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- Title
"Qualitative Research" Is a Moving Target.
- Authors
Lichterman, Paul
- Abstract
The term "qualitative" is best considered a disciplinary convenience, not a careful index of research practice. Viewed closely and historically, qualitative research is a shifting, expanding collection of techniques and logics of inquiry, though for curricular reasons we often define that collection by techniques. An effort to discern a single, shared definition of "qualitative" distracts us from the more central questions: What are qualitative researchers trying to achieve, and how do we know if they are doing that well? Qualitative research aims to access meanings that orient actors. Researchers have several historically evolving, mutually reinforcing standards to guide our efforts to access and conceptualize actors' meanings. These standards currently are interpretive validity, groundedness, and theoretical imagination. When we switch from asking what is qualitative to inquiring after the aims and standards of interpretive research, we find that communities of inquiry continue cultivating logics and observation techniques, and re-visioning standards for deploying them as we investigate meaningful action.
- Subjects
QUALITATIVE research; COMMUNITY of inquiry
- Publication
Qualitative Sociology, 2021, Vol 44, Issue 4, p583
- ISSN
0162-0436
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11133-021-09499-8