Denzin - Lincoln, Discipline and Practice of QLR001 PDF

SECOND EDITION
Strategies
of 8
Qualitatíve
Inquiry
editors
NORMAN K. DENZIN
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
YVONNA S, LINCOLN
Texas A&M University
SAGE Publications
International Educational and Professional Publisher
Thousand Oaks • London • New Delhi
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strategies of qualitative inquiry / Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S.

Lincoln.—2nd ed.
p. cm.
Selections from the Handbook of qualitative research. 2nd ed.
Includes bibliographical references and Índex.
ISBN 0-7619-2691-7 (Paper)
1. Social sciences-Methodology. 2. Social sciences-Research-Methodology.
I. Denzin, Norman K. II. Lincoln, Yvonna S. III. Handbook of qualitative
research.
H61 .S8823 2003
300'.7'2—dc21 2002156612
Printed on acid-free paper
03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acquiring Editor: Margaret H. Seawell

Production Editor: Claudia A. Hoffman
Typesetter: Christina Hill
Indexer: Molly Hall
Cover Designen Michelle Lee and Ravi Balasuriya
Cover Photograph: C. A. Hoffman
Contents
Preface vii
Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln
1. Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of

Qualitative Research 1
2. The Choreography of Qualitative Research Design:

Minuets, Improvisations, and Crystallization 46
Valerie J. Janesick
3. An Untold Story? Doing Funded Qualitative Research 80

Ju ianne Cheelc
4. Performance Ethnography:
A Brief History and Some Advice 112
Michal M. McCall
5. CaseStudies 134
Robert E. Stake
6. Ethnography and Ethnographic Representation 165

Barbara Tedlock
1
Introduction
The Discipline and
Pracüce of Qualitative Research
^ Qualitative research has a long, distinguished, and sometimes an-

guished history in the human disciplines. In sociology, the work of
the "Chicago school" in the 1920s and 1930s established the impor-
tance of qualitative inquiry for the study of human group life. In anthro-
pology, during the same time period, the discipline-defining studies of
Boas, Mead, Benedict, Bateson, Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, and
Malinowski charted the outlines of the fieldwork method (see Gupta &
Ferguson, 1997; Stocking, 1986, 1989). The agenda was clear-cut: The
observer went to a foreign setting to study the customs and habits of
another society and culture (see in Volume 1, Vidich & Lyman, Chapter 2;
Tedlock, this volume, Chapter 6; see also Rosaldo, 1989, pp. 25-45, for
criticisms of this tradition). Soon, qualitative research would be employed
in other social and behavioral science disciplines, including education
(especially the work of Dewey), history, political science, business, medi-
cine, nursing, social work, and Communications.
In the opening chapter in Part I of Volume 1, Vidich and Lyman chart
many key features of this history. In this now classic analysis, they note,
STRATEGIES OF QUALITATIVE INQUIRY
with some irony, that qualitative research in sociology and anthropology

was "born out of concern to understand the 'other.' " Furthermore, this
other was the exotic other, a primitive, nonwhite person from a foreign
culture judged to be less civilized than that of the researcher. Of course,
there were colonialists long before there were anthropologists. Nonethe-
less, there would be no colonial, and now no postcolonial, history were it
not for this investigative mentality that turned the dark-skinned other into
the object of the ethnographer's gaze.
Thus does bell hooks (1990, pp. 126-128) read the famous photo that
appears on the cover of Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) as an
instance of this mentality (see also Behar, 1995, p. 8; Cordón, 1988). The
photo depicts Stephen Tyler doing fieldwork in India. Tyler is seated some
distance from three dark-skinned persons. A child is poking his or her
head out of a basket. A woman is hidden in the shadows of a hut. A man, a
checkered white-and-black shawl across his shoulder, elbow propped on
his knee, hand resting along the side of his face, is staring at Tyler. Tyler is
writing in a field journal. A piece of white cloth is attached to his glasses,
perhaps shielding him from the sun. This patch of whiteness marks Tyler as
the white male writer studying these passive brown and black persons.
Indeed, the brown male's gaze signáis some desire, or some attachment to
Tyler. In contrast, the female's gaze is completely hidden by the shadows
and by the words of the book's title, which cross her face (hooks, 1990,
p. 127). And so this cover photo of perhaps the most influential book on
ethnography in the last half of the 20th century reproduces "two ideas that
are quite fresh in the racist imagination: the notion of the white male as
writer/authority . . . and the idea of the passive brown/black man [and
woman and child] who is doing nothing, merely looking on" (hooks,
1990, p. 127).
In this introductory chapter, we will define the field of qualitative re-
search and then navigate, chart, and review the history of qualitative re-
search in the human disciplines. This will allow us to lócate this vol-
ume and its contents within their historical moments. (These historical
moments are somewhat artificial; they are socially constructed, quasi-
historical, and overlapping conventions. Nevertheless, they permit a "per-
formance" of developing ideas. They also facilítate an increasing sensitiv-
ity to and sophistication about the pitfalls and promises of ethnography
and qualitative research.) We will present a conceptual framework for
reading the qualitative research act as a multicultural, gendered pro-
cess, and then provide a brief introduction to the chapters that follow.
Introductíon
Returning to the observations of Vidich and Lyman as well as those of

hooks, we will conclude with a brief discussion of qualitative research and
critical race theory (see also in Volume 1, Ladson-Billings, Chapter 9; and
in Volume 3, Denzin, Chapter 13). As we indícate in our preface, we use
the metaphor of the bridge to structure what follows. We see this volume
as a bridge connecting historical moments, research methods, paradigms,
and communities of interpretive scholars.
• Definitional Issues
Qualitative research is a field of inquiry in its own right. It crosscuts disci-

plines, fields, and subject matters.1 A complex, interconnected family of
terms, concepts, and assumptions surround the term qualitative research.
These include the traditions associated with foundationalism, positivism,
postfoundationalism, postpositivism, poststructuralism, and the many
qualitative research perspectives, and/or methods, connected to cultural
and interpretive studies (the chapters in Part II of Volume 1 take up these
paradigms).2 There are sepárate and detailed literatures on the many meth-
ods and approaches that fall under the category of qualitative research,
such as case study, politics and ethics, participatory inquiry, interviewing,
participant observation, visual methods, and interpretive analysis.
In North America, qualitative research opérales in a complex historical
field that crosscuts seven historical moments (we discuss these moments in
detail below). These seven moments overlap and simultaneously opérate
in the present.3 We define them as the traditional (1900-1950); the mod-
ernist or golden age (1950-1970); blurred genres (1970-1986); the crisis
of representation (1986-1990); the postmodern, a period of experimen-
tal and new ethnographies (1990-1995); postexperimental inquiry
(1995-2000); and the future, which is now (2000-). The future, the sev-
enth moment, is concerned with moral discourse, with the development of
sacred textualities. The seventh moment asks that the social sciences and
the humanities become sites for critical conversations about democracy,
race, gender, class, nation-states, globalization, freedom, and community.
The postmodern moment was defined in part by a concern for literary
and rhetorical tropes and the narrative turn, a concern for storytelling, for
composing ethnographies in new ways (Ellis & Bochner, 1996). Laurel
Richardson (1997) observes that this moment was shaped by a new sensi-
bility, by doubt, by a refusal to privilege any method or theory (p. 173).
But now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the narrativa turn has been
taken. Many have learned how to write differently, including how to
lócate themselves in their texts. We now struggle to connect qualitative
research to the hopes, needs, goals, and promises of a free democratic
society.
Successive waves of epistemological theorizing move across these seven
moments. The traditional period is associated with the positivist, foun-
dational paradigm. The modernist or golden age and blurred genres mo-
ments are connected to the appearance of postpositivist arguments. At the
same time, a variety of new interpretive, qualitative perspectives were
taken up, including hermeneutics, structuralism, semiotics, phenomenol-
ogy, cultural studies, and feminism.4 In the blurred genres phase, the
humanities became central resources for critical, interpretive theory, and
for the qualitative research project broadly conceived. The researcher
became a bricoleur (see below), learning how to borrow from many differ-
ent disciplines.
The blurred genres phase produced the next stage, the crisis of repre-
sentation. Here researchers struggled with how to lócate themselves and
their subjects in reflexive texts. A kind of methodological diaspora took
place, a two-way exodus. Humanists migrated to the social sciences,
searching for new social theory, new ways to study popular culture and its
local, ethnographic contexts. Social scientists turned to the humanities,
hoping to learn how to do complex structural and poststructural readings
of social texts. From the humanities, social scientists also learned how to
produce texts that refused to be read in simplistic, linear, incontrovertible
terms. The line between text and context blurred. In the postmodern
experimental moment researchers continued to move away from founda-
tional and quasi-foundational criteria (see in Volume 3, Smith & Deemer,
Chapter 12, and Richardson, Chapter 14; and in Volume 1, Gergen &
Gergen, Chapter 13). Alternative evaluative criteria were sought, criteria
that might prove evocative, moral, critical, and rooted in local under-
standings.
Any definition of qualitative research must work within this complex
historical field. Qualitative research means different things in each of these
moments. Nonetheless, an initial, generic definition can be offered: Quali-
tative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world.
It consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world
visible. These practices transform the world. They turn the world into a
series of representations, including field notes, interviews, conversations,
Introduction
photographs, recordings, and memos to the self. At this level, qualitative

research involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to the world. This
means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings,
attempting to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the
meanings people bring to them.5
Qualitative research involves the studied use and collection of a variety
of empirical materials—case study; personal experience; introspection;
life story; interview; artifacts; cultural texts and productions; obser-
vational, historical, interactional, and visual texts—that describe routine
and problematic moments and meanings in individuáis' Uves. Accordingly,
qualitative researchers deploy a wide range of interconnected interpretive
practices, hoping always to get a better understanding of the subject mat-
ter at hand. It is understood, however, that each practice makes the world
visible in a different way. Henee there is frequently a commitment to using
more than one interpretive practice in any study.
The Qualitative Researcher as Bricoleur and Quilt Maker
The qualitative researcher may take on múltiple and gendered im-

