate something about the state of a nation during a national address, 21 the most evocative ethnographic writings utilize sentimentality and emotion in detailing individual’s stories and particular episodes. As such, their representational power lies in their informational richness and ability to communicate affect , as opposed to other research traditions that prioritize statistical validity or theoretical applicability. Indeed, by providing compelling testimonies, which embrace the emotionality and messiness of real life (Law, 2004 ), ethnographies do more to complicate and therefore advance existing theories than to straightforwardly confirm them.

Ethnography and Narrative

Storytelling saturates ethnography. Ethnographers collect stories from people firsthand, on their own terms, or in such close proximity to them that they powerfully reflect something about the way culturally situated actors move through their worlds (Turner, 2007 ). As researchers, we invite such stories through open-ended ethnographic interviews (see the section Ethnographic Interviews) where participants are asked to share their personal histories, their perspectives, and/or what is most meaningful to them about a given topic. Ethnographers are also told personal narratives while building rapport and deeply hanging out (Wogan, 2004 )—for example, when getting a ride home from an open-microphone event (Harrison, 2009 , p. 64) or while sharing cramped living spaces (Holmes, 2013 ). In addition, ethnographers are regularly featured actors in the stories they recount. Contemporary ethnography mandates degrees of reflexivity and transparency, both of which demand that researchers share aspects of their personal stories and provide some accounting of the research experiences that led them to know what they know. These stories—often culled from interview transcripts or field journals or pieced together from various sources (Brand, 2007 )—get recirculated, re-created, or re-placed, sometimes verbatim, in ethnographic texts.

Ethnographers are foremost writers. A primary aspect of their data collection involves writing field notes (see the section Field-Note Writing). In crafting these and other data into finished works, they indulge ethnography’s aspirations and ability to reach broad audiences and to communicate sophisticated meanings through artful storytelling and other experimental modes of academic writing. As a thickly descriptive research genre, ethnographic texts may, at times, appear to threaten too much information; however, when done well, the layered meanings activated through such dense contextualization circle back to show their relevance. Accordingly, ethnographic writing should be undertaken as a writerly endeavor—meaning that authors acknowledge the intelligence of their readers and, therefore, allow space for them to construct their own meanings and make their own sense of certain aspects of an ethnographic account. 22

The Story of the College Visit

A few years after completing my dissertation, I was invited to speak to an anthropology class at a small liberal arts college where I was giving a guest lecture. The students had read a short piece—recounting the story of a gathering in Golden Gate Park following an open-microphone event—that would become the introduction to my first book, Hip Hop Underground (Harrison, 2009 ). 23 I spent a few minutes talking about my research in relation to the passage and then opened the floor for questions. A few questions in, a young man raised his hand and began explaining how he had grown up in San Francisco, had probably “partied” on the same Golden Gate Park picnic tables that I mentioned in my piece, and was someone who considered hip-hop close to his heart. At this point, he looked away, focusing on the paper on his desk and, in thoughtful, measured tones explained that whenever he read an academic piece on hip-hop he found himself getting defensive. Mine was the first piece he had read where he did not have that feeling. “That’s ethnography,” I said.

Paradigmatic Plasticity

Throughout the course of their research and writing, ethnographers orient themselves around certain theoretical, ethical, and political commitments. At their foundation, these commitments involve questions of ontology (concerning the nature of reality), epistemology (how we know what we know), and axiology (relating to morals and values). Following Patricia Leavy ( 2009 ), I use paradigm as an umbrella term that encompasses the range of philosophical stances, assumptions, and goals that surround research endeavors. Although the philosophies guiding ethnographic research are quite often unstated, at moments when they come into conflict the results can be explosive.

The Story of the Conference Incident

Several years ago, I attended an interdisciplinary conference where, in response to a few last-minute cancelations, the organizers decided to combine two panels. This made sense at the time. First, although the panel topics were different, they overlapped under the broader theme of the conference. Second, a single panel would attract a larger audience for all of the presentations—indeed, by the time I arrived it was standing room only. Last, such a move would spare one presenter from the awkwardness of being the lone panelist in a 90-minute session. However, in deciding to combine panels, the organizers overlooked or chose to ignore the paradigmatic differences informing the respective audiences that would be drawn to each panel. This did not become an issue until the final presentation: a masterful explication on the functionality of various strategies for alleviating conflict among competing social groups. During the question-and-answer period, an audience member—who had obviously come to see presentations initially slated for the other panel—questioned the researcher’s right to reduce people’s behaviors to such all-too-neat formulations, the evidentiary basis on which his claims were being made, as well as his investment in the communities through which, in making his academic career, he appeared to be profiting from. Chaos ensued as the two parties went back and forth in a heated exchange—with the accused researcher at one point even blurting out, “You don’t know me!” Thankfully, there were only a few minutes left in the session. As the panel came to a close, various colleagues approached the two combatants to endorse their action and/or console, as appropriate.

As a research tradition, ethnography straddles multiple paradigms. With its roots in anthropology—regarded as the most humanistic of social sciences and the most scientific of humanities (Redfield, 1953 )—such paradigmatic plasticity is to be expected. Yet, as ethnographic practices have migrated to a wide range of academic disciplines and interdisciplinary spaces, the potential for paradigmatic disputes over what is and what is not “good” and/or legitimate research has become more pronounced.

