u           u           U    U'   d           fi__I    t           d__
IHE LANDSCAPE OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
qualitative researchers who arc attached to poststructural, postnío/lcni sensibilities (see below; see also Vidich & Lyman, Volume I, Chapter 2, and Richardson, Volume 3, Chapter 12). These researchers argue thai positivist methods are but one way of telling a story about society or the social world. They may be no better or no worse than any other method; they just tell a different kind of story.
This tolerant view is not shared by everyone. Many members of the critical theory, constructivism poststructural, and postmodern schools of thought reject positivist and postpositivist criteria when evaluating (heir own work. They sec these criteria as irrelevant to their work, and contend thai these criteria reproduce only a certain kind of science, a science thai silences loo many voices. These researchers seek alternative methods for evaluating their work, including verisimilitude, emotionality, personal responsibility, an ethic of caring, political praxis, mullivoiced texts, and dialogues with subjects, hi response, posiiivisls and postpositivists argue that what they do is good science, free of individual bias and subjectivity; as noted above, they see postmodernism as an attack on reason and truth.
Capturing the individual's point of view. Both qualitative and quantitative researchers are concerned about the individual's point of view. However, qualitative investigators think they can get closer to the actor's perspective through detailed interviewing and observation. They argue that quantitative researchers seldom are able to capture the subject's perspective because 11 it-y havi lo rely on more remole, inferential empirical materials, Thi empirical materials produced by the sorter, interpretive methods arc regarded by many quantitative researchers as unreliable, impressionistic, and not objective.
Examining lbe constraints of everyday life. Qualitative researchers are more likely than quantitative researchers to confront the constraints of the everyday social world. They see this world in action and embed their findings in it. Quantitative researchers abstract from this world and seldom study it directly- They seek a nomothetic or etic science based on probabilities derived from the study of large numbers of randomly selected cases. These kinds of Statements Stand above and outside che constraints of everyday life- Qualitative researchers are committed to an emic, iiho-graphic, case-based position, which directs their attention to the specifics of particular cases.
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Introduction
Securing rich descriptions. Qualitative researchers believe lhal rich descriptions of the social world arc valuable, whereas quantitative researchers, with their etic, nomothetic commitments, arc less concerned with such detail.
The five points of difference described above (uses of positivism, acceptance of postmodern sensibilities, capturing the individual's point of view, examining the constraints of everyday life, and securing rich descriptions) reflect commitments to different styles of research, different epistc-mologies, and different forms of representation. Each work tradition is governed by a different set of genres; each has i is own classics, its own
preferred forms of representation, interpretation, and textual evaluation
(sec Becker, 1986, pp. 134-135). Qualitative researchers use ethnographic prose, historical narratives, first-person accounts, siill photographs, life histories, fictionalized facts, and biographical and autobiographical materials, among others. Quantitative researchers use mathematical models, statistical tables, and graphs, and often write about their research in impersonal, third-person prose.
With the differences between these two traditions understood, we will now offer a brief discussion of the history of qualitative research. We can break this into four historical moments, mindful that any history is always somewhat arbitrary.
♦  The History of Qualitative Research
The history of qualitative research reveals, as Vidich and Lyman remind us in Chapter 2 of Volume 1, that the modern social science disciplines have taken as their mission "the analysis and understanding of the patterned conduct and social processes of society." The notion that this task could be carried out presupposed that social scientists had the ability to observe ibis world objectively. Qualitative methods were a major tool of such observations.*
Throughout the history of qualitative research, investigators have always defined their work in terms of hopes and values, "religious faiths, occnpahon.il and professional ideologies" (Vidich & Lyman, Volume I, Chapter 2). Qualitative research (like all research) has always been judged on the "standard of whether the work communicates or 'says' something
11
THE LANDSCAPE OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
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to us" (Vidich & Lyman, Volume J, Chapter 2), based on how we conceptualize out reality and our images of the world. Epistemology is the word that has historically defined these standards or evaluation. In the contemporary period, as argued above, many received discourses on epistemology have been "disprivileged," or cast into doubt.
