Descriptive and interpretive approaches to …

Chapter 11 Descriptive and interpretiveapproaches to qualitative researchRobert Elliott and Ladislav TimulakQualitative research methods today are a diverse set, encompassing approaches such asempirical phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, protocol analysis and dis-course analysis. By one common definition (Polkinghorne, 1983), all these methodsrely on linguistic rather than numerical data, and employ meaning-based rather thanstatistical forms of data analysis. Distinguishing between measuring things with wordsand measuring them in numbers, however, may not be a particularly useful way ofcharacterising different approaches to research. Instead, other distinctive features ofqualitative research may turn out to be of far greater importance (Elliott, 1999): emphasis on understanding phenomena in their own right (rather than from someoutside perspective); open, exploratory research questions (vs.)

but may also include the researcher’s interpretations and reactions, as long as these are clearly labelled as such. Qualitative observational methods often use non-interview

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