ABSTRACT
Qualitative theoreticians have presented a very wide array of views about what the qualitative approach is or should be. By qualitative theoretician, I do not mean someone who has developed a theory about how humans construct meaning; instead, I use the term throughout this book to mean a scholar who focuses on the qualitative approach as the phenomenon of interest and seeks to describe what it is or prescribe what it should be. This is in contrast to a qualitative researcher who is a scholar who uses some aspect of the approach as a tool to examine social phenomena. Of course, some scholars are both theoreticians and researchers.
