Revision summary
Qualitative epistemology: social reality is meaningful and situated. Weber, Schutz, and Blumer supply the foundations. Methods follow people into context rather than only into items. Reflexivity and saturation are checks, not ornaments. Indian ethnographies of village, mill, and SHG rest on this claim.
Model answer
Introduction
Qualitative methods rest on the claim that social reality is meaningful, situated, and historically produced. Knowledge of it comes from interpreting action in context, not only from counting standardised items. That is an epistemology, not a dislike of numbers.
Body
Foundational claims
- Max Weber’s Verstehen: to know a social fact is to grasp meaning adequate to the actor and then to compare.
- Alfred Schutz’s life-world: the everyday stock of knowledge is the first given, not a residual.
- Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism: meaning arises in interaction; methods must follow people into that process.
What follows for method
- Participant observation, unstructured interview, and case study are justified because closed items can miss the object.
- Grounded theory, after Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, builds categories from cases until saturation.
- Reflexivity, after Ann Oakley and feminist standpoint work, treats the interview as a relation, not a tap.
Relation to positivism
- The foundation is anti-reduction, not anti-evidence. Documents and talk are still public enough to dispute.
- Indian village studies, mill ethnographies, and SHG life-histories rest on this epistemology.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD MEAN[Meaningful reality] --> V[Verstehen] V --> MTH[Observation interview case] REF[Reflexivity] --> MTH MTH --> KNOW[Situated knowledge]
Conclusion
Qualitative methods are founded on meaning, context, and interaction as real. Weber, Schutz, and Blumer justify why a codebook can be too early. Reflexivity keeps the account checkable rather than private.
Quick related
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Can it study inequality?
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