Qualitative Method Essay -- History, Greek

Qualitative methods can be traced back to the antique Greek historians. Herodotus, who is practically called the father of history, traveled widely in the quaint world and recounted in his Histories the stories he had heard from the muckle he met. His successors down(p) the ages recorded their postings of people that they encountered in their travels. These kinds of observations eventually became formalized in the contain of anthropology. In clinical look, qualitative methods were first used in suit of clothes histories, for instance, Breuer and Freuds (1895/1955) first cases, which began the psychoanalytic tradition, and Watson and Rayners (1920) force field of Little Albert, which helped take a crap 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 R osenhans (1973) Sane in insane places study (Barker and Pistrang 2002).Qualitative research seeks to understand a social or human problem by means of an inquiry process. It is conducted in a natural setting and reports the views of informants in fat detail. Qualitative research strives to describe the extraordinarily complex nature of people and their perceptions of their hear in the specific social context in which the experience occurs. (Geertz, 1973). This is quite different than the paradigm of quantitative research. The afflictive material 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 an(prenominal) 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 me thods to enhance their understanding of research participants who dropped bring out or did not adhere to the intervention (Jolly et al., 2003 as sited Schumacher et, al. 2005).In addition, detective have conducted qualitative interviews following an intervention study to elucidate the nub 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).