Qualitative Research Quotes

“I want to understand the world from your point of view. I want to know what you know in the way you know it. I want to understand the meaning of your experience, to walk in your shoes, to feel things as you feel them, to explain things as you explain them. Will you become my teacher and help me understand?”
― James P. Spradley

“In business, qualitative measurements and quantitative measurements are equally important.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“The worse thing that contemporary qualitative research can imply is that, in this post-modern age, anything goes. The trick is to produce intelligent, disciplined work on the very edge of the abyss.”
― David Silverman, Interpreting Qualitative Data

“The complexities of validating qualitative research need not be due to a weakness of qualitative methods, but on the contrary, may rest upon their extraordinary power to reflect and conceptualize the nature of the phenomenon investigated, to capture the complexity of the social reality. The validation of qualitative research becomes intrinsically linked to the development of a theory of social reality.”
― S Kvale

“Darwin's work is a testament to the power of two of the most basic tools used in research, the pencil and paper.”
― Robert Mark Silverman and Kelly L. Patterson

“[…] a student in our class asked disdainfully why quantitative methodologists do not openly criticize qualitative methods. He scoffed, 'They don't even mention it. But in courses in qualitative methods, quantitative methods always come up.'
[…]
I pointed out that the lack of critical remarks and the absence of any mention of qualitative research in 'methods' courses indicate the hegemony of the quantitative approach. Were not his statistics professors making a strong statement about the place of qualitative methods by omitting them entirely? Qualitative researchers, then, have to legitimate their perspective to students in order to break the methodological silence coming from the other side.”
― Sherryl Kleinman, Emotions and Fieldwork

“Fragmenting and colliding both hegemonic and oppositional codes, my goal is to reinscribe validity as a way that uses the antifoundational problematic to loosen the master code of positivism that continues to shape even postpositivism”
― Patti Lather

“As a general rule, researchers should assume an unobtrusive stance in public settings. A researcher should strive to blend into his or her surroundings in order to reduce his or her impact on the research setting. The art of blending into a research setting entails conscious decisions about how to dress in a research setting, what mannerisms to exhibit, whether to take notes openly or in a concealed manner, and other strategies that allow a researcher to become invisible in the field.”
― Robert Mark Silverman and Kelly L. Patterson