Some Methodological and Philosophical Reflections on the Interview-Based Fieldwork in India and Elsewhere Taking Qualitative Research Seriously.

Qualitative research has frequently had a bad press and tends to be regarded as non-rigorous, subjectively biassed and in general 'unscientific'. This paper is restatement of the merits of this type of research allied to a repudiation of the arguments of its various critics. Thus,it takes issue with the supposed greater 'objectivity' attained through quantitative and positivistic research methods. But it is equally critical of the overly narrow understanding of language and text in 'post-modernism' and of fashionable worries about 'disempowered' informants. Instead, it is argued that seeking to understand, interpret and report honestly the things people say and the things people do in all their 'messy complexity' enables deep and rich 'knowledge claims'to be made. But for the full richness of such claims to emerge, it is argued, they must be mediated reflexively and self-consciously through the purposes (and associated theoretical frameworks) the researcher brings to his/her work. An understanding of the Wittgensteinian approach to language if allied with a Marxian framework for the broader understanding of social processes, can provide powerful analytical tools in the practice of qualitative social and economic research.