The history presented by Vidich and Lyman covers the following (somewhat) overlapping stages: early ethnography (to the seventeenth century);colonial ethnography (seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century explorers); «he ethnography of the American Indian as "other" (late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology); the ethnography of the "civic other," or community sindies, and ethnographies of American immigrants (early twentieth century through the 1.960s); studies of ethnicity and assimilation (mid-century through the 1980s); and the present, which we call the fifth moment.
In each of these eras researchers were and have been influenced by their political hopes and ideologies, discovering findings in their research that confirmed prior theories or beliefs. Karly ethnographers confirmed the racial and cultural diversity of peoples throughout the globe and attempted to fit this diversity into a theory about the origin of history, the races, and civilizations. Colonial ethnographers, before the professional izacion of ethnography in the twentieth century, fostered a colonial pluralism that left natives on their own as long as their leaders could be co-opted by the colonial administration.
European ethnographers studied Africans and other Third World peoples of color. Early American ethnographers studied the American Indian from the perspective of the conqueror;- who saw the life world of the primitive as a window to the prehistoric past. The Calvinist mission to save the Indian was soon transferred to the mission of saving the "hordes" of immigrants who entered the United States with the beginnings of industrialization. Qualitative community studies of the ethnic other proliferated from the early 1900$ to the 1960s, and included the work of K. Franklin Frazier, Robert Park, and Robert Redfield and their students, as well as William Foote Whyte, the Lynds, August Hollingshead, Herbert Gans, Stanford Lyman, -.(Vrlhur Vidich, and Joseph Bensman. The post-1960s' ethnicity studies challenged the "melting pot" hypothesis of Park and his followers and corresponded to the emergence of ethnic studies programs that saw Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans attempting to take control over the study of their own peoples.
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Itttrciiuction
The postmodern challenge emerged in the mid-1980s. It questioned the assumptions that had organized this earlier history, in each of its colonial-izing moments. Qualitative research that crosses the "postmodern divide" requires one, Vidich and Lyman argue, to "abandon all established and preconceived values, theories, perspectives,... and prejudices as resources for ethnographic study." In this new era the qualitative researcher does more than observe history; he or she plays a part in it. New tales of the field will now be written, and they will reflect the researcher's direct and personal engagement with this historical period.
Vidich and Lyman's analysis covers the full sweep of ethnographic history. Ours, presented below, is confined to the twentieth century and complements many of their divisions. We begin with the early foundational work of the British and French, as well the Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and Berkeley schools of sociology and anthropology. This early foundational period established the norms of classical qualitative and ethnographic research.
♦ The Five Moments of Qualitative Research
As noted above, we divide our history of qualitative research in this century into five phases, each of which is described in turn below.
The Traditional Period
We call the first moment the traditional period (this covers Vidich and Lyman's second and third phases). It begins in the early 1900s and continues until World War II. In this period, qualitative researchers wrote "objective," colonializing accounts of field experiences that were reflective of the positivist scientist paradigm. They were concerned with offering valid, reliable, and objective interpretations in their writings. The "other" who was studied was alien, foreign, and strange.
Here is Malinowski (1967) discussing his field experiences in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands in the years 1914-1915 and 1917-1918:
Nothing whatever draws me to ethnographic studies.... On the whole the village struck mc rather unfavorably. There is a certain disorganization ...
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THE LANDSCAPE OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
(Ik towdincss and persistence of the people who laugh ami Marc and fie discouraged me somewhat... . Went to (he village hoping to photograph a few stapes of i he Intra dance. I handed out linllstuks of tobacco, then watched a few dances; then took pictures—but results were poor. .., clicy would tiol pose long enough for time exposures. Al moments 1 was furious .it them, particularly because after I gave litem their portions of tobacco they all went away, (quoted in Gccr(7, 198X. pp. 71 74)
In mother wojk, this lonely, frustrated, isolated field-worker describes his methods in the following words:
In the held one lias to face a chaos of facts-----i» »his crude form they arc
not scientific fans at all; they are absolutely elusive, and can only be fixed by interpretation... . Only laws and generalizations ftfl scientific facts, and field work consists only and exclusively in (he interpretation of the chaotic «Ktal reality, ui sul)ordinating it to general rules. (Mahnowski. I'M*. I'»IS, p. 128} quoted in Gecsts, 1988, p. 81)
Maltiiowski's remarks are provocative. On the one hand they disparage ficldwork, hm Oil the other they speak of it within the glorified language of science, wilh laws and generalizations fashioned out of this selfsame
experience.
