380 RE-RECOGNIZING INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGIES
380CHAPTER 22
DOING SOCIAL SCIENCE
IN A HUMANISTIC MANNER
DVORA YANOW AND PEREGRINE SCHWARTZ-SHEA
These latter studies used observational methods to obtain data on self-identification, but
the data are mainly subjected to a narrowly conceived quantitative analysis.... Such
methodological melding usually eliminates the richness of the field observational data
and fails to capture the vitality of the interactive processes undergirding the development
of children’s identities.... The process is simply too complex and multilayered to
capture adequately with conventional survey and psychometric methods.
—Debra Van Ausdale and Joe Feagin (2001, 91–92)
The ideal study in political science today would be the comparative study
of health regulation of noodles in one hundred and fifty countries.
In this way you have a sufficiently large mass of material
to reach generalizations, and you don’t ever have to have eaten a noodle—
all you need is that data.
—Stanley Hoffmann (quoted in Cohn 1999)Although word-based, meaning-focused methods such as those presented and discussed in this
book have long had a place in the social sciences, their legitimacy as tools of scientific inquiry has
been increasingly challenged since the post–World War II behaviorist revolution, which gener-
ated significant emphasis on the research use of, and doctoral training in, quantitative methods.
This challenge has produced uneven consequences across the social sciences in the United States,
with some disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, retaining an emphasis on field re-
search and ethnographic or participant-observer methods and others, such as political science,
becoming predominantly quantitative in their research practices. Within the last decades, how-
ever, there has been a resurgence of interest in qualitative methods, as indicated by the success of
the Sage handbooks on qualitative research,^1 the creation of the journal Qualitative Inquiry, the
establishment of an Inter-University Faculty Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods,^2 the
prominent place of qualitative methods in the 2004 Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Re-
search Methods (Lewis-Beck, Bryman, and Liao 2004),^3 a 2003 workshop on “Scientific Founda-
tions of Qualitative Research” funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF),^4 the 2003
establishment of the Organized Section in Qualitative Methods within the American Political
Science Association, and the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (May 2005),
among others.
We are simultaneously heartened by this recognition of qualitative methods and qualitative
methodology and concerned that the ways in which they are being conceptualized and treated