By my reckoning, both parties involved in the conference incident would rightly consider their work ethnographic. Yet where activities of research (i.e., methods) may appear similar, the foundational philosophies of knowledge (i.e., epistemologies) and ideas about how it should be applied through endeavors labeled “research” can look radically different.

In considering different paradigmatic orientations surrounding qualitative inquiry, Thomas Schwandt ( 2000 ) highlighted three areas of concern that are instructive for my discussion of ethnography. I adapt them here:

Cognitive concerns surrounding how to define, justify, and legitimize claims to understanding.

Social concerns regarding (in this case) the goals of ethnography.

Moral concerns as to how to “envision and occupy the ethical space” between ethnographers and those they research in responsible, obligatorily aware, and status conscious ways (see Schwandt, 2000 , p. 200).

Before briefly outlining some of the paradigms that surround ethnography, I offer a few caveats. Whereas defining and labeling paradigmatic frameworks is useful, it would be a mistake to give too much attention to trying to fit a particular researcher or even an instance of ethnographic research neatly into one category. Ethnographic experience is perpetually ephemeral, meaning that at times ethnographers are prone to move, transform, and shape shift between different paradigmatic classifications. Attempts to categorize also tend to highlight differences over time and disciplinary space. While differences clearly exist—the above-mentioned conference incident stands as a testament to this—the need to neatly place individuals or projects in particular boxes closes down the possibility of also seeing commonalities and furthermore belies the nuanced nature and theoretic eclecticism of ethnographic inquiry. Nonetheless, in what follows, I discuss three philosophical traditions that ethnographers might move between and draw from as paradigmatic resources.

Positivism is premised on a belief in what is referred to as naive realism —that is, the notion that there is a reality out there that can be grasped through sensory perception. As such, it holds empirical data—that which is produced though direct observations—as definitive evidence through which to construct claims to truth. In doing so, positivism prioritizes objectivity, assuming that it is possible for a researcher to detach him- or herself from values, interests, or the clouding contamination of bias and prejudice. Following this formula, good research is achieved through conventional rigor—that is, dutifully following a prescribed, systematic series of steps surrounding data accumulation and analysis. In that positivism recognizes a fundamental (capital “T”) Truth, which it is believed researchers can apprehend, researchers anchored in this tradition are more prone to concern themselves with questions of transferability (i.e., can the findings from one setting be applied to another?) and generalizability (i.e., can the findings from a particular context be generalized to the whole?) on the assumption that such Truth has potential relevance for a broad range of social circumstances and cultural contexts. Although few, if any, contemporary ethnographers would define themselves as strict positivists, it is nonetheless important to discuss positivism as foundational to any social scientific enterprise. To some extent, outlining the tenets of strict positivism may be useful in explaining what most ethnographers are not. However, before dismissing it too quickly, I should point out that, particularly with regard to the mandates of certain gatekeepers of credible research reporting, ethnography is not as far removed from its positivist principles as some of its practitioners would like to think. Postpositivist orientations 24 toward valuing empirical evidence, making efforts toward detached objectivism, and deductive reasoning continue to carry weight, even if researchers are less confident about their conclusions.

Interpretivism

Interpretivism, which issues from an acknowledgment of the constructed nature of all social reality, recognizes no single all-encompassing Truth, but rather multiple (small “t”) truths that are the products of human subjectivities. Thus, cultural and contextual specifics are critical to understanding, and inductive reasoning becomes the privileged path to making sense of unwieldy social realities. Reality, which is shaped by experience, thus becomes something to be interpreted. Such interpretivism sees human action as inherently meaningful with meanings being processual, temporal, and historically unfinished. The subjectivity of the ethnographer is quite consequential here. Under any form of interpretivism, the outcomes of researcher bias are acknowledged. Sometimes efforts are made to mitigate researchers’ subjectivities. Such techniques might involve reflexive journaling, inventorying subjectivities, and other attempts to manage and track bias (Schwandt, 2000 , p. 207n11). Yet, increasingly, interpretivist approaches accept that within ethnography the human is the research instrument and, as such, cultural, social, and personal frames of reference are inescapable.

Critical Research

The critical research paradigm focuses on the workings of power, with attention to axes including (but not limited to) race, gender, ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and differential abilities. As opposed to the positivist stance of neutrality and detachment, critical researchers distinguish themselves by their personal and sometimes emotional investment in the welfare of the individuals and communities they work among. Critical researchers are committed to using their research to empower such communities by working with them to create meaningful social change. 25 As such, they aspire to make the processes surrounding research transparent to both the communities they work among and their various audiences. Critical perspectives emerged in connection with various social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and, accordingly, are often fashioned as a form of scholar activism. Recently, participant action and collaboration have become key methodological imperatives shaping the relationships formed around various critical research projects. Through such developments, questions regarding who initiates research, controls its direction, and owns its products have become vitally important.

Ethnographers do not just take part in the daily lives of the people they conduct research among; as a consequence of their participation, they impact people’s lives and, in turn, are implicated in them. It is therefore difficult to separate cognitive, social, and moral concerns surrounding research. All are influenced by the research paradigm(s) the ethnographer observes. Paradigmatic orientations affect the entire ethnographic process, starting with the ways research is conceived of and designed, what qualifies as data, and ultimately how such data are treated.

Through the previous discussion of paradigms and essential attributes, I have drawn attention to ethnography as a research methodology, as opposed to a method. Again, this distinction is important to my effort to differentiate ethnography from qualitative field research more generally. Nevertheless, when someone mentions doing ethnographic research, a handful of research activities (or methods) come to mind. These include having sustained contact with a community of people through participant observation, writing field notes, and (usually) interviewing. In the following sections, I give each of these research conventions additional consideration.

