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California ()ualitativc research is inquiry nimed at describing and clarifying human experience as it appears in people's lives. Researchers ming qualitative methods gather data that serve as evidence for their distilled descriptions. Qualitative data are gathered primarily in the form of spoken or written language rather than in the form of numbers. Possible data sources arc interviews with participants, observations, documents, and artifa~ts. The uata arc u.,ually transformed into written text for analytic usc. Selection of interview participants requires purposive and iterative strategies. Production of interview data req11ires awareness of the complexity of self-reports and the relation between experience and languaged expression. To generate interview datu of sufficient breadth and depth requires practiced skill and time. Production of useful data from other sources is addressed.

Research methods are plans used in the pursuit of knowledge. They are outlines of investigative journeys, laying out previously developed paths, which, if followed by researchers, are supposed to lead to valid knowledge. These paths are drawn on maps based on assumptions about the nature of reality and the processes of human understanding. The map developed for Western science . during the past three centuries is based on the notion that reality consists of natural objects and that knowledge is a description of these objects as they exist in themselves. The purpose of the paths laid out on this map is to eliminate the distorting influence of personal perspective and the subjective properties of researchers.Phenomenological research methods are drawn on a different map. It is a map developed in the first half of this century by Edmund Husserl and subsequent members of the phenomenological movement (Spiegelberg, 1976). The phenomenological map is not antithetical to the mainstream natural science map, but it marks different features of the terrain. It locates geological features of human awareness and reminds us that the research journey needs to attend to the configurations of experience before moving on to assumptions about independent natural objects. Because the descriptions of natural objects are derived from experience, experience itself must be clear-

Attention to the judgments about the validity of research-generated knowledge claims is integral to all social science research. During the past several decades, knowledge development has been split into two communities: conventional researchers and reformist researchers. Narrative research is positioned within the reformist community. The two communities use different kinds of data and employ different analytic processes. In both communities, researchers develop arguments to convince readers of the validity of their knowledge claims. Both need to respond to threats to validity inherent in their designs. The threats particular to narrative research relate to two areas: the differences in people's experienced meaning and the stories they tell about this meaning and the connections between storied texts and the interpretations of those texts.