Qualitative Research

Qualitative research includes both a series of techniques and a group of approaches to research. Often mistakenly thought of as simply research without numbers, qualitative research lies at the very core of human geography, involving an array of different theoretical, methodological, and philosophical positions to research that together seek to answer questions of meaning.

Research in human geography, especially in the subfields of cultural geography and historical geography, has long had a qualitative base, although it was not until the late 20th century that it explicitly acquired the label qualitative research. During the 1920s, Carl Sauer, considered to be the founder of modern cultural geography, was influenced by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, adapting his anthropological fieldwork techniques (e.g., participant observation) for use in geography. Although Sauer never termed it as such, his methods of landscape interpretation can be seen to be profoundly qualitative, involving archival research, acute observation, interaction with local people, and skilled interpretation—all techniques that continue to flourish, albeit in modified forms, in contemporary human geography. Sauer's focus, however, was not on methods (means of collecting data) or methodology (conceptualizing how research can and should be conducted) but rather on the empirical results his investigations produced. Thus, although generations of students were trained in Sauerian ways, their writings, like Sauer's own, generally left their techniques and the underlying philosophical underpinnings of their research obscure.

At midcentury, geography's quantitative revolution swept the discipline, appearing to allow geography to enter the elite realm of the “hard sciences” (e.g., chemistry, biology, physics) and offering the allure of research results that resembled the “laws of science” with their broad applicability rather than the idiographic results of the Sauerian era—results that, while offering local insight, seldom had been found to be transferable to other areas. Methods that were not quantitative came to be seen as “soft science” and therefore less valuable; much qualitative research was eclipsed. By the 1970s, however, human geographers began to see that, for all the power of the quantitative techniques, such techniques often reduced human geography to a humanless form, where people were represented in aggregate or as averages rather than as thinking and feeling individuals, and qualitative research saw its resurgence in humanism.

For humanistic geographers, research was motivated by precisely the things that quantitative researchers found to be unimportant—the ability to study subjective meanings (e.g., of place, of landscape, of region), meanings held not only by aggregated groups but also by individuals. Humanistic geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan showed that quantitative research was not able to address complex questions of meaning and that an understanding of the human social world was incomplete without that. By the 1980s, human geography had two traditions, qualitative and quantitative, both of which were vying for supremacy—in publishing, in faculty positions, and in the ability to answer pressing questions of science and society.

Although for some that duel continues today, most human geographers now understand the difference between qualitative research and quantitative research[Page 392] not as one of superiority/inferiority but rather as one that divides the kinds of questions—and answers—that research can address. In fact, the very use of the labels soft and hard to segregate the two kinds of research is found to be inappropriate because both present significant, albeit different, challenges to the researcher.

...