Participant Observation

Participant observation, as the term suggests, refers to a research disposition somewhere between full participation, just like (or as) a member of a community, and strictly observing. While participant observation is often conceptualized as a location on a continuum between these two extremes—with ideally some level of balance 26 —I believe it is better thought of as a simultaneous process that oscillates between varying degrees of participation and observation. Such oscillations occur both situationally and temporally. In the case of the latter, they might take place in the context of a particular event or more generally over the course of different research phases. Participant observation has historically been championed as providing the virtues of both an insider’s (participant) and an outsider’s (observer) perspective. As a foundation of ethnographic understanding, a discussion of this insider/outsider binary is instructive even if such neat distinctions rarely, if ever, exist in the lived world.

Whereas a recognized goal of ethnography is to grasp people’s understandings of their world, since its inception the primary means of achieving this goal has been through experiential understanding. Writing in his introduction to Argonauts , Malinowski (1922/1966, p. 5) recalled that, to “get … the hang of tribal life,”

I had to learn how to behave, and to a certain extent, I acquired “the feeling” for native good and bad manners. With this, and with the capacity of enjoying their company and sharing some of their games and amusements, I began to feel that I was indeed in touch with the natives, and this is certainly the preliminary condition of being able to carry on successful field work. (p. 8)

Yet to simply grasp the native’s point of view is often not enough. Ethnographers have long recognized that “those cultural features of a particular society that are the most deeply ingrained are the least likely to be explicated and questioned by native members themselves” (Wengle, 1988 , p. xvii). As a consequence of ethnocentrism —that is, the tendency for all people to position their own cultural beliefs and practices at the center of their worldview (i.e., to see them as “normal”)—native members of a cultural group are at times blind to many of the most salient aspects of their lifeways. 27 Thus, a flexible and situated position somewhere between an insider and an outsider is typically upheld as ideal.

As a practice, participant observation involves an inherent critique of interviewing. Although interviewing is fundamental to most ethnographic projects, advocates of participant observation are quick to point out that, if the goal is to understand behaviors and worldviews in their cultural context, interviews alone will not suffice. There is usually some disjuncture between what people do and what they say they do. At one level, this can be seen as a distinction between ideal and actual behavior. In an interview setting, people are more likely to shade their representations of behaviors toward cultural ideals. For example, studies point out the tendency among Americans to underreport the amount of alcohol they consume (Rathje & Murphy, 1992 ). Whether consciously underreported or not, this pattern is likely connected to the cultural ideal against drinking too much. Yet even in circumstances where a strong cultural ideal is not in play, people’s behaviors amount to more than what they choose or are able to tell an interviewer in the context of an interview. Native language speakers, for example, would have considerable difficulty explaining the rules to their language or how they know what they know without additional linguistic training. Even in a situation where both conditions are met (someone is aware and can explain ), an interviewee must make decisions about what to emphasize and what to ignore or gloss over. Such choices might lead them to steer clear of topics that the interviewer would find salient. 28

To return to the drinking example, in particular settings where the ability to consume a lot of alcohol is linked to status, it may be likely that quantities will be overreported. Of course, such settings are usually informal, are semiexclusive, and involve peer groups—for example, the stereotypical morning after the college fraternity party. Another advantage of participant observation over interviewing alone is that it provides access to these interior spaces. Fieldworkers achieve this by locating such spaces, gaining access (including building rapport), and, notably, spending time there. The famous Hawthorne studies on worker productivity found that people tend to alter their behavior for short periods of time under the scrutiny of a researcher or observer (Landsberger, 1958 ). Such reactivity can jeopardize ethnography’s aspirations for naturalistic inquiry. Thus, an ideal, if nearly unattainable, goal of participant observation is that the researcher becomes familiar enough within the research setting that everyday life proceeds as if he or she was not there. Factors surrounding this include duration of time in a setting, resemblance between researcher and members of the researched community, and level of participation.

Duration of Time in the Setting

The general rule is that the longer a researcher stays in “the field,” the more accustomed people become to his or her presence—not to mention the greater the understanding of what is going on. Yet this is conditional. Wolcott ( 1987 ) pointed out that, “based on any one researcher’s skill, sensitivity, problem, and setting, optimum periods of fieldwork may vary” (p. 39). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that within anthropology the Malinowski-derived standard has been a minimum of 1 year in the field.

Resemblance between Researcher and Members of the Researched Community

This resemblance includes both physical and social resemblances. Greater resemblance, in theory, facilitates “life as usual,” whereas notable differences are a perpetual reminder that there is a researcher present. Some of the most recognizable differences concern race, language proficiency, decisions regarding self-presentation, and, in certain instances, age and gender.

Level of Participation

This, in part, depends on the researcher’s aspirations—for example, a researcher may aspire to a stance that, at different times, involves full participation or minimum participation (Junker, 1960 ). At the same time, and in conjunction with the previously noted factors, the various communities researchers engage have differing levels of accessibility and inclinations toward hospitality (e.g., insisting that someone “join in”); and beyond language alone, researchers have different competencies 29 —all of which can impact their level of participation.

