ABSTRACT
There has been a great deal of thinking and writing about the qualitative approach over the past several decades. Has this scholarly activity been moving in the direction of a creating a greater differentiation between the quantitative and qualitative approaches? Or has it instead moved in the direction of convergence? Recently, Denzin and Lincoln (1994b) organized this activity into what they called “five historical moments” (p. 1), which show a pattern indicating that “a quiet methodological revolution has been taking place in the social sciences The social sciences and humanities have drawn closer together in a mutual focus on an interpretive, qualitative approach to research and theory” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994c, p. ix). They perceived the first moment, the traditional period, as beginning in the early part of this century and ending about World War II. This period is characterized by objective type research in a positivist tradition where researchers are the experts studying cultures that are “alien, foreign, and strange” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b, p. 7). The second moment, called the modernist phase, began in the postwar years and extended until the 1970s. “The modernist ethnographer and sociological participant observer attempted rigorous, qualitative studies of important social processes” (p. 8). Although the “social realism, naturalism, and slice-of-life ethnographies” (p. 8) were still valued, this was a period of “creative ferment” where scholars drew from interpretive theories from contiguous fields. Their third moment, which lasted until 1986, is called “blurred genres.” During this time, qualitative researchers had a “full complement of paradigms, methods, and strategies to employ in their research” (p. 9). During this time the old approaches of positivism and behavioralism were waning and were replaced by newer approaches such as poststructuralism, neopositivism, micro-macro descriptivism, neo-Marxism, ritual theories of drama and culture, deconstructivism, and ethnomethodology. By the mid-1980s a fourth moment emerged called the “crises of representation,” which eroded classical norms and called into question the influence of gender, class, and race on interpretations. Qualitative researchers became more self-reflexive and framed their writings more as personal interpretations than as grounded theories or explanations. The fifth moment is focused on the problem about how qualitative studies are to be evaluated when scholars cannot agree on the meaning of terms such as validity, generalizability, and reliability. This problem is being addressed by the more action- (or activist-) oriented researchers who have replaced the aloof researcher. And social criticism and small-scale theories are replacing grand narratives.