ages: scientist, naturalist, field-worker, journalist, social critic, artist, per-
former, jazz musician, filmmaker, quilt maker, essayist. The many meth-
odological practices of qualitative research may be viewed as soft science,
journalism, ethnography, bricolage, quilt making, or montage. The re-
searcher, in turn, may be seen as a bricoleur, as a maker of quilts, or, as in
filmmaking, a person who assembles images into montages. (On montage,
see the discussion below as well as Cook, 1981, pp. 171-177; Monaco,
1981, pp. 322-328. On quilting, see hooks, 1990, pp. 115-122; Wolcott,
1995, pp. 31-33.)
Nelson, Treichler, and Grossberg (1992), Lévi-Strauss (1966), and
Weinstein and Weinstein (1991) clarify the meanings of bricolage and bri-
coleur.6 A bricoleur is a "Jack of all trades or a kind of professional do-it-
yourself person" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 17). There are many kinds of bri-
coleurs—interpretive, narrative, theoretical, political (see below). The
interpretive bricoleur produces a bricolage—that is, a pieced-together set
of representations that are fitted to the specifics of a complex situation.
"The solution [bricolage] which is the result of the bricoleur's method is an
[emergent] construction" (Weinstein & Weinstein, 1991, p. 161) that
changes and takes new forms as different tools, methods, and techniques
of representation and interpretation are added to the puzzle. Nelson et al.
(1992) describe the methodology of cultural studies "as a bricolage. Its

choice of practice, that is, is pragmatic, strategic and self-reflexive" (p. 2).
This understanding can be applied, with qualifications, to qualitative
research.
The qualitative researcher as bricoleur or maker of quilts uses the aes-
thetic and material tools of his or her craft, deploying whatever strategies,
methods, or empirical materials are at hand (Becker, 1998, p. 2). If new
tools or techniques have to be invented, or pieced together, then the re-
searcher will do this. The choices as to which interpretive practices to
employ are not necessarily set in advance. The "choice of research prac-
tices depends upon the questions that are asked, and the questions depend
on their context" (Nelson et al., 1992, p. 2), what is available in the con-
text, and what the researcher can do in that setting.
These interpretive practices involve aesthetic issues, an aesthetics of
representation that goes beyond the pragmatic, or the practical. Here
the concept of montage is useful (seeCook, 1981,p. 323; Monaco, 1981,
pp. 171-172). Montage is a method of editing cinematic images. In the his-
tory of cinematography, montage is associated with the work of Sergei
Eisenstein, especially his film The Battleship Potemkin (1925). In mon-
tage, several different images are superimposed onto one another to créate
a picture. In a sense, montage is like pentimento, in which something that
has been painted out of a picture (an image the painter "repented," or
denied) becomes visible again, creating something new. What is new is
what had been obscured by a previous image.
Montage and pentimento, like jazz, which is improvisation, créate the
sense that images, sounds, and understandings are blending together,
overlapping, forming a composite, a new creation. The images seem to
shape and define one another, and an emotional, gestalt effect is pro-
duced. Often these images are combinad in a swiftly run filmic sequence
that produces a dizzily revolving collection of several images around a
central or focused picture or sequence; such effects are often used to sig-
nify the passage of time.
Perhaps the most famous instance of montage is the Odessa Steps
sequence in The Battleship Potemkin.7 In the climax of the film, the citi-
zens of Odessa are being massacred by czarist troops on the stone steps
leading down to the harbor. Eisenstein cuts to a young mother as she
pushes her baby in a carriage across the landing in front of the firing
troops. Citizens rush past her, jolting the carriage, which she is afraid to
push down to the next flight of stairs. The troops are above her firing at
Introduction
the citizens. She is trapped between the troops and the steps. She screams.
A Une of rifles pointing to the sky erupt in smoke. The mother's head
sways back. The wheels of the carriage teeter on the edge of the steps. The
mother's hand clutches the silver buckle of her belt. Below her people are
being beaten by soldiers. Blood drips over the mother's white gloves. The
baby's hand reaches out of the carriage. The mother sways back and forth.
The troops advance. The mother falls back against the carriage. A woman
watches in horror as the rear wheels of the carriage roll off the edge of the
landing. With accelerating speed the carriage bounces down the steps, past
the dead citizens. The baby is jostled from side to side inside the carriage.
The soldiers fire their rifles into a group of wounded citizens. A student
screams as the carriage leaps across the steps, tilts, and overturns (Cook,
1981, p. 167).8
Montage uses brief images to créate a clearly defined sense of urgency
and complexity. Montage invites viewers to construct interpretations that
build on one another as the scene unfolds. These interpretations are built
on associations based on the contrasting images that blend into one
another. The underlying assumption of montage is that viewers perceive
and interpret the shots in a "montage sequence not sequentially, or one
at a time, but rather simultaneously" (Cook, 1981, p. 172). The viewer
puts the sequences together into a meaningful emotional whole, as if in a
glance, all at once.
The qualitative researcher who uses montage is like a quilt maker or a
jazz improvisen The quilter stitches, edits, and puts slices of reality to-
gether. This process creates and brings psychological and emotional unity
to an interpretive experience. There are many examples of montage in
current qualitative research (see Diversi, 1998; Jones, 1999; Lather &
Smithies, 1997; Ronai, 1998). Using múltiple voices, different textual for-
mats, and various typefaces, Lather and Smithies (1997) weave a complex
text about women who are HIV positive and women with AIDS. Jones
(1999) creates a performance text using lyrics from the blues songs sung by
Billie Holiday.
In texts based on the metaphors of montage, quilt making, and jazz
improvisation, many different things are going on at the same time—
different voices, different perspectives, points of views, angles of visión.
Like performance texts, works that use montage simultaneously créate
and enact moral meaning. They move from the personal to the political,
the local to the historical and the cultural. These are dialogical texts. They
presume an active audience. They créate spaces for give-and-take between
reader and writer. They do more than turn the other into the object of
the social science gaze (see McCall, Chapter 4, this volume.
Qualitative research is inherently multimethod in focus (Flick, 1998,
p. 229). However, the use of múltiple methods, or triangulation, reflects
an attempt to secure an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon in
question. Objective reality can never be captured. We can know a thing
only through its representations. Triangulation is not a tool or a strategy of
validation, but an alternative to validation (Flick, 1998, p. 230). The com-
bination of múltiple methodological practices, empirical materials, per-
spectives, and observers in a single study is best understood, then, as a
strategy that adds rigor, breadth, complexity, richness, and depth to any
inquiry (see Flick, 1998, p. 231).
In Chapter 14 of Volume 3, Richardson disputes the concept of triangu-
lation, asserting that the central image for qualitative inquiry is the crystal,
not the triangle. Mixed-genre texts in the postexperimental moment have
more than three sides. Like crystals, Eisenstein's montage, the jazz solo, or
the pieces that make up a quilt, the mixed-genre text, as Richardson notes,
"combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, sub-
stances, transmutations. . . . Crystals grow, change, alter. . . . Crystals are
prisms that reflect externalities and refract within themselves, creating dif-
ferent colors, patterns, and arrays, casting off in different directions."
In the crystallization process, the writer tells the same tale from differ-
ent points of view. For example, in A Thrice-Told Tale (1992), Margery
Wolf uses fiction, field notes, and a scientific article to give an accounting
of the same set of experiences in a native village. Similarly, in her play Pires
in theMirror(\993), Anna Deavere Smith presents a series of performance
pieces based on interviews with people involved in a racial conflict in
Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on August, 19,1991 (see Denzin, Chapter 13,
Volume 3). The play has múltiple speaking parts, including conversations
with gang members, pólice officers, and anonymous young girls and boys.
There is no "correct" telling of this event. Each telling, like light hitting a
crystal, reflects a different perspective on this incident.
Viewed as a crystalline form, as a montage, or as a creative performance
around a central theme, triangulation as a form of, or alternative to, valid-
ity thus can be extended. Triangulation is the display of múltiple, refracted
realities simultaneously. Each of the metaphors "works" to créate simulta-
neity rather than the sequential or linear. Readers and audiences are then
invited to explore competing visions of the context, to become immersed
in and merge with new realities to comprehend.
Introductíon
The methodological bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of

diverse tasks, ranging from interviewing to intensive self-reflection and
introspectíon. The theoretical bricoleur reads widely and is knowledge-
able about the many interpretive paradigms (feminism, Marxism, cultural
studies, constructivism, queer theory) that can be brought to any particu-
lar problem. He or she may not, however, feel that paradigms can be min-
gled or synthesized. That is, one cannot easily move between paradigms as
overarching philosophical systems denoting particular ontologies, episte-
mologies, and methodologies. They represent belief systems that attach
users to particular worldviews. Perspectives, in contrast, are less well
developed systems, and one can more easily move between them. The
researcher-as-bn'co/ezir-theorist works between and within competing and
overlapping perspectives and paradigms.
The interpretive bricoleur understands that research is an Interactive
process shaped by his or her personal history, biography, gender, social
class, race, and ethnicity, and by those of the people in the setting. The
political bricoleur knows that science is power, for all research findings
have political implications. There is no value-free science. A civic social
science based on a politics of hope is sought (Lincoln, 1999). The
gendered, narrativa bricoleur also knows that researchers all tell stories
about the worlds they have studied. Thus the narratives, or stories, scien-
tists tell are accounts couched and framed within specific storytelling
traditions, often defined as paradigms (e.g., positivism, postpositivism,
constructivism).
The product of the interpretive bricoleur's labor is a complex, quilt-
like bricolage, a reflexive collage or montage—a set of fluid, intercon-
nected images and representations. This interpretive structure is like a
quilt, a performance text, a sequence of representations connecting the
parís to the whole.
Qualitative Research as a
Site of Múltiple Interpretive Practices
Qualitative research, as a set of interpretive activities, privileges no sin-

gle methodological practice over another. As a site of discussion, or dis-
course, qualitative research is difficult to define clearly. It has no theory or
paradigm that is distinctly its own. As the contributions to Part II of Vol-
ume 1 reveal, múltiple theoretical paradigms claim use of qualitative re-
search methods and strategies, from constructivist to cultural studies,
STRATEGIES OF QUAUTATIVE INQUIRY
feminism, Marxism, and ethnic models of study. Qualitative research is

