Qualitative Research

18 The Qualitative Research methods introduced in this book are often employed to answer the whys and hows of human behavior, opinion, and experience information that is difficult to obtain through more quantitatively-oriented methods of data collection. Researchers and practitioners in fields as diverse as anthropology, education, nursing, psychology, sociology, and marketing regularly use Qualitative methods to address questions about people s ways of organizing, relating to, and interacting with the world. Despite the interdisciplinary recognition of the value of Qualitative Research (or perhaps because of it), Qualitative Research is not a unified field of theory and practice. On the contrary, a plethora of viewpoints, some-times diametrically opposed to one another, exist on the subject. Scholars regularly debate about what Qualitative Research is, how and why it should be conducted, how it should be analyzed, and in what form it should be presented.

The methods covered here—participant observation, in-depth interviews, and focus groups—are the most commonly used methods in applied qualitative inquiry. We do, however, cover other methods such as systematic elicitation and document analysis in Chapter 6, since these are also impor-tant, often-used methods in applied qualitative inquiry.

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  Research, Methods, Interview, Observation, Qualitative, Qualitative research

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