QUALITATIVE HEALTH RESEARCH / May 1999Morse / STAT OF THE A T Qualitative Methods: The State of the Art

Qualitative methods offer the researcher different approaches to a research problem. They offer alternatives in analytic approaches; cater to different disciplinary perspectives, assumptions, and agendas; provide a means to explore various levels of analysis, from micro-analytic to complex behaviors; and permit the development of the necessary level of concep-tualization of results. Depending on the researcher’s question(s), any one or combinations of qualitative approaches offer the researcher the means to obtain optimal research results. In this article, the example of the experience of traumatic injury is used to explore research pos-sibilities and to convey an appreciation for methodological diversity. Once a colleague, who specialized in the effects of smoking on health, cameknocking on my door to “see what I was up to. ” He was mildly interested in qualitative research, but when I showed him a video clip that I was analyzing, he was aghast: “You study that! ” The chaos of the scene—a cluster of physicians and nurses providing trauma care to a critically injured patient—was beyond his defini-tion of researchable problems and far beyond his conceptualization of research. The scene was not only “uncontrolled ” in his eyes, but it was such a crowded shouting mass that it was difficult to even ascertain what was going on (see Figure 1). Th