used in many sepárate disciplines, as we will discuss below. It does not
belong to a single discipline.
Ñor does qualitative research have a distinct set of methods or practices
that are entirely its own. Qualitative researchers use semiotics, narrative,
content, discourse, archival and phonemic analysis, even statistics, tables,
graphs, and numbers. They also draw upon and utilize the approaches,
methods, and techniques of ethnomethodology, phenomenology, herme-
neutics, feminism, rhizomatics, deconstructionism, ethnography, inter-
views, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, survey research, and participant
observation, among others.9 All of these research practices "can provide
important insights and knowledge" (Nelson et al., 1992, p. 2). No specific
method or practice can be privileged over any other.
Many of these methods, or research practices, are used in other con-
texts in the human disciplines. Each bears the traces of its own disciplinary
history. Thus there is an extensive history of the uses and meanings of eth-
nography and ethnology in education (see Fine, Weis, Weseen, & Wong,
Volume 1, Chapter 4); of participant observation and ethnography in
anthropology (see Tedlock, this volume, Chapter 6; Ryan & Bernard, Vol-
ume 3, Chapter 7; Brady, Volume 3, Chapter 15), sociology (see Gubrium
& Holstein, this volume, Chapter 7; Harper, Volume 3, Chapter 5;
Fontana & Frey, Volume 3, Chapter 2; Silverman, Volume 3, Chapter 9),
communication (see Filis 8c Bochner, Volume 3, Chapter 6), and cultural
studies (see Frow & Morris, Volume 1, Chapter 11); of textual, hermeneu-
tic, feminist, psychoanalytic, semiotic, and narrative analysis in cinema
and literary studies (see Olesen, Volume 1, Chapter 8; Brady, Volume 3,
Chapter 15); of archival, material culture, historical, and document analy-
sis in history, biography, and archaeology (see Hodder, Volume 3, Chapter
4; Tierney, this volume, Chapter 9); and of discourse and conversa-
tional analysis in medicine, Communications, and education (see Miller &
Crabtree, this volume, Chapter 12; Silverman, Volume 3, Chapter 9).
The many histories that surround each method or research strategy
reveal how múltiple uses and meanings are brought to each practice. Tex-
tual analyses in literary studies, for example, often treat texts as self-
contained systems. On the other hand, a researcher taking a cultural stud-
ies or feminist perspective will read a text in terms of its location within
a historical moment marked by a particular gender, race, or class ideol-
ogy. A cultural studies use of ethnography would bring a set of under-
standings from feminism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism to the
10
Introduction
project. These understandings would not be shared by mainstream post-

positivist sociologists. Similarly, postpositivist and poststructuralist histo-
rians bring different understandings and uses to the methods and findings
of historical research (see Tierney, this volume, Chapter 9). These tensions
and contradictions are all evident in the chapters in this volume.
These sepárate and múltiple uses and meanings of the methods of quali-
tative research make it difficult for researchers to agree on any essential
definition of the field, for it is never just one thing.10 Still, we must estab-
lish a definition for our purposes here. We borrow from, and paraphrase,
Nelson et al.'s (1992, p. 4) attempt to define cultural studies:
Qualitative research is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and some-

times counterdisciplinary field. It crosscuts the humanities and the social
and physical sciences. Qualitative research is many things at the same time.
It is multiparadigmatic in focus. Its practitioners are sensitive to the valué of
the multimethod approach. They are committed to the naturalistic perspec-
tive and to the interpretive understanding of human experience. At the
same time, the field is inherently political and shaped by múltiple ethical
and political positions.
Qualitative research embraces two tensions at the same time. On the one
hand, it is drawn to a broad, interpretive, postexperimental, postmodern,
feminist, and critical sensibility. On the other hand, it is drawn to more nar-
rowly defined positivist, postpositivist, humanistic, and naturalistic con-
ceptions of human experience and its analysis. Further, these tensions can
be combined in the same project, bringing both postmodern and naturalistic
or both critical and humanistic perspectives to bear.
This rather complex statement means that qualitative research, as a set

of practices, embraces within its own múltiple disciplinary histories con-
stant tensions and contradictions over the project itself, including its
methods and the forms its findings and interpretations take. The field
sprawls between and crosscuts all of the human disciplines, even includ-
ing, in some cases, the physical sciences. Its practitioners are variously
committed to modern, postmodern, and postexperimental sensibilities
and the approaches to social research that these sensibilities imply.
Resistances to Qualitative Studies
The academic and disciplinary resistances to qualitative research illus-

trate the politics embedded in this field of discourse. The challenges to
qualitative research are many. Qualitative researchers are callad journal-

ists, or soft scienrists. Their work is termed unscientific, or only explor-
atory, or subjective. It is called criticism and not theory, or it is interpretad
politically, as a disguised versión of Marxism or secular humanism (see
Huber, 1995; see also Denzin, 1997, pp. 258-261).
These resistances reflect an uneasy awareness that the traditions of
qualitative research commit the researcher to a critique of the positivist or
postpositivist project. But the positivist resistance to qualitative research
goes beyond the "ever-present desire to maintain a distinction between
hard science and soft scholarship" (Carey, 1989, p. 99; see also in Volume
1, Schwandt, Chapter 7; in Volume 3, Smith & Deemer, Chapter 12). The
experimental (positivist) sciences (physics, chemistry, economics, and psy-
chology, for example) are often seen as the crowning achievements of
Western civilization, and in their practices it is assumed that "truth" can
transcend opinión and personal bias (Carey, 1989, p. 99; Schwandt,
1997b, p. 309). Qualitative research is seen as an assault on this tradi-
tion, whose adherents often retreat into a "value-free objectivist science"
(Carey, 1989, p. 104) model to defend their position. They seldom at-
tempt to make explicit, or to critique, the "moral and political com-
mitments in their own contingent work" (Carey, 1989, p. 104; see also
Lincoln & Cuba, Chapter 6, Volume 1).
Positivists further allege that the so-called new experimental qualitative
researchers write fiction, not science, and that these researchers have no
way of verifying their truth statements. Ethnographic poetry and fiction
signal the death of empirical science, and there is little to be gained by
attempting to engage in moral criticism. These critics presume a stable,
unchanging reality that can be studied using the empirical methods of
objective social science (see Huber, 1995). The province of qualitative re-
search, accordingly, is the world of lived experience, for this is where indi-
vidual belief and action intersect with culture. Under this model there is no
preoccupation with discourse and method as material interpretive prac-
tices that constitute representation and description. Thus is the textual,
narrative turn rejected by the positivists.
The opposition to positive science by the postpositivists (see below)
and the poststructuralists is seen, then, as an attack on reason and truth.
At the same time, the positivist science attack on qualitative research is
regarded as an attempt to legislate one versión of truth over another.
This complex political terrain defines the many traditions and strands
of qualitative research: the British tradition and its presence in other
12
Introduction
national contexts; the American pragmatic, naturalistic, and interpretive

traditions in sociology, anthropology, communication, and education; the
Germán and French phenomenological, hermeneutic, semiotic, Marxist,
structural, and poststructural perspectives; feminist studies, African
American studies, Latino studies, queer studies, studies of indigenous and
aboriginal cultures. The politics of qualitative research créate a tensión
that informs each of the above traditions. This tensión itself is constantly
being reexamined and interrogated, as qualitative research confronts a
changing historical world, new intellectual positions, and its own institu-
tional and academic conditions.
To summarize: Qualitative research is many things to many people. Its
essence is twofold: a commitment to some versión of the naturalistic,
interpretive approach to its subject matter and an ongoing critique of the
politics and methods of postpositivism. We turn now to a brief discussion
of the major differences between qualitative and quantitative approaches
to research. We then discuss ongoing differences and tensions within qual-
itative inquiry.
Qualitative Versus Quantitative Research
The word qualitative implies an emphasis on the qualities of entities

and on processes and meanings that are not experimentally examined or
measured (if measured at all) in terms of quantity, amount, intensity,
or frequency. Qualitative researchers stress the socially constructed na-
ture of reality, the intímate relationship between the researcher and what
is studied, and the situational constraints that shape inquiry. Such re-
searchers emphasize the value-laden nature of inquiry. They seek answers
to questions that stress how social experience is created and given mean-
ing. In contrast, quantitative studies emphasize the measurement and
analysis of causal relationships between variables, not processes. Propo-
nents of such studies claim that their work is done from within a value-free
framework.
Research Styles:
Doíng the Same Things D'ifferently?
Of course, both qualitative and quantitative researchers "think they

know something about society worth telling to others, and they use a vari-
ety of forms, media and means to communicate their ideas and findings"
13
(Becker, 1986, p. 122). Qualitative research differs from quantitative re-

search in five significant ways (Becker, 1996). These points of difference
turn on different ways of addressing the same set of issues. They return
always to the politics of research, and to who has the power to legislare
correct solutions to these problems.
Uses of positivism and postpositivism. First, both perspectives are
shaped by the positivist and postpositivist traditions in the physical and
social sciences (see the discussion below). These two positivist science tra-
ditions hold to naive and critical realist positions concerning reality and its
perception. In the positivist versión it is contended that there is a reality
out there to be studied, captured, and understood, whereas the post-
positivists argüe that reality can never be fully apprehended, only approxi-
mated (Guba, 1990, p. 22). Postpositivism relies on múltiple methods as a
way of capturing as much of reality as possible. At the same time, emphasis
is placed on the discovery and verification of theories. Traditional evalua-
tion criteria, such as internal and external validity, are stressed, as is the use
of qualitative procedures that lend themselves to structured (sometimes
statistical) analysis. Computer-assisted methods of analysis that permit
frequency counts, tabulations, and low-level statistical analyses may also
be employed.
The positivist and postpositivist traditions linger like long shadows
over the qualitative research project. Historically, qualitative research was
defined within the positivist paradigm, where qualitative researchers
attempted to do good positivist research with less rigorous methods and
procedures. Some mid-20th-century qualitative researchers (e.g., Becker,
Geer, Hughes, & Strauss, 1961) reported participant observation findings
in terms of quasi-statistics. As recently as 1998, Strauss and Corbin, two
leaders of the grounded theory approach to qualitative research, at-
tempted to modify the usual canons of good (positivist) science to fit their
own postpositivist conception of rigorous research (but see Charmaz,
Chapter 8, this volume; see also Glaser, 1992). Some applied researchers,
while claiming to be atheoretical, often fit within the positivist or postpos-
itivist framework by default.
Flick (1998, pp. 2-3) usefully summarizes the differences between these
two approaches to inquiry. He observes that the quantitative approach has
been used for purposes of isolating "causes and effects... operationalizing
theoretical relations ... [and] measuring a n d . . . quantifying phenomena.
.. allowing the generalization of findings" (p. 3). But today doubt is cast on
such projects, because "Rapid social change and the resulting diversifica-
14
¡ntroduction
tion of life worlds are increasingly confronting social researchers with

new social contexts and perspectives. . . . traditional deductive method-
ologies . . . are failing. . . . thus research is increasingly forced to make
use of inductive strategies instead of starting from theories and testing
them. . . . knowledge and practice are studied as local knowledge and
practice" (p. 2).
Spindler and Spindler (1992) summarize their qualitative approach to
quantitative materials: "Instrumentation and quantification are simply
procedures employed to extend and reinforce certain kinds of data, inter-
pretations and test hypotheses across samples. Both must be kept in their
place. One must avoid their premature or overly extensive use as a security
mechanism" (p. 69).
Although many qualitative researchers in the postpositivist tradition
will use statistical measures, methods, and documents as a way of locating
groups of subjects within larger populations, they will seldom report their
findings in terms of the kinds of complex statistical measures or methods
to which quantitative researchers are drawn (i.e., path, regression, or log-
linear analyses).
Acceptance ofpostmodern sensibilities. The use of quantitative, positivist

