Qualitative Method Essay -- History, Greek

Qualitative methods can be traced back to the ancient classic historians. Herodotus, who is often called the father of history, traveled widely in the ancient world and recounted in his Histories the stories he had heard from the plenty he met. His successors down the ages recorded their observations of people that they encountered in their travels. These kinds of observations eventually became formalized in the discipline of anthropology. In clinical research, qualitative methods were first apply in case histories, for instance, Breuer and Freuds (1895/1955) first cases, which began the psychoanalytical tradition, and Watson and Rayners (1920) tuition of Little Albert, which helped establish the behavioral tradition. There is also a tradition of participant observation methods in mental health research, though they are more often conducted by sociologists than by psychologists. Classic examples of participant observation studies are Goffmans (1961) Asylums and Rosenhans (1973) S ane in insane places study (Barker and Pistrang 2002).Qualitative research seeks to understand a social or human problem through an inquiry process. It is conducted in a natural setting and reports the views of informants in rich detail. Qualitative research strives to describe the extraordinarily complex nature of people and their perceptions of their ensure in the specific social context in which the experience occurs. (Geertz, 1973). This is quite different than the paradigm of quantitative research. The raw poppycock for qualitative research is ordinary language, as opposed to the numbers that are the raw material for quantitative research. The language may be obtained in many ways. It may be the participants own descriptions of him or he... ...ings-Sanders & Anderson, 2003 Lawler, Dowswell, Hearn, Forster, & Young, 1999 as sited Schumacher, Koresawa, West, Dodd, Paul, Tripathy, Koo, Miaskowski, 2005). Others have used qualitative methods to enhance their understanding of re search participants who dropped out or did not adhere to the intervention (Jolly et al., 2003 as sited Schumacher et, al. 2005).In addition, researcher have conducted qualitative interviews adjacent an intervention study to elucidate the content and interpersonal processes of the intervention, to elicit participants experiences of having received the intervention, to evaluate the intervention, or to explain study findings (Gamel, Grypdonck, Hengeveld, & Davis, 2001). In these studies, sequential research designs, in which qualitative inquiry precedes or follows the intervention study, are most common (Schumacher et, al. 2005).