Qualitative Methods

The Development of Qualitative Methods

The main theoretical and practical development of qualitative methods was carried out in sociology and anthropology. Geographers adapted these insights to and enhanced them in their own research. Anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas pioneered the use of qualitative methods with observations in ethnographic field studies at the start of the 20th century. In the 1920s, members of the Chicago School of sociology and urban geography, such as Robert Ezra Park and Ernst Burgess, applied—in addition to some quantitative methods—mainly qualitative methods, such as participant observations, to investigate different patterns of social life in diverse parts of Chicago. This type of research was highly influenced by one strand of argument in the so-called Methodenstreit. This methodological dispute took place in late-19th-century Germany. It was argued by social scientists such as Georg Simmel and Max Weber that because human beings are complex and creative social subjects, their behaviors are neither caused nor explainable by standardized laws; thus, there is a fundamental difference between natural science and social science that requires the use of different methodologies.

The specific aspects of human interactions are notably elucidated by the social psychological theory of symbolic interactionism, according to which the activities and consciousness of the individual are considered part of social interactions. With the rise of positivism since the late 1920s, the use of qualitative research methods came under fierce attack. As a result of the argument that social research methods should lead to measurable and objective results, some methods [Page 2324]similar to those of the natural sciences came into common use. These are characterized by the statistical analysis of data gathered by experimental and survey research. Critics of this approach argued that positivists research a simplified, overly abstract version of the real world that ignores the rich meanings people construct and use in everyday life. According to this criticism, such research neglects the unintended influence on the research process by the researcher in his or her specific role. This argument is analogous to one from the natural sciences, that is, the uncertainty principle developed in 1927 by the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who demonstrated that the position of extremely small particles such as electrons could not be exactly specified because the process of its measurement itself changes the momentum and direction of the particle.

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