Chapter 1
Introduction: Go to the People

1. A Note on the History of Qualitative Methods
2. Qualitative Methodology
3. Theory and Methodology
4. Notes

The term methodology refers to the way in which we approach problems and seek answers. In the social sciences, the term applies to how research is conducted. Our assumptions, interests, and purposes shape which methodology we choose. When stripped to their essentials, debates over methodology are debates over assumptions and purposes, over theory and perspective.

Two major theoretical perspectives have dominated the social science scene (Bruyn, 1966; Deutscher, 1973; also see Creswell, 2012; Saldaña, 2011).1 The first, positivism, traces its origins in the social sciences to the great theorists of the 19th and early 20th centuries and especially to Auguste Comte (1896) and Émile Durkheim (1938, 1951). The positivist seeks the facts or causes of social phenomena apart from the subjective states of individuals. Durkheim (1938, p. 14) told the social scientist to consider social facts, or social phenomena, as "things" that exercise an external influence on people.

The second major theoretical perspective, which, following the lead of Deutscher (1973), we describe as phenomenological, has a long history in philosophy and sociology (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Bruyn, 1966; Husserl, 1962; Psathas, 1973; Schutz, 1962, 1966). The phenomenologist, or interpretivist (Ferguson, Ferguson, & Taylor, 1992), is committed to understanding social phenomena from the actor's own perspective and examining how the world is experienced. The important reality is what people perceive it to be. Jack Douglas (1970, p. ix) wrote, "The 'forces' that move human beings, as human beings rather than simply as human bodies.are 'meaningful stuff.' They are internal ideas, feelings, and motives."

Since positivists and phenomenologists take on different kinds of problems and seek different kinds of answers, their research requires different methodologies. Adopting a natural science model of research, the positivist searches for causes through methods, such as questionnaires, inventories, and demography, that produce data amenable to statistical analysis. The phenomenologist seeks understanding through qualitative methods, such as participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and others, that yield descriptive data. In contrast to practitioners of a natural science approach, phenomenologists strive for what Max Weber (1968) called verstehen, understanding on a personal level the motives and beliefs behind people's actions (Hennink, Hutter, & Bailey, 2011).

This book is about qualitative methodology-how to collect descriptive data, people's own words, and records of people's behavior. It is also a book on how to study social life phenomenologically. We are not saying that positivists cannot use qualitative methods to address their own research interests: Durkheim (1915) used rich descriptive data collected by anthropologists as the basis for his treatise The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We are saying that the search for social causes is neither what this book is about nor where our own research interests lie.

We return to the phenomenological or interpretivist perspective later in this chapter, for it is at the heart of this work. It is the perspective that guides our research.

A Note on the History of Qualitative Methods

Descriptive observation, interviewing, and other qualitative methods are as old as recorded history (R. H. Wax, 1971). Wax pointed out that their origins can be traced to historians, travelers, and writers ranging from the Greek Herodotus to Marco Polo. It was not until the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, that what we now call qualitative methods were consciously employed in social research (Clifford, 1983).

Frederick LePlay's 1855 study of European families and communities stands as one of the first genuine pieces of qualitative research (Bruyn, 1966). Robert Nisbet (1966) wrote that LePlay's research represented the first scientific sociological research:

But The European Working Classes is a work squarely in the field of sociology, the first genuinely scientific sociological work in the century. Durkheim's Suicide is commonly regarded as the first "scientific" work in sociology, but it takes nothing away from Durkheim's achievement to observe that it was in LePlay's studies of kinship and community types in Europe that a much earlier effort is to be found in European sociology to combine empirical observation with the drawing of crucial inference-and to do this acknowledgedly within the criteria of science. (p. 61)

In anthropology, field research came into its own around the turn of the century. Boas (1911) and Malinowski (1932) can be credited with establishing fieldwork as a legitimate anthropological endeavor. As R. H. Wax (1971, pp. 35-36) noted, Malinowski was the first professional anthropologist to provide a description of his research approach and a picture of what fieldwork was like. Perhaps due to the influence of Boas and Malinowski, in academic circles field research or participant observation has continued to be associated with anthropology.

We can only speculate on the reasons why qualitative methods were so readily accepted by anthropologists and ignored for so long by sociologists and other social researchers. Durkheim's Suicide (1897/1951), which equated statistical analysis with scientific sociology, was extremely influential and provided a model of research for several generations of sociologists. It would be difficult for anthropologists to employ the research techniques, such as survey questionnaires and demographics, that Durkheim and his predecessors developed: We obviously cannot enter a preindustrial culture and ask to see the police blotter or administer a questionnaire. Further, whereas anthropologists are unfamiliar with and hence deeply concerned with everyday life in the cultures they study, sociologists probably take it for granted that they already know enough about the daily lives of people in their own societies to decide what to look at and which questions to ask.

Yet qualitative methods have a rich history in American sociology. The use of qualitative methods first became popular in the studies of the Chicago school of sociology in the period from approximately 1910 to 1940 (Bulmer, 1984; Corbin & Strauss, 2008). During this period, researchers associated with the University of Chicago produced detailed participant observation studies of urban life (N. Anderson, The Hobo, 1923; P. G. Cressey, The Taxi-Dance Hall, 1932; Thrasher, The Gang, 1927; Wirth, The Ghetto, 1928; Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum, 1929); rich life histories of juvenile delinquents and criminals (Shaw, The Jack-Roller, 1930; Shaw, The Natural History of a Delinquent Career, 1931; Shaw, McKay, & McDonald, Brothers in Crime, 1938; Sutherland, The Professional Thief, 1937); and a classic study of the life of immigrants and their families in Poland and America based on personal documents (W. I. Thomas & Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 1927). Up until the 1940s, people who called themselves students of society were familiar with participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and personal documents.

As important as these early studies were, interest in qualitative methodology waned toward the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s with the growth in prominence of grand theories (e.g., Parsons, 1951) and quantitative methods. With the exception of W. F. Whyte's (1943, 1955, 1981, 1993) Street Corner Society, few qualitative studies were taught and read in social science departments during this era.

Since the 1960s there has been a reemergence in the use of qualitative methods, and qualitative methodologies have moved in new directions (see DeVault, 2007 for an overview). So many powerful, insightful, and influential studies have been published based on these methods (e.g., E. Anderson, 1990, 1999, 2011; Becker, 1963; Duneier, 1999; Erikson, 1976; Hochschild, 1983; Kang, 2010; Lareau, 2001; Liebow, 1967; Thorne, 1993; Vaughan, 1997) that they have been impossible to discount. What was once an oral tradition of qualitative research has been recorded in monographs (Berg & Lune, 2011; Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Creswell, 2012, 2014; Dewalt & Dewalt, 2002; Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011; Esterberg, 2001; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Lofland, 1971, 1976; Lofland & Lofland, 1995; Riessman, 2008; Saldaña, 2011; Schatzman & Strauss, 1973; Silverman, 2013; Spradley, 1979, 1980; Stake, 1995; ten Have, 2004; Van Maanen, Dabbs, & Faulker, 1982; C. A. B. Warren & Karner, 2014; W. F. Whyte, 1984; Yin, 2011, 2014) and edited volumes (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Emerson, 1983; Filstead, 1970; Glazer, 1972; Luttrell, 2010; McCall & Simmons, 1969; Van Maanen, 1995). There also have been books published that examine the philosophical underpinnings of qualitative research (Bruyn, 1966; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, 2011; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011; Prasad, 2005), relate qualitative methods to theory development (Charmaz, 2014; Clarke, 2005; Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014; Prus, 1996; Saldaña,...