Some people find it hard to believe that qualitative research is a relatively recent invention. Given how ubiquitous it is in healthcare research today, it's hard to imagine that it only really came into existence in the 1980s. Prior to that, most research that was broadly humanistic came under the umbrella of sociology or philosophy. But these approaches tended to be either densely theoretical or quantitative, as in the case of classical sociology. The domain that came to be known as qualitative research emerged largely from critical theory and came into existence as an attempt to codify a set of methodological approaches that could capture the kinds of phenomena that gave it a rapid and … [Read more...] about Going beyond qualitative research