ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter indicates that a wide range of types and kinds of qualitative research are addressed here. The chapter addresses several key issues in planning and conducting qualitative research:
foundations of naturalistic, qualitative and ethno-OO graphic enquiry (theoretical bases of these kinds of research) planning naturalistic, qualitative and ethnographic OO research features and stages of a qualitative studyOO critical ethnographyOO some problems with ethnographic and naturalistic OO approaches
There is no single blueprint for naturalistic, qualitative or ethnographic research, because there is no single picture of the world. Rather, there are many worlds and many ways of investigating them. In this chapter we set out a range of key issues in understanding these worlds. It is important to stress, at the outset, that, though there are many similarities and overlaps between naturalistic/ethnographic and qualitative methods, there are also differences between them. Here the former connotes long-term residence with an individual, group or specific community (cf. Swain, 2006: 206), whilst the latter, often being concerned with the nature of the data and the kinds of research question to be answered, is an approach that need not require naturalistic approaches or principles. That said, there are sufficient areas of commonality to render it appropriate to consider them in the same chapter, and we will tease out differences between them where relevant. The intention of this chapter is to provide guidance for qualitative researchers who are conducting either long-term ethnographic research or small-scale, short-term qualitative research. There are many varieties of qualitative research, indeed Preissle (2006: 686) remarks that qualitative researchers cannot agree on the purposes of qualitative research, its boundaries and its disciplinary fields, or, indeed, its terminology (‘interpretive’, ‘naturalistic’, ‘qualitative’, ‘ethnographic’, ‘phenomenological’, etc.).
