Qualitative research can contribute significantly to both applied, and to basic research, opening intellectual avenues that have not been explored in the past. In this paper, I present a unified view of five prominent qualitative methdologies ('genres'): educational criticism; formative research; and action research in the applied orientation, and ethnography and phenomenology in the basic orientation. The analysis of these genres is developed along six parameters: goals; the issues these genres enable us to explore; the intellectual traditions in which they are embedded; the role of theory; the perspectives from which researchers operate; and the writing style which they employ. These aspects are illustrated by concrete examples of research.
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