In sum, participant observation is simultaneously the most fundamental, complex, and uncertain method of ethnographic research. Its temporal parameters can range from strictly designated fieldwork outings—for example, a few hours in the field on a weekday afternoon—to an all-consuming living experience (24 hours a day) spanning several years. Its spatial parameters can be as narrow as a Midwest college bar (Spradley & Mann, 1975 ), as broad as multiple sites across a global landscape (Wulff, 1998 ), and as amorphous as translocal (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997 ) and virtual (Nardi, 2010 ) fields of activity. 30 While a good deal of planning goes into participant observation research projects, the combination of its ill-defined parameters and the fact that it plays out in the lived world render it difficult to forecast and, consequently, a largely improvised endeavor.

Field-Note Writing

A second principal method of ethnographic research is the creation and management of ethnographic field notes. These systematic in-the-field writings are inextricably linked to participant observation in that they serve as the primary means of recording the detailed observations and insights gleaned through such experiences. Accordingly, the quality and character of field-note writing have implications on an ethnographer’s ability to accurately and effectively report research findings. 31 Historically, field notes received little methodological attention. Like ethnography more generally, their resemblance to people’s everyday activities—particularly the act of keeping a personal journal or diary—cultivated the belief that instructions to simply “write down everything you see and hear” would suffice. In the literature that has since emerged on field-note writing, there is no consensus on a single correct method. I would advise any researcher to use the available methodological prescripts as guidelines but to develop particular routines and procedures that align with their own best writing habits as well as the specific circumstances of research. Nevertheless, a handful of best practices consistently show up in the literature and together illustrate why field-note writing and keeping a diary are not one and the same.

Schedule a significant amount of time each day or soon after each fieldwork “outing” to write field notes. Details fade with the passage of time, so do not unnecessarily delay field-note writing. In a full-immersion fieldwork situation—where participant observation comprises the entirety of one’s living experience—this practice of writing field notes (i.e., articulating and reflecting on observations and experiences) can be thought of as the major nonparticipatory endeavor that the researcher consistently engages in.

Employ jottings or “scratch notes” (Sanjek, 1990 , p. 96)—that is, quickly scribbled words or phrases, written in the context of participant observing, intended to jog one’s memory when writing. A researcher should always carry a small notebook or some equivalent jot-recording technology (e.g., a small handheld recorder). Additionally, when observing/experiencing the world with the intention of documenting it through field-note writing, it is important to rely on all one’s senses and not merely vision alone. Sounds, smells, tastes, and touches can all be powerful means to creating scenes on a page.

Organize different approaches to field-note writing categorically. For example, Emerson et al. (2011, pp. 57–79) discussed four general field-note subcategories: (a) descriptions based on concrete sensory details of physical spaces, people, objects, or actions, (b) dialogues between people, (c) characterizations portraying how a person acts and lives, and (d) narratives involving either sketches (i.e., snapshots) of a setting/character or episodes illustrated through continuous action and interaction. In all of these categories, it is important for the field-note writer to distinguish between that which is concrete and/or directly observed—for example, verbatim quotes—and that which is inferred, approximated, or logically assumed (Bailey, 2017 ). Field notes can additionally take the form of methodological notes (highlighting research techniques used and/or planned), analytic notes (periodic forays into conceptual understandings that strive to approximate professional writing 32 ), and personal notes (therapeutic and potentially revealing outlets for discussing one’s relationships, feelings, and emotions).

Ethnographic Interviews

Ethnographers typically conduct interviews as a primary method of research. However, whereas participant observation is so central to ethnography that some well-practiced scholars might be forgiven for simply—and in my view, mistakenly—equating the two, interview-based research and ethnography are distinctly different (Becker & Geer, 1957 ; Lamont & Swidler, 2014 ). Ethnographers, like most qualitative researchers, conduct interviews, but, unlike participant observation, interviews alone do not come close to approximating ethnography.

Ethnographic interviewing is distinct from what I will call general interview-based research in several ways. First, ethnographic interviews typically take place after a researcher has been in the field for some period of time. Ethnographers do not enter the field assuming they know what is most important; firsthand experience in a social arena is thought to facilitate better interview questions (O’Reilly, 2012 ). It is furthermore presumed that a level of familiarity between researcher and researched, and perhaps even mutual respect, leads to better research collaborations.

Second, ethnographers understand and at times analyze interviews as speech events—meaning that an interview is more than just a transcript of questions and answers. Contextual factors including (but not limited to) place, time, body language, fluidity of dialogue, and prior relationship between interviewer and interviewee may all have a bearing on the way an interview plays out (O’Reilly, 2012 ). In fact, an ethnographer may find as much value in what a person chooses not to talk about as in what they emphasize. Additionally, the texture of statements—such things as inflection, accent, volume, and cadence—combined with context, can often alter the literal meaning of what is said.

Finally, some ethnographers consider everyday dialogue with people in the field as a form of informal interviewing. If an interview is defined as a consciously initiated verbal exchange through which a researcher—primarily via questions and answers—learns from the people they conduct research among about a given topic, we must be cognizant of the fact that, during the course of participant observation–based fieldwork, these types of exchanges take place all the time. At what point does asking someone how to take the bus downtown or inquiring, over coffee, about why someone did not join his or her sister in visiting a relative turn into an interview? The point is, with participant observation research, these distinctions are conditional and often undefined.

