Evolution of Qualitative Research

In North America, qualitative research operates in a complex historical field that crosscuts at least eight historical moments. In the present, these moments overlap and operate simultaneously. We define them as the traditional (1900–1950); the modernist or golden age (1950–1970); blurred genres (1970–1986); the crisis of representation (1986–1990); the postmodern, a period of experimental and new ethnographies (1990–1995); postexperimental inquiry (1995–2000); the methodologically contested present (2000–2004); and the future, which is now (2005–). The future, the eighth moment, confronts the methodological backlash associated with the evidence-based social movement. It is concerned with moral discourse, with the development of sacred textualities. The eighth moment asks that the social sciences and the humanities become sites for critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, freedom, and community.

Successive waves of epistemological theorizing move across these eight moments. The traditional period is associated with the positivist foundational paradigm. The modernist or golden age and blurred genres moments 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, phenomenology, cultural studies, and feminism. In the blurred genres phase, the humanities became central resources for critical interpretive theory and the qualitative research project broadly conceived. The researcher became a bricoleur, learning how to borrow from many different disciplines.

The blurred genres phase produced the next stage, the crisis of representation. Here researchers struggled with how to locate 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 ethno graphic 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 a text and a context blurred. In the postmodern/experimental moment, researchers continued to move away from foundational and quasifoundational criteria. Alternative evaluative criteria were sought—those that might prove to be evocative, moral, critical, and rooted in local understandings.

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. Qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. Qualitative research 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 fieldnotes, interviews, [Page 312]conversations, 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 interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.

The history of qualitative research reveals that the modern social science disciplines have taken as their mission the analysis and understanding of the patterned conduct and social processes of society. To carry out this task, it was presupposed that social scientists had the ability to observe this world objectively. Qualitative methods were a major tool of such observations.

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