ABSTRACT
The legitimacy and usefulness of the contribution of qualitative research to studying the organisation and delivery of health services are hotly contested. Enthusiasts argue that qualitative research has an essential contribution to make to the study of health care settings, while critics respond that such methods lack rigour and precision. This debate is, at times, vituperative, with qualitative researchers condemning alternative approaches as scientistic, positivistic, artificial and failing to reflect meanings underpinning social action. Critics are equally outspoken, rejecting qualitative research as soft, impressionistic, anecdotal, political and subjective. On both sides there is a tendency to present qualitative methods as innovative, controversial and relatively untried. In fact, self-conscious discussion of qualitative methods in social research has been around for at least one hundred years (Dingwall et al. 1998) and the terms in which the current debate is conducted are anticipated in much earlier writings on the subject (Murphy et al. 1998).