Participant observation, field-note writing, and ethnographic interviewing are by no means the only research methods ethnographers employ. The data collection techniques of ethnographic research are often determined pragmatically in relation to theoretical orientations, research questions, and the availability and appropriateness of various options. Ethnographers also gather and analyze pieces of material culture, make nonparticipatory behavioral observations; record videos; take photographs; engage in community mapping; conduct surveys, genealogies, and domain analyses; and examine archival documents, censuses, and various media materials, in addition to a range of other methods. Nevertheless, participant observations, the field notes they inspire, and interviewing comprise the core practices of most ethnographic researchers.

Ethnographic Comportment

As a final framework for understanding ethnography and what distinguishes it from other forms of participant observation–based field research, I introduce the idea of ethnographic comportment as a politics of positionality, which bears on an ethnographer’s conduct and demeanor throughout the research and writing process. The critical awarenesses that underly ethnographic comportment, in many respects, are extensions of ethnography’s now-standard mandate for reflexivity. Generally speaking, reflexivity in ethnography amounts to an awareness of “one’s own role in the construction of social life as [ethnographic research] unfolds” (O’Reilly, 2012 , p. 11). It involves “a continual internal dialogue and critical self-evaluation” regarding one’s positionality, assumptions, and agendas (Berger, 2015 , p. 220). The origins of reflexivity can be traced to ethnographers’ postwar rise in self-consciousness (Nash & Wintrob, 1972 ), which was fully realized with anthropology’s 1980s postmodern turn (Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ; Marcus & Fischer, 1986 ). In the early 21st century, reflexivity is thought of as both an important aspect of ethnographic knowledge production and a means to assessing research accountability and validity. Trained ethnogra phers are well aware of this—to the point, perhaps, where reflexivity becomes embodied knowledge or a part of who we are.

Ethnographic training also includes familiarity with ethnography’s history and key debates (McGranahan, 2014 ). This history began during the colonial era at a time when, according to Kathleen Gough ( 1968 ), “Western nations were making their final push to bring practically the whole pre-industrial non-Western world under their political and economic control” (p. 401). Anthropologists, particularly, are well schooled in this history and, as a foundation of contemporary disciplinary training, debate the extent to which past ethnographers were willingly and/or unwillingly complicit in furthering it (see Lewis, 2013 ). Ethnographers working in sociology observe a similar tradition of researching marginalized urban communities (Vidich & Lyman, 2000 ) and representing them in ways, or through analytical categories, that were often not consistent with their self-understandings and/or best interests.

Training in ethnography should also incorporate considerations of the power dynamics that continue to shape ethnographic encounters (Koivunen, 2010 ; Wolfe, 1996 ). These critical awarenesses inspire sensibilities that ethnographers carry with them throughout the research enterprise. I am in no position to prescribe the exact decisions and actions that follow from such awarenesses. Does the White British ethnographer researching in Ghana meaningfully grapple with the politics surrounding the favorable attention she receives as a European in Africa, or does she simply explain that Ghanaians are nice and she had no trouble building rapport? Does she struggle with the historical implications of potentially projecting her own frames of understanding onto contemporary Abron music practices or does she simply report what she understands she is seeing and move on? The choice is up to the ethnographer; however, it should be made with some understanding of and critical reflection on the enterprise she is taking part in. To summarize, ethnographic comportment involves a historical awareness and reflexive self-awareness of one’s participation in ethnography as a research tradition. Following João de Pina-Cabral’s ( 1992 ) assertion that ethnographers match what they observe “against the accumulated knowledge of [their] discipline” (p. 6), I maintain that such knowledge increasingly includes a critical outlook on both the historical and the resonating fault lines of ethnography as practiced.

At a moment when the (mis)use of ethnography as an umbrella term for any and all qualitative research threatens its integrity, researchers who are seriously invested in ethnography are reflexive of their participation in this research tradition. Accordingly, they adopt a disposition of accountability for their role in advancing rejuvenated and/or progressive forms of ethnographic practice. Throughout the process of research, ethnographers are (self-)conscious about how they comport themselves in relation to their research and the people they are researching among; they are also conscious—albeit often abstractly—of the end product that they are working toward. Such textual awareness (Van Maanen, 2011 ) influences their decision-making throughout the various, flexible, and often unforeseeable stages of an ethnographic project. When their work is finished, they hope that both their in-the-field conduct and their written ethnography will be regarded as good (see Harrison, 2018 ) and, in the best of instances, that the latter will contribute to furthering the ethnographic tradition in positive ways.

In sum, ethnographic comportment is predicated on the idea that the embodied knowledge a researcher has accrued through disciplinary and methodological training guides them, as a form of improvised analysis, throughout the ethnographic enterprise toward the goal of producing work that is valued in its own right, (usually) by the researched community, and as part of the ethnographic tradition.

At a time when the proliferation of ethnography threatens to untether it from its core commitments and fundamental modes of inquiry, I see a pressing need to reprofessionalize ethnography by calling attention to its historical foundations, outlining its central practices and research principles, and presenting new frameworks, which I believe are helpful in grasping and gauging its contemporary significance. An awareness of ethnography’s history—its complicated engagements with colonialism and progressive humanism—should inform all efforts to move it forward. Beyond key practices like participant observation, field-note writing, and ethnographic interviewing, ethnography is marked by its attention to culture as an explanatory construct, lavish contextualization, iterative modes of data collection and analysis, empathetic engagements, and abundant storytelling. In embracing these attributes, ethnographers thoughtfully observe, reflect on, and represent the complexities of social life and culturally situated perspectives of people.

