ABSTRACT
The methods of data collection with which qualitative research is associated have been employed by social scientists for many years. The best-known of these methods is participant observation, which entails the sustained immersion of the researcher among those whom he or she seeks to study with a view to generating a rounded, in-depth account of the group, organization, or whatever. The adoption of such a research strategy was specifically advocated by Malinowski soon after the turn of the century, with his plea for the social anthropologist to come down from the verandah and to mix with the natives. Indeed, the debt owed by participant observers and qualitative researchers in general to anthropology can be discerned in the widespread use of the term ‘ethnography’ to describe their approach (e.g. Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983), a term coined in the context of anthropology to denote ‘literally, an anthropologist's “picture” of the way of life of some interacting human group’ (Wolcott, 1975, p. 112). Some sociologists made use of participant observation in such classic studies as Whyte's (1943) research among street corner boys, Gans's (1962) investigation of an Italian-American community, Dalton's (1959) examination of the world of managers, and Roy's (1960) and Lupton's (1963) research on industrial workers.
