The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Quality
Introduction:
In the contemporary social sciences, qualitative data, by which we here refer specifically to evidence gathered from participant observation and in-depth interviewing, have a peculiar status. Across many substantive fields – inequality, poverty, education, organizations, immigration, health, crime, and more – scholars doing quantitative research actively rely on insights from qualitative work to both generate ideas and interpret findings. They cite neighborhood ethnographies to motivate a study of the effects of a criminal intervention; they quote interviews with low-income mothers to explain the significance of survey findings. Nevertheless, many researchers – both quantitative and qualitative – remain ambivalent about how to evaluate evidence presented in qualitative research (see King et al., 1994; Lamont & White, 2005; Becker, 2009; Small, 2009).