Moments in Qualitative Research

The Traditional Period

The first moment, the traditional period, begins in the early 1900s and continues until World War II. During this time, qualitative researchers wrote “objective,” colonizing accounts of field experiences, reflective of the POSITIVIST scientist paradigm. They were concerned with offering valid, RELIABLE, and OBJECTIVE interpretations in their writings. The other who was studied was often alien, foreign, and exotic.

Modernist Phase

The modernist phase, or second moment, builds on the canonical works from the traditional period. Social REALISM, NATURALISM, and slice-of-life ETHNOGRAPHIES are still valued. It extended through the postwar years to the 1970s and is still present in the work of many. In this period, many texts sought to formalize and legitimize qualitative methods. The modernist ethnographer and sociological participant observer attempted rigorous, qualitative studies of important social processes, including deviance and social control in the classroom and society. This was a moment of creative ferment.

Blurred Genres

By the beginning of the third stage (1970–l986), “blurred genres,” qualitative researchers had a full complement of paradigms, methods, and strategies to employ in their research. Theories ranged from SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM to CONSTRUCTIVISM, naturalistic inquiry, positivism and postpositivism, PHENOMENOLOGY, ETHNOMETHODOLOGY, critical Marxist theories, SEMIOTICS, STRUCTURALISM, FEMINISM, and various ethnic paradigms. APPLIED QUALITATIVE RESEARCH was gaining in stature, and the politics and ethics of qualitative research were topics of considerable concern. Research strategies and formats for reporting research ranged from GROUNDED[Page 661]THEORY to CASE STUDY to methods of historical, biographical, ethnographic, action, and clinical research. Diverse ways of collecting and analyzing empirical materials became available, including qualitative interviewing (open-ended and semistructured), observational, visual, personal experience, and documentary methods. Computers were entering the situation, to be fully developed (to provide online methods) in the next decade, along with narrative, content, and semiotic methods of reading interviews and cultural texts. Geertz's two books, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), and Local Knowledge (1983), defined the beginning and end of this moment.

Crisis of Representation

A profound rupture occurred in the mid-l980s. What we call the fourth moment, or the crisis of representation, appeared with Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus & Fischer, 1986), The Anthropology of Experience (Turner & Bruner, 1986), and Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). They articulated the consequences of Geertz's “blurred genres” interpretation of the field in the early 1980s as new models of truth, method, and representation were sought (Rosaldo, 1989).

The Postmodern Moment

The fifth moment is the postmodern period of experimental ethnographic writing. Ethnographers struggle to make sense of the previous disruptions and crises. New ways of composing ethnography are explored. Writers struggle with new ways to represent the “other” in the text. Epistemologies from previously silenced groups have emerged to offer solutions to these problems. The concept of the aloof observer has been abandoned.

...