methods and assumptions has been rejected by a new generation of quali-
tative researchers who are attached to poststructural and/or postmodern
sensibilities (see below; see also in Volume 1, Vidich & Lyman, Chapter 2;
and in Volume 3, Richardson, Chapter 14). These researchers argüe that
positivist methods are but one way of telling stories about society or the
social world. These methods may be no better or no worse than any other
methods; they just tell different kinds of stories.
This tolerant view is not shared by everyone (Huber, 1995). Many
members of the critical theory, constructivist, poststructural, and post-
modern schools of thought reject positivist and postpositivist criteria
when evaluating their own work. They see these criteria as irrelevant to
their work and contend that such criteria reproduce only a certain kind of
science, a science that silences too many voices. These researchers seek
alternative methods for evaluating their work, including verisimilitude,
emotionality, personal responsibility, an ethic of caring, political praxis,
multivoiced texts, and dialogues with subjects. In response, positivists and
postpositivists argüe that what they do is good science, free of individual
bias and subjectivity. As noted above, they see postmodernism and post-
structuralism as attacks on reason and truth.
15
Capturing the individual's point ofview. Both qualitative and quantitative

researchers are concerned with 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 argüe that quantita-
tive researchers are seldom able to capture their subjects' perspectives
because they have to rely on more remote, inferential empirical methods
and materials. The empirical materials produced by interpretive methods
are regarded by many quantitative researchers as unreliable, impression-
istic, and not objective.
Examining the constraints of everyday Ufe. Qualitative researchers are

more likely to confront and come up against the constraints of the every-
day 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 the constraints of everyday
Ufe. Qualitative researchers, on the other hand, are committed to an emic,
idiographic, case-based position, which directs their attention to the spe-
cifics of particular cases.
Securing rich descriptions. Qualitative researchers believe that rich de-

scriptions of the social world are valuable, whereas quantitative research-
ers, with their etic, nomothetic commitments, are less concerned with
such detail. Quantitative researchers are deliberately unconcerned with
rich descriptions because such detail interrupts the process of developing
generalizations.
The five points of difference described above (uses of positivism and
postpositivism, postmodernism, capturing the individual's point of view,
examining the constraints of everyday Ufe, securing thick descriptions)
reflect commitments to different styles of research, different epistemolo-
gies, and different forms of representation. Each work tradition is gov-
erned by its own set of genres; each has its own classics, its own preferred
forms of representation, interpretation, trustworthiness, and textual eval-
uation (see Becker, 1986, pp. 134-135). Qualitative researchers use
ethnographic prose, historical narratives, first-person accounts, still pho-
tographs, Ufe histories, fictionalized "facts," and biographical and auto-
biographical materials, among others. Quantitative researchers use math-
16
Introduction
ematical models, statistical tables, and graphs, and usually write about
their research in impersonal, third-person prose.
Tensions Within Qualitative Research
It is erroneous to presume that all qualitative researchers share the same

assumptions about the five points of difference described above. As the
discussion below will reveal, positivist, postpositivist, and poststructural
differences define and shape the discourses of qualitative research. Real-
ists and postpositivists within the interpretive qualitative research tradi-
tíon criticize poststructuralists for taking the textual, narrative turn. These
crides contend that such work is navel gazing. It produces conditions "for
a dialogue of the deaf between itself and the community" (Silverman,
1997, p. 240). Those who attempt to capture the point of view of the
interacting subject in the world are accused of naive humanism, of repro-
ducing "a Romantic impulse which elevates the experiential to the level of
the authentic" (Silverman, 1997, p. 248).
Still others argüe that lived experience is ignored by those who take the
textual, performance turn. Snow and Morrill (1995) argüe that "this per-
formance turn, like the preoccupation with discourse and storytelling, will
take us further from the field of social action and the real dramas of every-
day Ufe and thus signal the death knell of ethnography as an empirically
grounded enterprise" (p. 361). Of course, we disagree.
With these differences within and between the two traditions now in
hand, we must now briefly discuss the history of qualitative research. We
break this history into seven historical moments, mindful that any his-
tory is always somewhat arbitrary and always at least partially a social
construction.
• The History of Qualitative Research
The history of qualitative research reveáis, 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 pat-
terned conduct and social processes of society." The notion that this task
could be carried out presupposed that social scientists had the ability to ob-
serve this world objectively. Qualitative methods were a major tool of such
observations.11
17
Throughout the history of qualitative research, investigators have

always defined their work in terms of hopes and valúes, "religious faiths,
occupational and professional ideologies" (Vidich & Lyman, Chapter 2,
Volume 1). Qualitative research (like all research) has always been judged
on the "standard of whether the work communicates or 'says' something
to us" (Vidich & Lyman, Chapter 2, Volume 1), based on how we concep-
tualize our reality and our images of the world. Epistemology is the word
that has historically defined these standards of evaluation. In the contem-
porary period, as we have argued above, many received discourses on epis-
temology are now being reevaluated.
Vidich and Lyman's history covers the following (somewhat) overlap-
ping stages: early ethnography (to the 17th century); colonial ethnogra-
phy (17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century explorers); the ethnography of the
American Indian as "other" (late-19th- and early-20th-century anthropol-
ogy); the ethnography of the "civic other," or community studies, and
ethnographies of American immigrants (early 20th century through the
1960s); studies of ethnicity and assimilation (midcentury through the
198Os); and the present, which we cali the seventh 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. Early ethnographers confirmed
the racial and cultural diversity of peoples throughout the globe and
attempted to fit this diversity into a theory about the origins of history, the
races, and civilizations. Colonial ethnographers, before the profession-
alization of ethnography in the 20th 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, Asians, and other Third
World peoples of color. Early American ethnographers studied the Ameri-
can 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
"bordes" of immigrants who entered the United States with the beginnings
of industrializaron. Qualitative community studies of the ethnic other
proliferated from the early 1900s to the 1960s and included the work of
E. Franklin Frazier, Robert Park, and Robert Redfield and their students,
as well as William Foote Whyte, the Lynds, August Hollingshead, Herbert
Gans, Stanford Lyman, Arthur Vidich, and Joseph Bensman. The post-
1960 ethnicity studies challenged the "melting pot" hypothesis of Park
18
Introduction
and his followers and corresponded to the emergence of ethnic studies

programs that saw Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Afri-
can Americans attempting to take control over the study of their own
peoples.
The postmodern and poststructural challenge emerged in the mid-
198Os. It questioned the assumptions that had organized this earlier his-
tory in each of its colonializing moments. Qualitative research that crosses
the "postmodern divide" requires one, Vidich and Lyman argüe in Volume
1, Chapter 2, to "abandon all established and preconceived valúes, theo-
ries, 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 from 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 his-
tory. Ours is confined to the 20th 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, Berkeley, and British
schools of sociology and anthropology. This early foundational period
established the norms of classical qualitative and ethnographic research
(see Gupta & Ferguson, 1997; Rosaldo, 1989; Stocking, 1989).
• The Seven Moments of Qualitative Research
As suggested above, our history of qualitative research in North America in

this century divides into seven phases, each of which we describe in turn
below.
The Traditional Period
We cali the first moment the traditional period (this covers Vidich and
Lyman's second and third phases). It begins in the early 1900s and contin-
úes until World War II. In this period, qualitative researchers wrote "objec-
tive," 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.
19
Here is Malinowski (1967) discussing his field experiences in New

Guinea and the Trobriand Islands in the years 1914-1915 and 1917-
1918. He is bartering his way into field data:
Nothing whatever draws me to ethnographic studies.... On the whole the

village struck me rather unfavorably. There is a certain disorganization . ..
the rowdiness and persistence of the people who laugh and stare and lie dis-
couraged me somewhat.... Went to the village hoping to photograph a few
stages of the hará dance. I handed out half-sticks of tobáceo, then watched a
few dances; then took pictures—but results were poor. ... they would not
pose long enough for time exposures. At moments I was furious at them,
particularly because after I gave them their portions of tobáceo they all went
away. (quoted in Geertz, 1988, pp. 73-74)
In another work, this lonely, frustrated, isolated field-worker describes

his methods in the following words:
In the field one has to face a chaos of facts in this crude form they are not
scientific facts at all; they are absolutely elusive, and can only be fixed by in-
terpretation.... Only laws andgeneralizations are scientific facts, and field
work consists only and exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic social
reality, in subordinating it to general rules. (Malinowski, 1916/1948,
p. 328; quoted in Geertz, 1988, p. 81)
Malinowski's remarks are provocative. On the one hand they disparage

fieldwork, but on the other they speak of it within the glorified language
of science, with laws and generalizations fashioned out of this selfsame
experience.
The field-worker during this period was lionized, made into a larger-
than-life figure who went into and then returned from the field with
stories about strange people. Rosaldo (1989, p. 30) describes this as the
period of the Lone Ethnographer, the story of the man-scientist who went
off in search of his native in a distant land. There this figure "encountered
the object of his quest... [and] underwent his rite of passage by enduring
the ultímate ordeal of 'fieldwork' " (p. 30). Returning home with his data,
the Lone Ethnographer wrote up an objective account of the culture stud-
ied. These accounts were structured by the norms of classical ethnography.
This sacred bundle of terms (Rosaldo, 1989, p. 31) organized ethno-
graphic texts in terms of four beliefs and commitments: a commitment to
objectivism, a complicity with imperialism, a belief in monumentalism
20
Introduction
(the ethnography would créate a museumlike picture of the culture stud-