The field-worker, during this period, was lionized, made mio a larger-than-life figure who went into and then relumed from the field with stories about strange people. Rosaldo (198.9) describes tins as t lie period of the Lone Ethnographer, the story of the man-Scientist who wenl off in search of his native in a distent land. There this figure "encountered the object of his quest.. . (and) underwent his rite of passage by enduring the ultimate ordeal of 'ficldwork' " (p. 30). Returning home wilh his data, the Lone Ethnographer wrote up an objective account of the culture lie studied. These accounts were structured by the norms of classical ethnography. This sailed bundle of terms (Rosaldo, 1989, p. .11) organized ethnographic texts in terms til foui beliefs and commitments: a commitment lo objectivism, a complicity with imperialism, a belief in inoniimcnt.ilism (the ethnography would create a museumlikc picture of the culture studied), and a belief in límeleetnctt (what was studied never changed). This model of the researcher, who could also write complex, dense theories about what was studied, holds lo the present day.
l-'.
n n r . í . ' . i . i . i
totrotkKtioii
The myih of the l.one Ethnographer depicts the birth of classic ethnography. The texts of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown. Margaret Mead, and Gregory BltCtOfl are still carefully studied for what they can tell the novice about fieldwork, taking field notes, and writing theory (see the discussion of hiitcNou and Me.nl in Harper, Volume .1, Chapter 5), loday (his image has been shattered. The works of the classic ethnographers are seen by m m as i flu sol tin-colonial past (Rosaldo, 19X9. p. 44). Although many feel nostalgic about this image, others celebrate its passing. Rosaldo (1989) qoOtM Cora Du llois, a retired Harvard anthropology professor, who lamented (his passing at a conference in 198(1, reflecting on the crisis in
anthropology: "|1 fed a distance] from the complexity «nddiaarray of what
I once found a justifiable and challenging discipline. . . . Il has been like moving trom a distinguished art museum into a garage sale" (p. '14).
I)u Hois regards (he classic ethnographies as pieces of timeless artwork, NM h M those contained in a museum. She detesls the chaos of the garage vale, which Rosaldo values: "It [the garage sate) provides a precise image of the pOSCCOlonkl situation where cultural artifacts flow between unlikely-places, and nothing is sacred, permanent, or sealed off The image of anthropology as a garage sale depicts our present global situation" (p. -14). Old standards no longer hold. Ethnographies do not produce timeless truths. The commitment to objectivism is now hi doubt. The complicity with imperialism is openly challenged today, and the belief in monumen-talism is a (lung of the past.
The legacies of this first period begin at the end of the nineteenth century, when the novel and the social sciences li.nl ha nine distinguished as separate systems of discourse (Clough, 1992, pp, 21-22). However, the Chicago school, with its emphasis on the life story and lite "slicc-of-life" approach to ethnographic materials, sought to develop an interpretive methodology that maintained the ccntrality of (he narrated life history appn i.ich. This led to the production of the texts that gave the rcsearchcr-as-author the power to represent the subject's story. Witten under the mantle ol Straightforward, semi ment-free social realism, these texts used the langu ige ol ordinary people. I hey articulated l social science v< rsion oi binary naturalism, which often produced the sympathetic illusion that a solution to a social problem had been found. Like films about the Depression era iuvenile delinquent and other social problems (Hoffman &: ľurdy, 19X1), these accounts romanticized the subject. They turned the deviant into ihc sociological version of a screen hero. These sociological stones, like their film counterparts, usually had happy endings, as they
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30
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TUE LANDSCAPE Of GUALITATIVE RESEARCH
followed individuals through the three stages of the classic morality tale: existence in a stale of grace, seduction by evil and the (all, and finally redemption through suffering.