Ethnographers are not particularly adept at problem solving, in large part because the knowledge they procure, produce, and distribute is expansive, conditional, and historically unfinished. While “bucolic wise men” gather at the village store and resolve gun control debates or immigration issues in minutes, the ethnographer among them is perpetually suspicious of such quick answers. She understands that her job is to listen for meaning. She may participate—to extend the dialogue or maintain her own internal dialogue as she reflects on the grounded perspectives being shared around her. Above all else, she recognizes that people on all sides of a debate have convictions, passions, and frameworks of understanding that should be respected and that, as researchers, we should aspire to better understand. Increasingly, such patience and attention to human complexities are under threat by assembly line modes of academic production that treat time and knowledge as commodities. Yet by resisting these inclinations—and offering a counter to narrow definitions of research efficiency—ethnography secures its relevance to understanding the varied ways people live their lives and means through which they know what they know.

Future Directions

How can ethnography continue to flourish within contexts of accelerating academic production? How can it maintain its patient, thoughtful, and unfinished research practices at a time when academic value is equated with efficiency, volume of output, and tangibility of results?

Given that many people in the early 21st century engage with digital/social media technologies as aspects of their daily lives, how can ethnography best attend to the intersections between virtual and physical worlds?

In contexts of increased political and methodological conservatism, where institutional review boards require completed research designs and protocols as prerequisites to approval, how can ethnographers represent their iterative and inductive modes of research in ways that comply with institutionally mandated expectations?

As the lines between ethnography and everyday life become increasingly fuzzy, what new modes of ethnographic understanding and representation should be acknowledged and embraced?

In ethnography’s postpostmodern reformulations and trajectories, how should researchers map the borders of the field (ontologically and in terms of the various interests that ethnographic studies can serve)?

Ethnography’s foundations are in writing culture, yet, historically, ethnographers are deeply implicated in the project of literatizing nonliterate societies. Given this paradox, what nonliteral forms of ethnographic representations might a contemporary, critical, and historically informed ethnographic project take? How can we move beyond writing culture ?

Here, I am using field in both the traditional sense of fieldwork conducted within a physical place/space and in the Bourdieuian sense of a field of cultural practice (Bourdieu, 1984 ).

Ethnographies can also take the shorter form of essays and professional journal articles, as well as nonliterary forms like “films, records, museum displays, or whatever” (Geertz, 1973 , p. 19n). Recognizing this—yet in the interest of avoiding cumbersome qualifications—throughout the remainder of the chapter I treat ethnography foremost as a writing practice.

Etymologically, ethnography combines ethno , meaning “culture (or race),” and graphy, meaning “to write, record, and describe.” Thus, ethnography can be thought of as the process and product of writing, recording, and describing culture.

In addition to my own writings, there is a wealth of very good work on ethnography’s history—for example, see Darnell ( 2001 ), Jones ( 2010 ), Kuper ( 1996 ), Lassiter ( 2005 ), and Stocking ( 1983a ).

Broadly speaking, the distinction between social and cultural anthropology is based on national traditions, with the former practiced in England and the latter in the United States. More specifically, British (social) anthropology has historically stressed the interrelationships between social institutions and observes foundational figures like Malinowski and Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, whereas American (cultural) anthropology recognizes cultural coherences as outlined through the work of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict (Garbarino, 1977/1983 ).

In the introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific , Malinowski ( 1922/1966 ) included a footnote explaining that, “according to a useful habit of the terminology of science, [he] uses the word Ethnography for the empirical and descriptive results of the science of Man, and the word Ethnology for speculative and comparative theories” (p. 9, fn).

Historically, the masculine pronouns he/him/his were used as universal references to all people—in this case falsely implying that all ethnographers were men. Rather than cluttering the text with numerous [ sic ]s, I let these pass without further comment. In instances where I offer gendered pronouns, as a general (but not exclusive) rule, I use the feminine she/her/hers. Following Margery Wolf ( 1992 ), I do not do this “to privilege the female voice but to call attention to the way in which the supposedly generic ‘he’ does in fact privilege the male voice” (p. 56).

Malinowski was certainly not the first to acknowledge the importance of “native subjectivity”—in fact, several commentators have highlighted this as an area where American anthropologists greatly outpaced their British counterparts (Bunzl, 2004 ; Darnell, 2001 ; Lassiter & Campbell, 2010 ). Indeed, cultural relativism as an anthropological movement is most prominently connected with Franz Boas and his students, Margaret Mead ( 1928/1961 ), Melville Herskovits ( 1972 ), and, most famously, Ruth Benedict ( 1934/2005 ). Yet the significance of Malinowski’s powerful dictate to understand native subjectivities—as a “goal, of which an ethnographer should never lose sight” (1922/1966, p. 25)—is illustrated by the frequency with which he has been and continues to be cited.

A short list of Malinowski’s students at the London School of Economics includes Raymond Firth, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Hortense Powdermaker, Edmund Leach, Jomo Kenyatta, Lucy Mair, Audrey Richards, and Meyer Fortes.

Howard Becker ( 1999 ) is critical of this designation, arguing that “ ‘Chicago’ was never the unified chapel … [nor] unified school of thought” that many believe it to have been (p. 10).

These include Nel’s Anderson’s The Hobo (1923/1961), Frederick Thrasher’s The Gang ( 1927 ), Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto ( 1928 ), Harvey W. Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), Paul Cressey’s The Taxi-Dance Hall ( 1932 ), and E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in Chicago ( 1932 ).