ied), and a belief in timelessness (what was studied would never change).
The other was an "object" to be archived. This model of the researcher,
who could also write complex, dense theories about what was studied,
holds to the present day.
The myth of the Lone Ethnographer depicts the birth of classic ethnog-
raphy. The texts of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Margaret Mead, and
Gregory Bateson are still carefully studied for what they can tell the novice
about conducting fieldwork, taking field notes, and writing theory. Today
this image has been shattered. The works of the classic ethnographers are
seen by many as relies from the colonial past (Rosaldo, 1989, p. 44).
Although many feel nostalgia for this past, others celébrate its passing.
Rosaldo (1989) quotes Cora Du Bois, a retired Harvard anthropology
professor, who lamented this passing at a conference in 1980, reflecting
on the crisis in anthropology: "[I feel a distance] from the complexity and
disarray of what I once found a justifiable and challenging discipline It
has been like moving from a distinguished art museum into a garage sale"
(p. 44).
Du Bois regards the classic ethnographies as pieces of timeless artwork
contained in a museum. She feels uncomfortable in the chaos of the garage
sale. In contrast, Rosaldo (1989) is drawn to this metaphor: "[The garage
sale] provides a precise image of the postcolonial 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 pres-
ent global situation" (p. 44). Indeed, many valuable treasures may be
found if one is willing to look long and hard, in unexpected places. Oíd
standards no longer hold. Ethnographies do not produce timeless truths.
The commitment to objectivism is now in doubt. The complicity with
imperialism is openly challenged today, and the belief in monumentalism
is a thing of the past.
The legacies of this first period begin at the end of the 19th century,
when the novel and the social sciences had become distinguished as sepá-
rate systems of discourse (Clough, 1992, pp. 21-22; see also Clough,
1998). However, the Chicago school, with its emphasis on the life story
and the "slice-of-life" approach to ethnographic materials, sought to
develop an interpretive methodology that maintained the centrality of
the narrated life history approach. This led to the production of texts
that gave the researcher-as-author the power to represent the subject's
story. Written under the mantle of straightforward, sentiment-free social
21
realism, these texts used the language of ordinary people. They articulated
a social science versión of literary naturalism, which often produced the
sympathetic illusion that a solution to a social problem had been found.
Like the Depression-era juvenile delinquent and other "social problems"
films (Roffman & Purdy, 1981), these accounts romanticized the subject.
They turned the deviant into a sociological versión of a screen hero. These
sociological stories, like their film counterparts, usually had happy end-
ings, as they followed individuáis through the three stages of the classic
morality tale: being in a state of grace, being seduced by evil and falling,
and finally achieving redemption through suffering.
Modernist Phase
The modernist phase, or second moment, builds on the canonical

works from the traditional period. Social realism, naturalism, and slice-of-
life ethnographies are still valued. This phase extended through the post-
war years to the 1970s and is still present in the work of many (for reviews,
see Wolcott, 1990,1992,1995; see also Tedlock, Chapter 6, this volume).
In this period many texts sought to formalize qualitative methods (see, for
example, Bogdan & Taylor, 1975; Cicourel, 1964; Filstead, 1970; Glaser
& Strauss, 1967; Lofland, 1971, 1995; Lofland & Lofland, 1984, 1995;
Taylor & Bogdan, 1998).u 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 gradúate students across the human disciplines
encountered new interpretive theories (ethnomethodology, phenomenol-
ogy, critical theory, feminism). They were drawn to qualitative research
practices that would let them give a voice to society's underclass. Postposi-
tivism functioned as a powerful epistemological paradigm. Researchers
attempted to fit Campbell and Stanley's (1963) model of internal and
external validity to constructionist and interactionist conceptions of the
research act. They returned to the texts of the Chicago school as sources of
inspiration (see Denzin, 1970, 1978).
A canonical text from this moment remains Boys in White (Becker
et al., 1961; see also Becker, 1998). Firmly entrenched in mid-20th-
century methodological discourse, this work attempted to make qualita-
tive research as rigorous as its quantitative counterpart. Causal narratives
were central to this project. This multimethod work combined open-
22
Introduction
ended and quasi-structured interviewing with participant observation and

the careful analysis of such materials in standardized, statistical form. In a
classic article, "Problems of Inference and Proof in Participant Observa-
tion," 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 legitímate statistical data. But the
exigencies of the field usually prevent the collection of data in such a form
to meet the assumptions of statistical tests, so that the observer deals in what
have been called "quasi-statistics." His conclusions, while implicitly numer-
ical, do not require precise quantification. (p. 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 conclusión in fact applies in a specific situation (see also Becker,
1998, pp. 166-170). Thus did work in the modernistperiodclotheitself in
the language and rhetoric of positivist and postpositivist discourse.
This was the golden age of rigorous qualitative analysis, bracketed in
sociology by Boys in White (Becker et al., 1961) at one end and The Dis-
covery of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) at the other. In ed-
ucation, qualitative research in this period was defined by George and
Louise 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 (1998) and Ryan and Bernard (see Chapter 7, Vol-
ume 3).
The "golden age" reinforced the picture of qualitative researchers as
cultural romantics. Imbued with Promethean human powers, they valo-
rized villains and outsiders as héroes to mainstream society. They embod-
ied a belief in the contingency of self and society, and held to emancipatory
ideáis 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 Emerson, Marx, James, Dewey, Gramsci, and
Martin Luther King, Jr. (West, 1989, chap. 6).
As this moment carne to an end, the Vietnam War was everywhere
present in American society. In 1969, alongside these political cur-
rents, Herbert Blumer and Everett Hughes met with a group of young
sociologists called the "Chicago Irregulars" at the American Sociological
23
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 and political. The San Francisco

meetings witnessed not simply the Blumer-Hughes event but a "counter-
revolution." . . . a group first carne to ... talk about the problems of being a
sociologist and a female. . . . the discipline seemed literally to be bursting
with new . . . ideas: labelling theory, ethnomethodology, conflict theory,
phenomenology, dramaturgical analysis. (p. 253)
Thus did the modernist phase come to an end.
Blurred Genres
By the beginning of the third stage (1970-1986), which we cali the

moment of blurred genres, qualitative researchers had a full complement
of paradigms, methods, and strategies to employ in their research. The-
ories ranged from symbolic interactionism to constructivism, naturalistic
inquiry, positivism and postpositivism, phenomenology, ethnomethod-
ology, critical theory, neo-Marxist theory, semiotics, structuralism, femi-
nism, and various racial/ethnic paradigms. Applied qualitative research
was gaining in stature, and the politics and ethics of qualitative research—
implicated as they were in various applications of this work—were topics
of considerable concern. Research strategies and formats for reporting re-
search ranged from grounded theory to the case study, to methods of his-
torical, biographical, ethnographic, action, and clinical research. Diverse
ways of collecting and analyzing empirical materials were also available,
including qualitative interviewing (open-ended and quasi-structured) and
observational, visual, personal experience, and documentary methods.
Computers were entering the situation, to be fully developed as aids in the
analysis of qualitative data in the next decade, along with narrative, con-
tent, and semiotic methods of reading interviews and cultural texts.
Two books by Geertz, The Interpretaron of Culture (1973) and Local
Knowledge (1983), defined the beginning and end of this moment. In
these two works, Geertz argued that the oíd functional, positivist, behav-
ioral, totalizing approaches to the human disciplines were giving way to a
more pluralistic, interpretive, open-ended perspective. This new perspec-
tive took cultural representations and their meanings as its point of de-
24
Introduction
parture. Calling for "thick descriptions" of particular events, rituals, and

customs, Geertz suggested that all anthropological writings are interpreta-
tions of interpretations.13 The observer has no privileged voice in the
interpretations that are written. The central task of theory is to make sense
out of a local situation.
Geertz went on to propose that the boundaries between the social sci-
ences and the humanities had become blurred. Social scientists were now
turning to the humanities for models, theories, and methods of analysis
(semiotics, hermeneutics). A form of genre diaspora was occurring: docu-
mentaries that read like fiction (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies
(Castañeda), theoretical treatises that look like travelogues (Lévi-Strauss).
At the same time, other new approaches were emerging: poststructuralism
(Barthes), neopositivism (Philips), neo-Marxism (Althusser), micro-
macro descriptivism (Geertz), ritual theories of drama and culture
(V. Turner), deconstructionism (Derrida), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel).
The golden age of the social sciences was over, and a new age of blurred,
interpretive genres was upon us. The essay as an art form was replacing the
scientific article. At issue now is the author's presence in the interpretive
text (Geertz, 1988). How can the researcher speak with authority in an age
when there are no longer any firm rules concerning the text, including the
author's place in it, its standards of evaluation, and its subject matter?
The naturalistic, postpositivist, and constructionist paradigms gained
power in this period, especially in education, in the works of Harry
Wolcott, Frederick Erickson, Egon Guba, Yvonna Lincoln, Robert Stake,
and Elliot Eisner. By the end of the 1970s, several qualitative journals
were in place, including Urban Life and Culture (now Journal ofContem-
porary Ethnography), Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology and Educa-
tion Quarterly, Qualitative Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction, as well as
the book series Siudies in Symbolic Interaction.
Crisis of Representation
A profound rupture occurred in the mid-1980s. What we cali the

fourth moment, or the crisis of representation, appeared with Anthropol-
ogy as Cultural Critique (Marcus & Fischer, 1986), The Anthropology of
Experience (Turner & Bruner, 1986), Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus,
1986), Works and Lives (Geertz, 1988), and The Predicament of Culture
(Clifford, 1988). These works made research and writing more reflexive
25
and called into question the issues of gender, class, and race. They articu-
lated the consequences of Geertz's "blurred genres" interpretation of the
field in the early 1980s.14
New models of truth, method, and representation were sought
(Rosaldo, 1989). The erosión of classic norms in anthropology (obectiv-
ism, complicity with colonialism, social life structured by fixed rituals
and customs, ethnographies as monuments to a culture) was complete
(Rosaldo, 1989, pp. 44-45; see also Jackson, 1998, pp. 7-8). Critical, fem-
inist, and epistemologies of color now competed for attention in this
arena. Issues such as validity, reliability, and objectivity, previously
believed settled, were once more problematic. Pattern and interpretive
theories, as opposed to causal, linear theories, were now more common,
as writers continued to challenge older models of truth and meaning
(Rosaldo, 1989).
Stoller and Olkes (1987, pp. 227-229) describe howthe crisis of repre-
sentation was felt in their fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger. Stoller
observes: "When I began to write anthropological texts, I followed the
conventions of my training. I 'gathered data,' and once the 'data' were
arranged in neat piles, I 'wrote them up.' In one case I reduced Songhay
insults to a series of neat logical formulas" (p. 227). Stoller became dissat-
isfied with this form of writing, in part because he learned that "everyone
had lied to me and . . . the data I had so painstakingly collected were
worthless. I learned a lesson: Informants routinely lie to their anthropolo-
gists" (Stoller & Olkes, 1987, p. 9). This discovery led to a second—that
he had, in following the conventions of ethnographic realism, edited him-
self out of his text. This led Stoller to produce a different type of text, a
memoir, in which he became a central character in the story he told. This
story, an account of his experiences in the Songhay world, became an anal-
ysis of the clash between his world and the world of Songhay sorcery. Thus
Stoller's journey represents an attempt to confront the crisis of representa-
tion in the fourth moment.
Clough (1992) elaborates this crisis and criticizes those who would
argüe that new forms of writing represent a way out of the crisis. She
argües:
While many sociologists now commenting on the criticism of ethnogra-

