ABSTRACT
Is qualitative research truly scientific? This is no small question in the halls of academia, and it is not insignificant in many quarters of society. It has been an especially heated issue in my field of psychology. Few of the major research journals in psychology will even submit qualitative research papers to peer review. And the recent attempt to establish qualitative research as a sanctioned section of the American Psychological Association required five years of intense struggle before achieving success. This may strike one as paradoxical, as the grounding work of many of psychology’s major theorists—including Freud, Ebbinghaus, Piaget, Lorenz, and Vygotsky, among others—was primarily qualitative in nature. We may properly ask, then, how did qualitative research lose its scientific status? And, if such research is without credentials in the scientific community, then what promise is there that such efforts can acquire global significance?