For example, until 1929, the department at Chicago was known as the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Among the (other) notable anthropologists in the department during these formative years were Boas’s students, Edward Sapir and Fay-Cooper Cole; Robert Redfield, who married Park’s daughter; and Ralph Linton, who taught classes there while affiliated with Chicago’s Field Museum (Faris, 1967 ).

Commenting on the improvisational nature of anthropological ethnography, Lisa H. Malkki ( 2007 ) suggested that sociologists approach ethnography “with a different sensibility” (p. 186, n2). Additionally, there appears to be some historical reluctance within the sociological tradition to refer to their brand of field research as ethnography. In Buford H. Junker’s ( 1960 ) seminal introduction to social science fieldwork, for example, based on extensive interviews with University of Chicago student fieldworkers, ethnography is only referenced on a few occasions. In one telling passage, Junker describes the ethnographer’s task of “start[ing] from scratch by learning the language of his esoteric people” in opposition to the sociological field worker operating “in some part of an otherwise already familiar cultural milieu” (1960, p. 70).

Malinowski ( 1922/1966 ) specifically said that “one of the first conditions of acceptable ethnographic work certainly is that it should deal with the totality of all social, cultural, and psychological aspects of a community, for they are so interwoven that not one can be understood without taking into consideration all the others” (p. xvi). This idea of anthropology as a holistic science—assuming the interconnections and mutual influences between various aspects of social life—continues to be reiterated in the introductory chapters of almost all discipline textbooks.

Several very good overviews of the qualitative research methods used in ethnography exist, including Bailey ( 2017 ), Bernard ( 1995 ), Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw ( 2011 ), Gobo ( 2008 ), Hammersley and Atkinson ( 1995 ), Pawluch, Shaffir, and Miall ( 2005 ), and Spradley ( 1980 ).

Whereas historically ethnographers thought of their work as focusing on neatly bounded cultures, usually (mis)represented as being isolated from globalizing influences, 21st century ethnographers understand their work to be focused on culture as a socially orienting concept—accordingly, the term shifts from being a noun to an adjective (e.g., cultural beliefs, cultural values, cultural processes).

This is not to suggest, as others have (see Marcus & Fischer, 1986 , p. 156), that “native” ethnographers lose their capacity for radical critique as a result of their Western anthropological training (McClaurin, 2001 ).

In making this characterization, I am building on Karen O’Reilly’s ( 2012 ) description of ethnography as an iterative–inductive process .

See Christians ( 2000 ) for a thorough discussion of these three guiding pillars surrounding qualitative research ethics.

I insert this qualification to recognize an earlier (less enlightened) period when some would argue that ethnography was used as an instrument of colonial domination (see Asad, 1973 ; Deloria, 1969 ; Gough, 1968 ).

I make this comparison based on behavior, not presumed intent. I am well aware that many people view politicians as being disingenuous. I am in no way implying that ethnographers operate with insincere intentions. Thank you to Steve Gerus for bringing this similarity to my attention.

I juxtapose this understanding of writerly against the example of an instruction manual, which as a very unwriterly text does not recognize its readers’ capacity to think on their own and therefore presents information in unimaginative ways with the intention of providing little room for alternative interpretations.

This can be found in Harrison, 2009 , pp. 1–6.

For a short summary of postpositivism, see Bailey ( 2017 ).

In particular cases, where such researchers work among more powerful groups, these commitments might be toward exposing the workings of power, thus leading toward the same ends of empowering those who are marginalized.

These in-between spaces are sometimes distinguished as observing participation and participating observation (see Bernard, 1995 ; Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995 ; Junker, 1960 ).

This is sometimes referred to as homeblindness , defined as being blind to crucial dimensions of one’s own lifeways because they are taken for granted (Czarniawska, 1997 ). While I acknowledge that ethnocentrism more typically involves putting one’s culture above others, I maintain that homeblindness is a product of ethnocentrism.

Additionally, there might be countless potential reasons for an interviewee to be less than forthcoming.

For instance, someone doing an ethnography of pickup basketball games may have easier access if he or she has a background in playing basketball.

Today, many people engage the virtual, online, social media, or networked worlds consistently throughout their daily lives. To the extent that ethnographers are interested in engaging with people in everyday settings and circumstances, it would seem reasonable and even potentially quite illuminating for ethnographers to be attentive to the intersections of online and offline activities (Lane, 2016 ).

There are several excellent books that discuss field-note writing; see, for example, H. Russell Bernard’s Research Methods in Anthropology (1995); Carol A. Bailey’s A Guide to Qualitative Field Research ( 2017 ); and Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw’s Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes ( 2011 ). I strongly recommend that any novice researcher carry one of these books when embarking on fieldwork.

My definition of analytic notes is consistent with what Emerson et al. ( 2011 ) called in-process memos .

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• v.57(3); 2011 Mar

Ethnography: traditional and criticalist conceptions of a qualitative research method

Teaching family medicine residents how to conduct research is increasingly being seen as a crucial component of their training, in part as a means of strengthening the discipline and in part to improve their practices. Whereas quantitative methods once dominated approaches to medical research, the application of qualitative methods is seen as an effective way to study issues in primary care. 1 – 3 Ethnography is one such qualitative approach that offers residents a useful tool for conducting research. This article presents an overview of ethnography as a research method that is used to gain a deeper understanding of human behaviour, motivation, and social interaction within specific and complex cultural contexts.