phy view writing as "downright central to the ethnographic enterprise"
[Van Maanen, 1988, p. xi], the problems of writing are still viewed as differ-
26
Introducción
ent from the problems of method or fieldwork itself. Thus the solution usu-
ally offered is experiments in writing, that is a self-consciousness about
writing. (p. 136)
It is this insistence on the difference between writing and fieldwork that

must be analyzed. (Richardson is quite articúlate about this issue in Chap-
ter 14, Volume 3.)
In writing, the field-worker makes a claim to moral and scientific
authority. This claim allows the realist and experimental ethnographic
texts to function as sources of validation for an empirical science. They
show that the world of real lived experience can still be captured, if only in
the writer's memoirs, or fictional experimentations, or dramatic readings.
But these works have the danger of directing attention away from the ways
in which the text constructs sexually situated individuáis in a field of social
difference. They also perpetúate "empirical science's hegemony"
(Clough, 1992, p. 8), for these new writing technologies of the subject
become the site "for the production of knowledge/power . . . [aligned]
with . . . the capital/state axis" (Aronowitz, 1988, p. 300; quoted in
Clough, 1992, p. 8). Such experiments come up against, and then back
away from, the difference between empirical science and social criticism.
Too often they fail to engage fully a new politics of textuality that would
"refuse the identity of empirical science" (Clough, 1992, p. 135). This
new social criticism "would intervene in the relationship of information
economics, nation-state politics, and technologies of mass communica-
tion, especially in terms of the empirical sciences" (Clough, 1992, p. 16).
This, of course, is the terrain occupied by cultural studies.
Richardson (Volume 3, Chapter 14), Tedlock (this volume, Chapter 6),
Brady (Volume 3, Chapter 15), and Ellis and Bochner (Volume 3, Chapter
6) develop the above arguments, viewing writing as a method of inquiry
that moves through successive stages of self-reflection. As a series of writ-
ten representations, the field-worker's texts flow from the field experi-
ence, through intermediate works, to later work, and finally to the re-
search text, which is the public presentation of the ethnographic and
narrative experience. Thus fieldwork and writing blur into one another.
There is, in the final analysis, no difference between writing and field-
work. These two perspectives inform one another throughout every chap-
ter in these volumes. In these ways the crisis of representation moves quali-
tative research in new and critical directions.
27
A Triple Crisis
The ethnographer's authority remains under assault today (Behar,

1995, p. 3; Gupta & Ferguson, 1997, p. 16; Jackson, 1998; Ortner, 1997,
p. 2). A triple crisis of representation, legitimation, and praxis confronts
qualitative researchers in the human disciplines. Embedded in the dis-
courses of poststructuralism and postmodernism (see Vidich 8c Lyman,
Volume 1, Chapter 2; and Richardson, Chapter 14, Volume 3), these three
crises are coded in múltiple terms, variously called and associated with the
critical, interpretive, linguistic, feminist, and rhetorical turns in social
theory. These new turns make problematic two key assumptions of quali-
tative research. The first is that qualitative researchers can no longer
directly capture lived experience. Such experience, it is argued, is created
in the social text written by the researcher. This is the representational cri-
sis. It confronts the inescapable problem of representation, but does so
within a framework that makes the direct link between experience and
text problematic.
The second assumption makes problematic the traditional criteria for
evaluating and interpreting qualitative research. This is the legitimation
crisis. It involves a serious rethinking of such terms as validity, gen-
eralizability, and reliability, terms already retheorized in postpositivist
(Hammersley, 1992), constructionist-naturalistic (Guba & Lincoln, 1989,
pp. 163-183), feminist (Olesen, Chapter 8, Volume 1), interpretive
(Denzin, 1997), poststructural (Lather, 1993; Lather & Smithies, 1997),
and critical (Kincheloe & McLaren, Chapter 10, Volume 1) discourses.
This crisis asks, How are qualitative studies to be evaluated in the contem-
porary, poststructural moment? The first two crises shape the third, which
asks, Is it possible to effect change in the world if society is only and always
a text? Clearly these crises intersect and blur, as do the answers to the ques-
tions they genérate (see in Volume 1, Schwandt, Chapter 7; Ladson-
Billings, Chapter 9; and in Volume 3, Smith & Deemer, Chapter 12).
The fifth moment, the postmodern period of experimental ethno-
graphic writing, struggled to make sense of these crises. New ways of com-
posing ethnography were explored (Ellis & Bochner, 1996). Theories
were read as tales from the field. Writers struggled with different ways to
represent the "other," although they were now joined by new representa-
tional concerns (see Fine et al., Chapter 4, Volume 1). Epistemologies
from previously silenced groups emerged to offer solutions to these prob-
lems. The concept of the aloof observer has been abandoned. More action,
28
Introduction
participatory, and activist-oriented research is on the horizon. The search

for grand narratives is being replaced by more local, small-scale theories
fitted to specific problems and particular situations.
The sixth (postexperimental) and seventh (the future) moments are
upon us. Fictional ethnographies, ethnographic poetry, and multimedia
texts are today taken for granted. Postexperimental writers seek to con-
nect their writings to the needs of a free democratic society. The demands
of a moral and sacred qualitative social science are actively being explored
by a host of new writers from many different disciplines (see Jackson,
1998; Lincoln & Denzin, Chapter 6, Volume 1).
Reading History
We draw four conclusions from this brief history, noting that it is, like
all histories, somewhat arbitrary. First, each of the earlier historical
moments is still operating in the present, either as legacy or as a set of prac-
tices that researchers continué to follow or argüe against. The múltiple
and fractured histories of qualitative research now make it possible for any
given researcher to attach a project to a canonical text from any of the
above-described historical moments. Múltiple criteria of evaluation com-
pete for attention in this field (Lincoln, in press). Second, an embarrass-
ment of choices now characterizes the field of qualitative research. There
have never been so many paradigms, strategies of inquiry, or methods
of analysis for researchers to draw upon and utilize. Third, we are in a
moment of discovery and rediscovery, as new ways of looking, interpret-
ing, arguing, and writing are debated and discussed. Fourth, the qualita-
tive research act can no longer be viewed from within a neutral or objec-
tive positivist perspective. Class, race, gender, and ethnicity shape the
process of inquiry, making research a multicultural process. It is to this
topic that we now turn.
• Qualitative Research as Process
Three interconnected, generic activities define the qualitative research

process. They go by a variety of different labels, including theory, method,
analysis, ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Behind these terms
stands the personal biography of the researcher, who speaks from a partic-
ular class, gender, racial, cultural, and ethnic community perspective. The
29
gendered, multiculturally situated researcher approaches the world with a

set of ideas, a framework (theory, ontology) that specifies a set of questions
(epistemology) that he or she then examines in specific ways (methodology,
analysis). That is, the researcher collects empirical materials bearing on the
question and then analyzes and writes about them. Every researcher speaks
from within a distinct interpretive community that configures, in its special
way, the multicultural, gendered components of the research act.
In this volume we treat these generic activities under five headings, or
phases: the researcher and the researched as multicultural subjects, major
paradigms and interpretive perspectives, research strategies, methods of
collecting and analyzing empirical materials, and the art, practices, and
politics of interpretation. Behind and within each of these phases stands
the biographically situated researcher. This individual enters the research
process from inside an interpretive community. This community has its
own historical research traditions, which constitute a distinct point of
view. This perspective leads the researcher to adopt particular views of the
"other" who is studied. At the same time, the politics and the ethics of re-
search must also be considered, for these concerns permeate every phase
of the research process.
• The Other as Research Subject
Since its early-20th-century birth in modern, interpretive form, qualitative

research has been haunted by a double-faced ghost. On the one hand, quali-
tative researchers have assumed that qualified, competent observers can,
with objectivity, clarity, and precisión, report on their own observations of
the social world, including the experiences of others. Second, researchers
have held to the belief in a real subject, or real individual, who is present in
the world and able, in some form, to report on his or her experiences. So
armed, researchers could blend their own observations with the self-
reports provided by subjects through interviews and life story, personal
experience, case study, and other documents.
These two beliefs have led qualitative researchers across disciplines to
seek a method that would allow them to record accurately their own ob-
servations while also uncovering the meanings their subjects bring to their
life experiences. This method would rely upon the subjective verbal and
written expressions of meaning given by the individuáis studied as
30
Introduction
windows into the inner lives of these persons. Since Dilthey (1900/1976),
this search for a method has led to a perennial focus in the human disci-
plines on qualitative, interpretive methods.
Recently, as noted above, this position and its beliefs have come under
assault. Poststructuralists and postmodernists have contributed to the
understanding that there is no clear window into the inner life of an indi-
vidual. Any gaze is always filtered through the lenses of language, gender,
I social class, race, and ethnicity. There are no objective observations, only
observations socially situated in the worlds of—and between—the ob-
server and the observed. Subjects, or individuáis, are seldom able to give
full explanations of their actions or intentions; all they can offer are
I accounts, or stories, about what they did and why. No single method can
I grasp all of the subtle variations in ongoing human experience. Conse-
quently, qualitative researchers deploy a wide range of interconnected
interpretive methods, always seeking better ways to make more under-
standable the worlds of experience they have studied.
Table 1.1 depicts the relationships we see among the five phases that
define the research process. Behind all but one of these phases stands the
biographically situated researcher. These five levéis of activity, or practice,
work their way through the biography of the researcher. We take them up
briefly in order here; we discuss these phases more fully in the introduc-
tions to the individual parts of this volume.
Phase 1: The Researcher
Our remarks above indicate the depth and complexity of the traditional
and applied qualitative research perspectives into which a socially situated
researcher enters. These traditions lócate the researcher in history, simul-
taneously guiding and constraining work that will be done in any specific
study. This field has been characterized constantly by diversity and con-
flict, and these are its most enduring traditions (see Greenwood & Levin,
Chapter 3, Volume 1). As a carrier of this complex and contradictory his-
tory, the researcher must also confront the ethics and politics of research
(see Christians, Chapter 5, Volume 1). The age of value-free inquiry for
the human disciplines is over (see in Volume 1, Vidich & Lyman, Chap-
ter 2; and Fine et al., Chapter 4). Today researchers struggle to develop
situational and transsituational ethics that apply to all forms of the re-
search act and its human-to-human relationships.
31
TABLE 1.1 The Research Process
Phase 1: The Researcher as a Multicultural Subject

