ABSTRACT
A list of commonalities in structural qualitative research would probably consist of a single item: an interest in some kind of regularity in the organization of the phenomenon under study. The reason is that the procedures in structural analysis are much more diverse than in interpretational types of research. No one definition can be made to fit, even loosely, all five research approaches in this group: discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, ethnoscience, event structure analysis, and structural ethnography. The major difference between the conceptualization of the analysis procedures in these types of research and in interpretational approaches is this: the interpretational researcher ‘overlays’ a structure of her/his own making on the data, as a device for rendering the phenomenon under study easier to grasp; while structural analysts assume that the structure is actually inherent or contained in the data and the researcher’s job is to uncover it.
