The Evolution of Ethnographic Research Methods: Curiosities and Contradictions in the Qualitative Research Literature.

This article evaluates six recent contributions to the literature on ethnographic research methods. Four concern collecting and analyzing texts, one introduces the use of textual and numerical data, and one illustrates the use of quantitative methods for qualitative data. The first four books reveal that current thinking in qualitative methods continues to privilege inexplicit criteria for data collection and analysis despite recognizing that explicit criteria work best. The last two books show how to effectively integrate qualitative and quantitative data in ways that resolve these contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]