Franz Boas And Qualitative Study

Franz Boas' work must be given credit for informing the process of qualitative study by focused on the use of documents and informants, whereas, Malinowski stated that a researcher should be engrossed with the work for long periods in the field and do a participant observation by living with the informant and experiencing their way of life, and thus creating a dichotomy of subjectivity that forced the debate relevant to reliability and validity. The Smithsonian Institution was a big supporter of anthropological research stated in 1846. Later the Bureau of Ethnology in 1879 began to gather information on Indians. Frank Boas, a German researcher did much to further ethnography in the late 1800'.s He and his students dominated the field in the

Strauss offered ethnography an opportunity to structure its process so as to facilitate the development of theory that would explain data. Because of Strauss American anthropologists such as Julian Steward, Roy Rappaport, and Marvin Harris began to study how culture and social institutions relate to a people’s technology, economy, and natural environment. In the 1970s many anthropologists, including American ethnologist Clifford Geertz and British ethnologist Victor Turner, moved away from ecological and economic explanations of people’s cultures (Ellen, 1984). Hence anthropology was established "as a recognized field of study" in the 1840's in American and Europe as ethnology. Henry R. Schoolcraft was one of the first Americans to publish ethnographic style

Energies are engaged to systematically develop theory, but the two approaches to the research task is different. The qualitative researcher's emphasis is on the construction of the theory to agree with data, and the quantitative researcher's emphasis is on the testing of the theory to prove. The difference in approach may, in part, be due to the differences in the phenomena being studied, and the questions asked and the techniques considered appropriate for confirming or refuting the conjecture (Morse, 1996). Qualitative research requires methodological versatility; researchers have to create the knowledge fitting their research group through any of numerous strategies that depends on design, and therefore have an extensive knowledge of social science theory, to interact competently with others, and persistently focus on objective, and single-mindedly commit to research. He/she, the researcher must constantly distinguish between another's world and that of the participant researcher, and yet become close enough to the lives of another that it be both experienced and analyzed