The major approaches to collecting qualitative data all fall under the rubric of what is called field research, ethnography or the study of people in their natural settings. Field studies tend to be of a concentrated geographic community while ethnographic studies tend to be of a particular cultural group . These approaches range from observation to participation with the two major approaches being participant observation and intensive interviewing.
Some qualitative studies use a combination of both.
It would be unlikely that a field or ethnographic study would not employ some intensive interviewing, though many intensive interview studies are done with individuals who do not come from the same geographical area or cultural group. In addition to the examples provided in Rubin and Babbie, as well as Joe Soss's and Donileen Loeske's analyses which you read for this class, is an example of an intensive interview study. Field studies are always longitudinal and usually involve the researcher living among the people he is studying for a year or several years. Intensive interview studies, an increasingly common approach in the fields of Education, Sociology, Nursing, and Conununications, are topic specific rather than setting specific, which characterizes most field studies. Both fieldwork and intensive interviews strive for what Max Weber, a German sociologist, called verstehen , or deep understanding, grasping the situation from the insider s perspective, or a holistic understanding.