Qualitative Methods in Geography

Abstract

Increasing use of qualitative research strategies in geography accompanies philosophical and theoretical turns that have admitted new topics to the agenda of geographical inquiry. Interest in subjective experience and meaning, as intellectual turns have influenced directions of inquiry, has required methods able to reveal everyday experience and the multiple, partial meanings of the world. Qualitative methodology with its assumptions critiquing objectivity and the possibility of unitary explanation, provides an array of methods that center human subjectivity in investigating and analyzing the significance of spatiality to social, economic and political life. Geographers from different subdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives employ different strategies according to the purpose of the research, but in common these involve nonnumerical ways of observing, describing, and interpreting the world. Data are understood as narrative and visual representations of understandings of the world from particular subject positionings, and reflect the socially constructed nature of knowledge. Methodological issues arise from the complexity of constructing knowledge through methods reliant on intersubjective relations and interpretation sensitized by concepts from theory and the researcher's subjectivity. Attention to power relations in research and a current concern with the politics and ethics of research signal the need for flexible models in qualitative research and ongoing innovation.