Ethnographic research has long played an important role in medicine. 4 – 6 Becker and colleagues’ landmark ethnographic study, Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School, 7 used qualitative interviews and participant observation to learn how medical students are acculturated into the medical profession; how they learn to negotiate the social complexities within the hospital; and their anxieties, doubts, and idealism as they go through medical training. The study also provides useful insight into students’ evolving and shifting conceptions of the medical profession. Ethnographies such as this one provide an in-depth perspective on a range of health-related issues, such as the professional 8 and corporate culture, 9 social determinants, 10 the illness experiences of patients, 11 moral problems in health care, 12 the family’s role in patient care, 13 patient attitudes toward delivery of care, 14 and other factors that influence health care and health outcomes. 15 – 17 In essence, ethnographies provide a deeper insight into a culture. In this sense culture is defined as the collective assumptions and beliefs that influence the practices of a particular group of people who share a social space.

The term ethnography is thought to have first been introduced in 1922 by Bronsilaw Malinowski (1884–1942). 18 It has its roots in the descriptive science 19 of social anthropology, central to which is the study of culture and cultural behaviour. 20 Ethnographies, however, are not limited to studies of ethnic rituals and practices. They include studies that describe and explain a range of social phenomena within various culture-sharing groups. These ethnographies provide an in-depth description and analysis, and paint a portrait of the ways in which culture-sharing groups interpret their experiences and create meaning from their interactions. Surgeons, for example, have a particular professional culture influenced by attitudes and behaviour that are characteristic of that group and transmitted across generations through learning. 21

Divergent approaches

Traditional approaches to ethnographic research endeavoured to collect facts and evidence through detached observations about the culture being studied, with the researcher attempting to operate in the background as an objective bystander in order to develop an impartial understanding of observable phenomena. This positivist * aim of impartiality, criticalists † will argue, is not tenable, as it depends upon the unlikely ability of the researcher to be once-removed from the culture under observation. 22 Criticalists maintain that researchers are mistaken if they believe they are able to provide a neutral account of others’ experiences. Unlike Malinowski, the next generation of researchers finds that ethnographers are influenced by a “culturally mediated world, caught up in ‘webs of significance’ they themselves have spun [where] there is no privileged position, no absolute perspective, and no valid way to eliminate consciousness from our activities or those of others.” 23

Positivists defer to the transcribed interview over the lived experience of a face-to-face conversation. As a result, knowledge becomes a derivative of the captured, transcribed voice; the known, originally of flesh and blood, is transformed into an amorphous entity, only to be reincarnated and solidified in text. Both the captured voice and the fixed subject can now be manipulated without fear of losing data to the continuity of life and time. A transcribed text can be seen as containing a set of meanings that remain frozen for all time, and is thus more reliable. Yet criticalists would argue that such texts are read and reread, interpreted and reinterpreted with every new reading, through which the reader as researcher creates newer meanings and reifications. What goes unrealized is that each encounter with the text is a new experience. To believe that each reading is still an encounter with the original experience ignores the contextual, historical moments that produced it. 24 The text is given a life of its own with a corresponding belief that it presents the “truth” about the situation being studied.

Criticalists believe, therefore, that the new ethnographer must be careful not to be entrapped by a particular form and version of truth. The social world is governed by multiple truths, which are contextually situated. 25 The researcher’s credibility and legitimacy are gained by acknowledging the representation of multiple versions of truth, showing how each version can impinge on and shape the phenomenon being studied. No single version is given authoritative privilege, for each has its own strengths and limitations—for example, at the scene of an accident, a range of perspectives is obtained to help illuminate the situation in order to arrive at the best possible explanation of what happened. Meanings are not inherent in observation alone, but rather must be elucidated through the interpretation of the range of perspectives offered to illuminate the phenomenon under study.

Constructing realism

Although it might seem as if this movement toward “multiple truths” means that it is impossible to ever know anything, the opposite might in fact be the case. Instead of looking for a single truth when using an ethnographic approach, researchers are encouraged to try to understand the cultural environment from multiple points of view. Hence, in qualitative research, the term experience is more commonly used than truth. Researchers will need to broaden their perspectives while taking into account diverse perceptions of what is occurring in the social environment. Rather than developing single-person interpretations and generalizations, the aim is to collect thick, extensive, and detailed descriptions and interpretations of the area being studied. 26 We can speculate that if a study like Boys in White, 7 for example, were being conducted today it would be a much richer work, as it would not only be looking at the socialization of medical students from the “detached” perspective of the researchers but also examining in more detail the views of patients and other professionals, as well as the diversity within the student group. The experiences embedded in each of these perspectives would help us develop a much richer understanding of medical students within their social context.

Qualitative research is not a monolithic concept like statistics. It draws upon a rich variety of strategies and theoretical frameworks from different disciplines and traditions. Ethnography is but one qualitative research method for studying social phenomena.

Hypothesis is a quarterly series in Canadian Family Physician, coordinated by the Section of Researchers of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. The goal is to explore clinically relevant research concepts for all CFP readers. Submissions are invited from researchers and nonresearchers. Ideas or submissions can be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cfp or through the CFP website www.cfp.ca under “Authors.”

Competing interests

None declared

* Positivists subscribe to the theory that empirical experience is the most legitimate source of knowledge, and that knowledge begins and ends with a sensory experience free of subjective interpretation. 19

† Criticalism presupposes that knowledge is conjectural, socially constructed, and ephemeral—always open to critical analysis and re-analysis. 19