history and research traditions
conceptions of self and the other
ethics and politics of research
Phase 2: Theoretical Paradigms and Perspectives
positivism, postpositivism
¡nterpretivism, constructivism, hermeneutics
fem¡n¡sm(s)
racialized discourses
critical theory and Marxist models
cultural studies models
queer theory
Phase 3: Research Strategies
study design
case study
ethnography, participant observation, performance ethnography
phenomenology, ethnomethodology
grounded theory
life history, testimonio
historical method
action and applied research
clinical research
Phase 4: Methods of Collection and Analysis
interviewing
observing
artifacts, documents, and records
visual methods
autoethnography
data management methods
computer-assisted analysis
textual analysis
focus groups
applied ethnography
Phase 5: The Art, Practices, and Politics of Interpretation and Presentation
criterio for judging adequacy
practices and politics of interpretaron
writing as interpretation
policy analysis
evaluation traditions
applied research
32
Introduction
Phase 2: Interpretive Paradigms
All qualitative researchers are philosophers in that "universal sense in

which all human beings . . . are guided by highly abstraer principies"
(Bateson, 1972, p. 320). These principies combine beliefs about ontology
(What kind of being is the human being? What is the nature of reality?),
epistemology (What is the relationship between the inquirer and the
known?), and methodology (How do we know the world, or gain knowl-
edge of it?) (see Guba, 1990, p. 18; Lincoln 8c Guba, 1985, pp. 14-15; see
also Lincoln & Guba, Chapter 6, Volume 1). These beliefs shape how the
qualitative researcher sees the world and acts in it. The researcher is
"bound within a net of epistemological and ontological premises which—
regardless of ultímate truth or falsity—become partially self-validating"
(Bateson, 1972, p. 314).
The net that contains the researcher's epistemological, ontological, and
methodological premises may be termed a paradigm, or an interpretive
framework, a "basic set of beliefs that guides action" (Guba, 1990, p. 17).
All research is interpretive; it is guided by a set of beliefs and feelings about
the world and how it should be understood and studied. Some beliefs may
be taken for granted, invisible, only assumed, whereas others are highly
problematic and controversial. Each interpretive paradigm makes particu-
lar demands on the researcher, including the questions he or she asks and
the interpretations the researcher brings to them.
At the most general level, four major interpretive paradigms struc-
ture qualitative research: positivist and postpositivist, constructivist-
interpretive, critical (Marxist, emancipatory), and feminist-post-
structural. These four abstract paradigms become more complicated at the
level of concrete specific interpretive communities. At this level it is possi-
ble to identify not only the constructivist, but also múltiple versions of
feminism (Afrocentric and poststructural)15 as well as specific ethnic,
Marxist, and cultural studies paradigms. These perspectives, or para-
digms, are examined in Part II of Volume 1.
The paradigms examined in Part II of Volume 1 work against and along-
side (and some within) the positivist and postpositivist models. They all
work within relativist ontologies (múltiple constructed realities), inter-
pretive epistemologies (the knower and known interact and shape one
another), and interpretive, naturalistic methods.
Table 1.2 presents these paradigms and their assumptions, includ-
ing their criteria for evaluating research, and the typical form that an
33
TABLE 1.2 Interpretive Paradigms
Paradigm/
Theory Criterio Form of Theory Type of Narration
Positivist/ internal, external logical-deductive, scientific report

postpositivist validity grounded
Constructivist trustworthiness, credi- substantive-formal interpretive

bility, transferability, case studies,
confirmability ethnographic
fiction
Feminist Afrocentric, lived critical, standpoint essays, stories,

experience, dialogue, experimental
caring, accountability, writing
race, class, gender,
reflexivity, praxis,
emotion, concrete
grounding
Ethnic Afrocentric, lived standpoint, essays, f a bles,

experience, dialogue, critical, historical dramas
caring, accountability,
race, class, gender
Marxist emancipatory theory, critical, historical, historical,

falsifiable, dialogical, economic economic,
race, class, gender sociocultural
analyses
Cultural studies cultural practicas, social criticism cultural theory

praxis, social texts, as criticism
subjectivities
Queer theory reflexivity, social criticism, his- theory as criticism,

deconstruction torical analysis autobiography
interpretive or theoretical statement assumes in each paradigm.16 These

paradigms are explored in considerable detail in Volume 1, Part II by
Lincoln and Guba (Chapter 6), Schwandt (Chapter 7), Olesen (Chapter
8), Ladson-Billings (Chapter 9), Kincheloe and McLaren (Chapter 10),
34
Introduction
Frow and Morris (Chapter 11), and Gamson (Chapter 12). We have dis-
cussed the positivist and postpositivist paradigms above. They work from
within a realist and critical realist ontology and objective epistemologies,
and rely upon experimental, quasi-experimental, survey, and rigorously
defined qualitative methodologies. Ryan and Bernard (Chapter 7, Vol-
ume 3) develop elements of this paradigm.
The constructivist paradigm assumes a relativist ontology (there are
múltiple realities), a subjectivist epistemology (knower and respondent
cocreate understandings), and a naturalistic (in the natural world) set of
methodological procedures. Findings are usually presented in terms of the
criteria of grounded theory or pattern theories (see in Volume 1, Lincoln
& Guba, Chapter 6; in this volume, Charmaz, Chapter 8; and in Volume 3,
Ryan & Bernard, Chapter 7). Terms such as credibility, transferability,
dependability, and confirmability replace the usual positivist criteria of
internal and external validity, reliability, and objectivity.
Feminist, ethnic, Marxist, and cultural studíes and queer theory models
privilege a materialist-realist ontology; that is, the real world makes a
material difference in terms of race, class, and gender. Subjectivist episte-
mologies and naturalistic methodologies (usually ethnographies) are also
employed. Empirical materials and theoretical arguments are evaluated in
terms of their emancipatory implications. Criteria from gender and racial
communities (e.g., African American) may be applied (emotionality and
feeling, caring, personal accountability, dialogue).
Poststructural feminist theories emphasize problems with the social
text, its logic, and its inability ever to represent the world of lived experi-
ence fully. Positivist and postpositivist criteria of evaluation are replaced
by other terms, including the reflexive, multivoiced text that is grounded
in the experiences of oppressed people.
The cultural studies and queer theory paradigms are multifocused, with
many different strands drawing from Marxism, feminism, and the post-
modern sensibility (see in Volume 1, Frow & Morris, Chapter 11;
Gamson, Chapter 12; and in Volume 3, Richardson, Chapter 14). There is
a tensión between a humanistic cultural studies, which stresses lived expe-
riences (meaning), and a more structural cultural studies project, which
stresses the structural and material determinants (race, class, gender) and
effects of experience. Of course, there are two sides to every coin, and
both sides are needed and are indeed critical. The cultural studies and
queer theory paradigms use methods strategically—that is, as resources
for understanding and for producing resistances to local structures of
35
domination. Scholars may do cióse textual readings and discourse analyses

of cultural texts (see in Volume 1, Olesen, Chapter 8; Frow & Morris,
Chapter 11; and Silverman, Volume 3, Chapter 9) as well as conducting
local ethnographies, open-ended interviewing, and participant observa-
tion. The focus is on how race, class, and gender are produced and enacted
in historically specific situations.
Paradigm and personal history in hand, f ocused on a concrete empirical
problem to examine, the researcher now moves to the next stage of the re-
search process—namely, working with a specific strategy of inquiry.
Phase 3: Strategies of
Inquiry and Interpretive Paradigms
Table 1.1 presents some of the major strategies of inquiry a researcher

may use. Phase 3 begins with research design, which, broadly conceived,
involves a clear focus on the research question, the purposes of the study,
"what information most appropriately will answer specific research ques-
tions, and which strategies are most effective for obtaining it" (LeCompte
& Preissle, 1993, p. 30; see also in this volume Janesick, Chapter 2;
Cheek, Chapter 3). A research design describes a flexible set of guidelines
that connect theoretical paradigms first to strategies of inquiry and second
to methods for collecting empirical material. A research design situates
researchers in the empirical world and connects them to specific sites, per-
sons, groups, institutions, and bodies of relevant interpretive material,
including documents and archives. A research design also specifies how
the investigator will address the two critical issues of representation and
legitimation.
A strategy of inquiry comprises a bundle of skills, assumptions, and
practices that the researcher employs as he or she moves from paradigm
to the empirical world. Strategies of inquiry put paradigms of interpreta-
tion into motion. At the same time, strategies of inquiry also connect the
researcher to specific methods of collecting and analyzing empirical mate-
rials. For example, the case study relies on interviewing, observing, and
document analysis. Research strategies implement and anchor paradigms
in specific empirical sites, or in specific methodological practices, such as
making a case an object of study. These strategies include the case study,
phenomenological and ethnomethodological techniques, and the use of
grounded theory, as well as biographical, autoethnographic, historical,
action, and clinical methods. Each of these strategies is connected to a
36
Introduction
complex literatura, and each has a sepárate history, exemplary works, and
preferred ways for putting the strategy into motion.
Phase 4: Methods of
Collecting and Analyzing Empirical Materials
The researcher has several methods for collecting empirical materials.17

These methods are taken up in Part I of Volume 3. They range from the
interview to direct observation, the analysis of artifacts, documents, and
cultural records, and the use of visual materials or personal experience.
The researcher may also use a variety of different methods of reading and
analyzing interviews or cultural texts, including contení, narrative, and
semiotic strategies. Faced with large amounts of qualitative materials, the
investigator seeks ways of managing and interpreting these documents,
and here data management methods and computer-assisted models of
analysis may be of use. Ryan and Bernard (Volume 3, Chapter 7) and
Weitzman (Volume 3, Chapter 8) discuss these techniques.
Phase 5: The Art and Politics

of Interpretation and Evaluation
Qualitative research is endlessly creative and interpretive. The re-

searcher does not just leave the field with mountains of empirical materials
and then easily write up his or her findings. Qualitative interpretations are
constructed. The researcher first creates a field text consisting of field
notes and documents from the field, what Roger Sanjek (1990, p. 386)
calis "indexing" and David Plath (1990, p. 374) calis "filework." The
writer-as-interpreter moves from this text to a research text: notes and
interpretations based on the field text. This text is then re-created as a
working interpretive document that contains the writer's initial attempts
to make sense of what he or she has learned. Finally the writer pro-
duces the public text that comes to the reader. This final tale from the field
may assume several forms: confessional, realist, impressionistic, critical,
formal, literary, analytic, grounded theory, and so on (see Van Maanen,
1988).
The interpretive practice of making sense of one's findings is both artis-
tic and political. Múltiple criteria for evaluating qualitative research now
exist, and those that we emphasize stress the situated, relational, and
textual structures of the ethnographic experience. There is no single
37
interpretive truth. As we argued earlier, there are múltiple interpretive

