Place/Space in Qualitative Research

Although philosophers and scientists have long offered explanations and theories as to the nature of space and place, it is in the social sciences where particular ways of understanding and interpreting space and place have been centrally and practically implicated in empirical research, and hence, used to understand the multiple ways of viewing and explaining the social world. All social science disciplines engage to some extent with space and place, even if not always explicitly. Indeed, most empirical research into human life is based somewhere and at some scale, and these spatial contexts have varying degrees of importance and are accorded varying degrees of priority. Frequently, in sociological, anthropological, economic, or psychological studies, for example, a country, region, city, town, neighborhood, or settings for working and living in will be an important part of the overall inquiry and questions asked. Studies might refer to space and place as broad-brush macroscale classifications such as developing world, coastal, rural or urban, South East, Deep South, or forested, or studies might use microscale classifications such as clinical environments, schools, factories, or homes that equally imply some sort of spatial parameters. Studies might simply describe these physical borders of the research, or they might go farther and develop and convey a feel for a location and its layout, for example, in describing a town or workplace, and analyze the human activity therein.

Certain academic disciplines have strong connections to and traditional uses of space and place, including environmental psychology, architecture, and urban planning. It is, however, in the discipline of human geography where space and place have perhaps been brought most significantly to the forefront, the discipline by definition being concerned with the spatial organization and character of human life. In this sense, space and place have been elevated to a central position in geographical analysis and explanation, and the theoretical wing of human geography has debated very directly and identified over time what space and place are. Beginning in the late 1950s, the quantitative revolution in human geography focused geographical analysis at the macroscale, often at the regional or national level. The era of spatial science reduced space to little more than a featureless, characterless void on which the geometry of aggregate human activity was mathematically mapped, modeled, and predicted. The aim was ultimately to look for order in the social word—locational models of industry and concentric ring models of urban land use being popular recognizable examples. In these research endeavors, places were represented as little more than locations or points between which distances (spaces) were calculated. Fueled by emerging computer technology, this remained the dominant mode of inquiry in human geography until the 1970s, when humanistic and Marxist geographers began to present a wide-ranging critique that include the following observations: (a) In looking collectively at populations for sameness, spatial science was blind to human diversity and character. (b) People do not conform to rational predictive models that disguise human individuality and unpredictability. (c) Spatial science had become an exercise in mapping for mapping's sake. In other words, a spatial fetishism had led to space being privileged above all other relational features of social and economic life and being given a distinct reality in its own right. (d) Little or no attention was given in spatial science to explaining social processes, such as those relating to gender and class, beyond their abstract spatial patterning.

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