ABSTRACT
Qualitative research is as old as social science itself: well over a hundred years. 1842 is regarded as the birth year of sociology by those who consider Auguste Comte its founder; in 1871 anthropology matured into a discipline with Edward Tylor’s work Primitive Culture (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1974, vol. 16, p. 985), and in 1878 William James established the first course in psychology (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1974, vol. 6, p. 372). Education as a discipline did not surface until the twentieth century. From the beginning tension arose between those scholars within each field who were believers in the admirably ‘objective’ results achieved in the much older natural sciences, and those who felt that the ‘human’ sciences needed a different approach because of their complexity and the existence of a phenomenon unknown in the mechanical world: consciousness. Except in anthropology, there were always social scientists who aspired to the clean and clear rules that physics and chemistry could produce, and others who argued that human beings were not things and did not function according to such simple causal laws. (Amedeo Giorgi describes the history of this tension very vividly in his ‘Status of qualitative research in the human sciences’, 1986.) The debate is still with us.
