The American Tradition in Qualitative Research

The four volumes cover six central themes in American Qualitative Research: (1) History, Ethics, Politics; (2) Paradigms (positivism, postpositivism, interpretive theory, queer theory, Marxism, feminism, cultural studies, standpoint theory; (3) Strategies of Inquiry (Ethnography, Case Study, Life Story, Historical Method, Grounded Theory, Action Research, Ethnomethodology); (4) Methods of Collecting Empirical Materials (Interview, Observation, Document Analysis, Visual Culture, Narrative Content, Semiotic Methods); (5) Interpretive Practices (Causal Modules, Interpretive Validity, Politics of Interpretation, Art of Writing; (6) The Future.

Editors' Introduction

NormanK.Denzin and YvonnaS.Lincoln

The American tradition in qualitative research, the subject of this four volume series, is long and distinguished. In the 20th century it extends from the work of the early Chicago School sociologists through the present, in the work of the postmodern ethnographers who write and perform culture (see the readings by Geertz and Adler and Adler in Volume II; also Bryman and Burgess, 1999, pp. x–xi). This tradition is embedded in a complex historical field; indeed, Vidich and Lyman (in this volume) demonstrate how the ethnographic tradition reaches forward from the Greeks through the 15th- and 16th-century interests of Westerners in the origins of primitive cultures; to colonial ethnography connected to the empires of Spain, England, France, and Holland; to several ...

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