This guide is an interdisciplinary resource for individuals who study and use qualitative methods.
Choose an approach
Social scientists debate epistemology--what is the best way to understand social reality? Should you use a qualitative approach, a quantitative approach, or both? How do power and culture shape ways of knowing?
Some social scientists argue that the same logic applies to both qualitative and quantitative methods. In A Tale of Two Cultures, Gary Goertz and James Mahoney demonstrate that these two paradigms constitute different cultures, each internally coherent yet marked by contrasting norms, practices, and toolkits.
Applying insights from the literature on decolonization, the authors critique the status and role of the Deaf intellectual in relation to the academic field and the Deaf community.
Black women have been marginalized as researchers and the researched. Black Feminism in Qualitative Inquiry offers "onto-epistemological tools" for centering the intersectional identities, interpretations, and experiences of Black women in qualitative inquiry.
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) was a philosopher and an historian of culture who had a significant influence on the development of qualitative research. Dilthey saw the human sciences as distinct from the natural sciences. Unlike the natural sciences, which can develop law-based causal explanations of physical interactions, the human sciences must take into account lived experience to interpret social interactions.
Tony Lawson has become a figure of intellectual controversy by juxtaposing two simple and seemingly innocuous ideas. He argues that success in science depends on finding and using methods, including modes of reasoning, appropriate to the nature of the phenomena being studied, and also that there are important differences between the nature of the objects of study of natural sciences and those of social science. This book brings together some of the world's leading critics of economics orthodoxy to debate Lawson's contribution to the economics literature. The debate centers on ontology, which means enquiry into the nature of what exists, and in this collection scholars such as Bruce Caldwell, John B. Davis and Geoffrey M. Hodgson present their thoughtful criticisms of Lawson's work. Lawson himself presents his reactions to these criticisms, with full chapter replies to each of the scholars.
This comprehensive work from one of the leading thinkers in humanistic psychology frames the phenomenological foundations for qualitative research in psychology. Drawing from Husserl's philosophical principles, Giorgi offers practical steps for applying a phenomenological method.