communities, each with its own criteria for evaluating an interpretation.
Program evaluation is a major site of qualitative research, and qualita-
tive researchers can influence social policy in importan! ways. The contri-
butions by Greenwood and Levin (Volume 1, Chapter 3), Kemmis and
McTaggart (this volume, Chapter 11), Miller and Crabtree (this volume,
Chapter 12), Chambers (Volume 3, Chapter 11), Greene (Volume 3,
Chapter 16), and Rist (Volume 3, Chapter 17) trace and discuss the rich
history of applied qualitative research in the social sciences. This is the
critical site where theory, method, praxis, action, and policy all come
together. Qualitative researchers can isolate target populations, show the
immediate effects of certain programs on such groups, and isolate the con-
straints that opérate against policy changes in such settings. Action-
oriented and clinically oriented qualitative researchers can also créate
spaces for those who are studied (the other) to speak. The evaluator
becomes the conduit through which such voices can be heard. Chambers,
Greene, and Rist explicitly develop these topics in their chapters.
* Bridging the Historical Moments: What Comes Next?
Ellis and Bochner (Volume 3, Chapter 6), Gergen and Gergen (Volume 1,
Chapter 13), and Richardson (Volume 3, Chapter 14) argüe that we are
already in the post "post" period—post-poststructuralist, post-postmod-
ernist, post-postexperimental. What this means for interpretive ethno-
graphic practices is still not clear, but it is certain that things will never
again be the same. We are in a new age where messy, uncertain, multivoiced
texts, cultural criticism, and new experimental works will become more
common, as will more reflexive forms of fieldwork, analysis, and
intertextual representation. We take as the subject of our final essay in
Volume 1 these fifth, sixth, and seventh moments. It is true that, as the poet
said, the center no longer holds. We can reflect on what should be at the
new center.
Thus we come full circle. Returning to our bridge metaphor, the chap-
ters that follow take the researcher back and forth through every phase of
the research act. Like a good bridge, the chapters provide for two-way
traffic, coming and going between moments, formations, and interpretive
communities. Each chapter examines the relevant histories, controversies,
and current practices that are associated with each paradigm, strategy, and
38
Introduction
method. Each chapter also offers projections for the future, where a spe-
cific paradigm, strategy, or method will be 10 years from now, deep into
the formative years of the 21st century.
In reading the chapters that follow, it is important to remember that the
field of qualitative research is defined by a series of tensions, contradic-
tions, and hesitations. This tensión works back and forth between the
broad, doubting postmodern sensibility and the more certain, more tradi-
tional positivist, postpositivist, and naturalistic conceptions of this proj-
ect. All of the chapters that follow are caught in and articúlate this tensión.
* Notes
1. Qualitative research has sepárate and distinguished histories in education, social

work, Communications, psychology, history, organizational studies, medical science, an-
thropology, and sociology.
2. Some definitions are in order here. Positivism asserts that objective accounts of the
real world can be given. Postpositivism holds that only pardally objective accounts of the
world can be produced, because all methods for examining them are flawed. According to
foundationaüsm, we can have an ultímate grounding for our knowledge claims about the
world, and this involves the use of empiricist and positivist epistemologies (Schwandt,
1997a, p. 103). Nonfoundationalism holds that we can make statements about the world
without "recourse to ultimate proof or foundations for that knowing" (p. 102). Quasi-
foundationalism holds that certain knowledge claims can be made about the world based on
neorealist criteria, including the correspondence concept of truth; there is an independent
reality that can be mapped (see Smith & Deemer, Chapter 12, Volume 3).
3. Jameson (1991, pp. 3-4) reminds us that any periodization hypothesis is always sus-
pect, even one that rejects linear, stagelike models. It is never clear to what reality a stage
refers, and what divides one stage from another is always debatable. Our seven moments are
meant to mark discernible shifts in style, genre, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.
4. Some further definitions are in order. Structuralism holds that any system is made
up of a set of oppositional categories embedded in language. Semiotics is the science of signs
or sign systems—a structuralist project. According to poststructuralism, language is an
unstable system of referents, thus it is impossible ever to capture completely the meaning of
an action, text, or intention. Postmodernism is a contemporary sensibility, developing since
World War II, that privileges no single authority, method, or paradigm. Hermeneutics is an
approach to the analysis of texts that stresses how prior understandings and prejudices
shape the interpretive process. Phenomenology is a complex system of ideas associated with
the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Alfred Schutz. Cultural studies
is a complex, interdisciplinary field that merges critical theory, feminism, and post-
structuralism.
5. Of course, all settings are natural—that is, places where everyday experiences take
place. Qualitative researchers study people doing things together in the places where these
39
things are done (Becker, 1986). There is no field site or natural place where one goes to do
this kind of work (see also Gupta & Ferguson, 1997, p. 8). The site is constituted through
the researcher's interpretive practices. Historically, analysts have distinguished between
experimental (laboratory) and field (natural) research settings, henee the argument that
qualitative research is naturalistic. Activity theory erases this distinction (Keller & Keller,
1996, p. 20; Vygotsky, 1978).
6. According to Weinstein and Weinstein (1991), "The meaning of bricoleur in French
popular speech is 'someone who works with his (or her) hands and uses devious means com-
pared tothoseof the craftsman.'... the bricoleur is practica! and gets the Job done" (p. 161).
These authors provide a history of the term, connecting it to the works of the Germán soci-
ologist and social theorist Georg Simmel and, by implication, Baudelaire. Hammersley (in
press) disputes our use of this term. Following Lévi-Strauss, he reads the bricoleur as a
mythmaker. He suggests the term be replaced with the notion of the boatbuilder.
Hammersley also quarrels with our "moments" model of qualitative research, contending
that it implies some sense of progress.
7. Brian De Palma reproduced this baby carriage scene in his 1987 film The Un-
touchables.
8. In the harbor, the muzzles of the Potemkin's two huge guns swing slowly toward the
camera. Words onscreen inform us, "The brutal military power answered by guns of the bat-
tleship." A final famous three-shot montage sequence shows first a sculptured sleeping lion,
then a lion rising from his sleep, and finally the lion roaring, symbolizing the rage of the Rus-
sianpeople (Cook, 1981,p. 167). In this sequence Eisenstein uses montage to expand time,
creating a psychological duration for this horrible event. By drawing out this sequence, by
showing the baby in the carriage, the soldiers firing on the citizens, the blood on the
mother's glove, the descending carriage on the steps, he suggests a level of destruction of
great magnitude.
9. Here it ¡s relevant to make a distinction between techniques that are used across dis-
ciplines and methods that are used within disciplines. Ethnomethodologists, for example,
employ their approach as a method, whereas others selectively borrow that method as a
technique for their own applications. Harry Wolcott (personal communication, 1993) sug-
gests this distinction. It is also relevant to make distinctions among topic, method, and
resource. Methods can be studied as topics of inquiry; that is how a case study gets done. In
this ironic, ethnomethodological sense, method is both a resource and a topic of inquiry.
10. Indeed, any attempt to give an essential definition of qualitative research requires a
qualitative analysis of the circumstances that produce such a definition.
11. In this sense all research is qualitative, because "the observer is at the center of the
research process" (Vidich & Lyman, Chapter 2, Volume 1).
12. See Lincoln and Guba (1985) for an extensión and elaboration of this tradition in
the mid-1980s, and for more recent extensions see Taylor and Bogdan (1998) and Creswell
(1997).
13. Greenblatt (1997, pp. 15-18) offers a useful deconstructive reading of the many
meanings and practices Geertz brings to the term thick description.
14. These works marginalized and minimized the contributions of standpoint feminist
theory and research to this discourse (see Behar, 1995, p. 3; Cordón, 1995, p. 432).
15. Olesen (Chapter 8, Volume 1) identifies three strands of feminist research: main-
stream empirical, standpoint and cultural studies, and poststructural, postmodern. She
40
Introduction
places Afrocentric and other models of color under the cultural studies and postmodern
categories.
16. These, of course, are our interpretations of these paradigms and interpretive styles.
17. Empirical materiah is the preferred term for what are traditionally described as
data.
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SECOND EDITION

Sage Publications, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strategies of qualitative inquiry / Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S.

Printed on acid-free paper

Acquiring Editor: Margaret H. Seawell

1. Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of

2. The Choreography of Qualitative Research Design:

3. An Untold Story? Doing Funded Qualitative Research 80

6. Ethnography and Ethnographic Representation 165

Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln

^ Qualitative research has a long, distinguished, and sometimes an-

with some irony, that qualitative research in sociology and anthropology

Returning to the observations of Vidich and Lyman as well as those of

Qualitative research is a field of inquiry in its own right. It crosscuts disci-

photographs, recordings, and memos to the self. At this level, qualitative

The Qualitative Researcher as Bricoleur and Quilt Maker

The qualitative researcher may take on múltiple and gendered im-

(1992) describe the methodology of cultural studies "as a bricolage. Its

The methodological bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of

Qualitative research, as a set of interpretive activities, privileges no sin-

feminism, Marxism, and ethnic models of study. Qualitative research is

project. These understandings would not be shared by mainstream post-

Qualitative research is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and some-

This rather complex statement means that qualitative research, as a set

Resistances to Qualitative Studies

The academic and disciplinary resistances to qualitative research illus-

qualitative research are many. Qualitative researchers are callad journal-

national contexts; the American pragmatic, naturalistic, and interpretive

Qualitative Versus Quantitative Research

The word qualitative implies an emphasis on the qualities of entities

Of course, both qualitative and quantitative researchers "think they

(Becker, 1986, p. 122). Qualitative research differs from quantitative re-

tion of life worlds are increasingly confronting social researchers with

Acceptance ofpostmodern sensibilities. The use of quantitative, positivist

Capturing the individual's point ofview. Both qualitative and quantitative

Examining the constraints of everyday Ufe. Qualitative researchers are

Securing rich descriptions. Qualitative researchers believe that rich de-

Tensions Within Qualitative Research

It is erroneous to presume that all qualitative researchers share the same

• The History of Qualitative Research

The history of qualitative research reveáis, as Vidich and Lyman remind

Throughout the history of qualitative research, investigators have

and his followers and corresponded to the emergence of ethnic studies

• The Seven Moments of Qualitative Research

As suggested above, our history of qualitative research in North America in

The Traditional Period

Here is Malinowski (1967) discussing his field experiences in New

Nothing whatever draws me to ethnographic studies.... On the whole the

In another work, this lonely, frustrated, isolated field-worker describes

Malinowski's remarks are provocative. On the one hand they disparage

(the ethnography would créate a museumlike picture of the culture stud-

The modernist phase, or second moment, builds on the canonical

ended and quasi-structured interviewing with participant observation and

Participant observations have occasionally been gathered in standardized

In the analysis of data, Becker notes, the qualitative researcher takes a

Association meetings held in San Francisco and shared their memories of

moment of creative ferment—scholarly and political. The San Francisco

Thus did the modernist phase come to an end.