ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors discuss and describe pragmatic qualitative research, an approach that researchers can and should take up when the situation demands it. Pragmatic qualitative research has a long history in the field of inquiry, as it is grounded in the ideas and approaches of the early pragmatists in the 1930s, such as the Chicago School interactionists. While pragmatic qualitative research is widely used, it is relatively unacknowledged. This is arguably owing to a reluctance of researchers to ‘own up’ to adopting a plainer and ‘less sexy’ method coupled with ‘tyranny of method’, in which some designs unfortunately and inappropriately are viewed as lower on the qualitative research design hierarchy of goodness. Pragmatic qualitative approaches have enabled us to capture the richness within the data without the formal constraints of other qualitative approaches, such as ethnography or phenomenology.
