After our first acquaintance with naturalistic inquiry in the Introduction, this chapter goes into more depth. It begins with a discussion on interpretivism – the intellectual home of naturalistic inquiry – and positivism – which currently prevails in social research. It is shown that positivism, analogous to the natural world, looks for universal social laws in society, whereas interpretivism sees society as emerging from the actions and perspectives of its members. To study that emergent aspect of society, practitioners of naturalistic inquiry usually make a distinction in their work between describing, understanding, and explaining what people say and do, subsequently showing how in daily practice acts and meanings continuously interact. It is shown how this dialectical nature of the facts of society raises serious questions about proper – or useful – strategies in the collection of information. Moving into a discussion about research design, we pay specific attention to an often-used distinction between quantitative and qualitative research methods. We argue that the distinction between them, although often reiterated and even reified in scientific discourse, is a weak one if one considers a more fundamental difference between positivism and interpretivism. That is, in positivism, the researcher seeks to control the research situation, which from the viewpoint of naturalistic research is problematic because it engenders the creation of an artificial situation. Naturalistic inquiry, on the other hand, begins and ends with situations as they naturally occur and unfold in people's lives. That difference in viewpoint has obvious consequences for ideas about the validity and reliability of social research, a concluding point that the chapter addresses by offering practical suggestions.

Positivism and interpretivism: Auguste Comte versus Max Weber

Positivism – or to be precise: ontological positivism1 – is the epistemological assumption that the natural world and the social world are ordered by similar principles (Turner & Roth, 2003).