ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

In these days, the expression, ‘scientific’ is a synonym for ‘objective’ or ‘reliable’. In this paper, I have tried to examine of the scientific character of so-called ‘qualitative research’ which became a major alternative method in the various social sciences. There are many kinds of methods in the qualitative researches: narrative research, phenomenological research, grounded theory research, ethnographic research and case study etc. Each method has a specific character. However, it means that it is hard to grasp the identity of qualitative research itself. Generally speaking, the qualitative research is regarded as a non-quantitative research. The quantitative researches have a common identity by using a mathematic of statistical method, while qualitative researches have many differences in each research domain. Despite of methodological ambiguousness qualitative research has to be regarded as a significant method in various social researches, because the meaning of actions of human being and of social relations could not be explicated by a quantitative method. However, it is not obvious, how qualitative researches satisfy of the criterion of scientific research: objectivity and universality. I have argued that the phenomenological qualitative research is a good candidate to satisfy the criterions.

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