Nature of Qualitative Research

WHAT IS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH?
research) or what innovations arise when organizations focus on

sharing positive appreciative stories among its members (apprecia-
tive inquiry).
In its broadest sense, research is a systematic process by which
we know more about something than we did before engaging in
the process. We can engage in this process to contribute to the
knowledge base in a field (pure research), improve the practice of
a particular discipline (applied research), assess the value of
something (evaluation research), or address a particular, localized
problem (action research).
T H E N ATU R E OF QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
Most people know what an experiment is or what a survey is. We
might know someone in a weight loss experiment in which some
use diet alone, some use diet and exercise, and others use diet,
exercise, and an appetite suppressant. This is an experiment to see
which “treatment” results in the most weight loss. Randomly
dividing participants into three groups will test which treatment
has brought about the most improvement. Surveys are also familiar
to us, as when we are stopped in the shopping mall and asked to
respond to some survey questions about products we use, movies
we’ve seen, and so on. Survey research describes “what is”; that is,
how variables are distributed across a population or phenomenon.
For example, we might be interested in who is likely to watch which
television shows and their age, race, gender, level of education, and
occupation.
There are a number of variations on these designs, but basically
experimental approaches try to determine the cause of events and
to predict similar events in the future. Survey or descriptive designs
are intended to systematically describe the facts and characteristics
of a given phenomenon or the relationships between events and
phenomena. Sometimes these designs are grouped together and
labeled “quantitative” because the focus is on how much or how
many, and results are usually presented in numerical form.
Rather than determining cause and effect, predicting, or
describing the distribution of some attribute among a population,
we might be interested in uncovering the meaning of a
6 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: A GUIDE TO DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
phenomenon for those involved. Qualitative researchers are inter-

ested in understanding how people interpret their experiences,
how they construct their worlds, and what meaning they attribute
to their experiences. For example, rather than studying retired
adults to find out the percentage and characteristics of those who
take on part-time jobs after retirement, which could be done
through a survey, we might be more interested in how people
adjust to retirement, how they think about this phase of their lives,
the process they engaged in when moving from full-time work to
retirement, and so on. These questions are about understanding
their experiences and would call for a qualitative design. While
Braun and Clarke’s (2013) distinction between qualitative and
quantitative research is somewhat simplified, they write that “the
most basic definition of qualitative research is that it uses words as
data . . . collected and analyzed in all sorts of ways. Quantitative
research, in contrast, uses numbers as data and analyzes them using
statistical techniques” (pp. 3–4, emphasis in original).
W HERE D O E S Q U A L I T A T I V E R E S E A R C H
COME FROM?
Decades before what we now call “qualitative research” or “quali-
tative inquiry” became popular, anthropologists and sociologists
were asking questions about people’s lives, the social and cultural
contexts in which they lived, the ways in which they understood
their worlds, and so on. Anthropologists and sociologists went into
“the field,” whether it was a village in Africa or a city in the United
States, observed what was going on, interviewed people in these
settings, and collected and analyzed artifacts and personal and
public documents relevant to understanding what they were study-
ing. The written accounts of these studies were qualitative in
nature. Bogdan and Biklen (2011) point out that Chicago sociolo-
gists in the 1920s and 1930s emphasized “the intersection of social
context and biography” that lies at “the roots of contemporary
descriptions of qualitative research as holistic” (p. 9).
In addition, especially in the life histories Chicago School soci-
ologists produced, the importance of seeing the world from the
perspective of those who were seldom listened to—the criminal,
WHAT IS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH? 7
the vagrant, the immigrant—was emphasized. While not using

the phrase, they knew they were “giving voice” to points of view of
people marginalized in the society. (p. 10)
In addition to the work of anthropologists and sociologists,

people in professional fields such as education, law, counseling,
health, and social work have often been interested in specific cases
for understanding a phenomenon. Piaget, for example, derived his
theory of cognitive development by studying his own two children.
Investigative journalism and even the humanities and the arts have
also always been interested in portraying people’s experiences in
specific social contexts.
With regard to the development of what we now call qualitative
research, two important mid-twentieth-century publications con-
tributed to its emergence. In 1967, sociologists Barney Glaser and
Anselm Strauss published The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies
for Qualitative Research. Rather than testing theory, their book
made a case for building theory from inductively analyzing a social
phenomenon. This book provided both a theoretical framework
and practical strategies for doing this type of research. This book
and subsequent work by Strauss and his colleagues continue to
define and have an impact on our understanding of qualitative
research.
The second publication we would point to as important in
defining qualitative research was a monograph by Egon Guba
published in 1978, titled Toward a Methodology of Naturalistic Inquiry
in Educational Evaluation. A study was “naturalistic” if it took place in
a real-world setting rather than a laboratory, and whatever was
being observed and studied was allowed to happen “naturally.” In
naturalistic inquiry the investigator does not control or manipulate
what is being studied. It is also discovery-oriented research, in
which the findings are not predetermined.
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a growing number of
publications contributing to the understanding of this form of
inquiry (see, for example, Bogdan & Taylor, 1975; Guba & Lincoln,
1981; Patton, 1978, 1981). Researchers in many fields outside
the traditional disciplines of anthropology and sociology, such as
education, health, administration, social work, and so on, began to
adopt qualitative methods. Discipline-specific journals began
8 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: A GUIDE TO DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
publishing qualitative studies, and several journals devoted to

qualitative research were established.
Today there are hundreds of books on various aspects of
qualitative research, as well as journals and regularly held confer-
ences devoted to qualitative research. In fact, there are now
numerous paradigms and strategies of inquiry and analysis meth-
ods to choose from in designing a study, depending on the study’s
purpose and theoretical orientation (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba,
2011). Although this is certainly good news in terms of presenting
the researcher with a rich array of choices for doing qualitative
research, making sense of all this material can be a daunting task
for novice and experienced researchers alike!
PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES
In the preceding section we presented a brief sketch of the
emergence of what we today call qualitative research. An under-
standing of the nature of this type of research can also be gained by
looking at its philosophical foundations. Unfortunately, there is
almost no consistency across writers in how this aspect of qualitative
research is discussed. Some talk about traditions and theoretical
underpinnings (Bogdan & Biklen, 2011), theoretical traditions and
orientations (Patton, 2015); others, about paradigms and perspec-
tives (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011), philosophical assumptions and
interpretive frameworks (Creswell, 2013), or epistemology and
theoretical perspectives (Crotty, 1998). In true qualitative fashion,
each writer makes sense of the underlying philosophical influences
in his or her own way. In this section we share our understanding.
First, it is helpful to philosophically position qualitative
research among other forms of research. Such a positioning entails
what one believes about the nature of reality (also called ontology)
and the nature of knowledge (epistemology). Most texts on quali-
tative research address philosophical foundations of this type of
research in contrast to other types (Creswell, 2013; Denzin &
Lincoln, 2011; Patton, 2015). Prasad’s (2005) discussion of inter-
pretive, critical, and “post” (as in postmodernism, poststructural-
ism, and postcolonialism) traditions is helpful here, as are
typologies proposed by Carr and Kemmis (1995) and Lather
(1992, 2006). Carr and Kemmis make distinctions among three

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WHAT IS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH?

research) or what innovations arise when organizations focus on

phenomenon for those involved. Qualitative researchers are inter-

the vagrant, the immigrant—was emphasized. While not using

In addition to the work of anthropologists and sociologists,

publishing qualitative studies, and several journals devoted to

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