Cercetarea calitativă în etnologie: concepte, metode, principii de validare
Qualitative Research in Ethnology: Concepts, Methods, Principles of Validation

Summary/Abstract: The paper approaches the debate of ethnologists and cultural anthropologists in the 1970s over the relevance of quantitative vs. qualitative methods, bringing in definitions of and distinctions between pairs of concepts like emic/etic, regard eloigné/regard partagé and objective/subjective and reaching the conclusion that all perspectives should be employed according to the purpose of research. Actually, qualitative research uses quantitative data alongside other types of data from various sources (official and private documents, objects that can „tell a story”, accounts of informants and many others). Our approach continues with a description regarding the stages of qualitative research: collection and textualization of data (the ethnographic stage) and interpretation by either text analysis or construction of models and classifications. Finally, we shall discuss several principles that validate ethnological qualitative research (significance, multi-instrumentality, replicability, the ethic principle), suggesting that a most useful methodological question of qualitative research is „Why?” because even if it doesn't trigger an answer, it leads ethnologists towards a better understanding of their object.

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