The Modernist Phase
The modernist phase, or second moment, builds on the canonical works of the traditional period. Social realism, naturalism, and slice-of-life ethnographies arefstill valued. This phase extended through the postwar years io the 1970s; ii is still present in the work of many (see Wolcoti, 1992, for a review). In this period many texts attempted to formalize qualitative methods (sec, for example, Bogdan & Taylor, 197.5; Cicourel, 1964; Pilstead, 1970; Glaser ÔC Strauss, 1967; J. Lofland, 1971; Lofland St Lofland, 1984). 'The modernist ethnographer and sociological participant observer attempted rigorous, qualitative studies of important social processes, including deviance and social control in the classroom and society. This was a moment of creative ferment.
A new generation of graduate students, across lbe human disciplines, encountered new interpretive theories (cthnomcihodology, phenomenology, critical theory, feminism). They were drawn to qualitative research practices that would let them give a voice to society's underclass. Post positivism functioned as a powerful epístcmological paradigm in this moment. Researchers attempted to fit the arguments of Campbell and Stanley (1963) about internal and external validity to constructionist and interac-tionist models of the research act. They returned to the texts of the Chicago school as sources or inspiration (see Denzin, 1970, 1978).
A canonical text from this moment remains Boys in White (Becker er a!., 1961). Firmly entrenched in mid-century methodological discourse, this work attempted to make qualitative research as rigorous as its quantitative counterpart. Causal narratives were central to this project. This mul-tiinethod work combined Open-ended and quasi-structured interviewing with participant observation and the careful analysis of such materials in Standardised, statistical form. In a classic article, "Problems of Inference and Proof in Participant Observation," Howard S. Becker (1958/1970) describes the use of quasi-statistics:
Participant observations have occasionally been gathered in Standardized form capable of being transformed into legitimate statistical data. But the exigencies of the field usually prevent the collection of data in such a form
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Intfoduction
to meei the assumptions of statistical tests, so that the observer deals in what have been called "quasi-statistics." His conclusions, while implicitly numerical, do not require precise quantification- (j>. 31)
In the analysis of data, Becker notes, the qualitative researcher takes a cue from statistical colleagues. The researcher looks for probabilities or support for arguments concerning the likelihood that, or frequency with which, a conclusion in fact applies in a specific situation. Thus did work in the modernist period clothe itself in the language and rhetoric of positivist and postpositive discourse.
This was the golden age of rigorous qualitative analysis, bracketed in sociology by Boys in White (Becker e( al., 1961) at one end add The Discovery of O rounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) at the other. In education, qualitative research in this period was defined by George and l-ouise Spindler, Jules Henry, Harry Wolcott, and John Singleton. This form of qualitative research is still present in the work of such persons as Strauss and Corbin (1990) and Miles and Huberman (1993), and is represented in their chapters in ibis ihree-volumc set.
The "golden age" reinforced a picture of qualitative researchers as cultural romantics. Imbued with Promethean human powers, they valorized villains and outsiders as heroes to mainstream society. They embodied a belief in the contingency of self and society, and held to emancipatory ideals for which "one lives and dies." They put in place a tragic and often ironic view of society and self, and joined a long line of leftist cultural romantics that included Umerson, Marx, James, Dewey, Gramsci, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (West, 1989, chap. 6).
As this moment came to an end, the Vietnam War was everywhere present in American society. In 1969, alongside these political currents, Herbert Blumer and Everett Hughes met with a group of young sociologists called the "Chicago Irregulars" at the American Sociological Association meetings held in San Francisco and shared their memories of the "Chicago years." Lyn Lofland (1980) describes the 1969 meetings as a
moment of creative ferment—scholarly und political. The San Francisco
meetings witnessed not simply the BlumCt-1 lughes event but a "counterrevolution." ... a group first came to ... talk about die problems of being
a sociologist and a female------the discipline seemed literally to be bursting
with new . . . ideas: labelling theory, ethnoniethodology, conflict theory, phenomenology, dramaturgical analysis, (p. 253)
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