As Alasuutari (2004, 601) has commented in his critical view of the globalization of qualitative research “the theories and methodologies formulated from a centre position are more easily heard and seen” than others coming out from the peripheries. Since 1994 when the first edition of the Handbook of Qualitative Research was published until the third edition released two years ago, Denzin & Lincoln (2005) book have been very influential on the way of thinking about the origin and development of qualitative research. They provided us with a temporal schema based on moments to think about qualitative research in North America. The traditional moment (1900-1950) is associated with Malinowsi and the Chicago School urban ethnography. The modernist or second moment (1950-1970) was described by Denzin & Lincoln (:8) as “the golden age of rigorous qualitative analysis”. It is related to canonical texts as Becker et al. (1961) and Glaser & Strauss (1967) and it is dominated by rhetoric of positivist and post-positivist discourses. During the “blurred genres” moment –term borrowed from Geertz’s books (1973 & 1983)- the naturalistic, post-positivist and constructionist movements gained some room in the discussion. This third moment ranges from 1970 to the second half of the 1980s. The crisis of representation, or the fourth moment, happened in the middle of the 1980s when new models of truth, methods and representation were sought by the studies of George Marcus, Michael Fischer, James Clifford, Victor Turner, Edward Bruner & Clifford Geertz. The post-modern or experimental period (1990-1995) corresponded with the work and practice of new ethnographers such as Carolyn Ellis & Arthur Bochner. Because of the confrontation with qualitative researchers developing social theory based on critical, interpretive, linguistic, feminist and rhetorical research they have dealt with a triple crisis of representation, legitimation and praxis. The sixth moment or post-experimental inquiry period (1995-2000) was a period of great excitement where experiments with new ways of inquiry were the main goal: literary, poetic, autobiographical, multi-voiced, critical performative, and other representations were constructed. The seventh moment (2000-2004) is named “the methodologically contested present” and is the confluence of diverse approaches such as critical theory, feminism, queer theory, performative ethnography, and others that characterize a period of great tension. The eight moment (2005-) is associated with “Bush science” and evidence-based social movement.


American pragmatism and symbolic interactionist tradition are relevant contributions from this part of the world to the international debate, even though this influence hasn’t been comparatively evaluated in different regions. However, it is possible now to compare the American way of thinking about qualitative research to the European case (Knoblauch, Flick and Maeder, 2005a, 2005b; Fikfak, Frane and Garz, 2004 and Flick, Von Kardorff and Steinke, 2004), for instance.


In the German case, Mey & Mruck (2007) distinguish six phases in the development of qualitative research: (1) an initial flourishing followed by a decline; (2) (re)invention and meta-theoretical foundations; (3) empirical elaboration; (4) technical and reflexive elaborations; (5) consolidation and establishment; and (6) internationalizing qualitative research. 


The first period is characterized by the influence of hermeneutics and phenomenology. In the specific field of sociology, Dilthey, Simmel, Mannheim, Weber and many others, such as Pierce, Dewey, Thomas and Znaniecki, played a crucial role in the early elaboration of qualitative approaches. Lewin and Stern from the Hamburg Institute had some influence on psychology. In the phase of (re)invention and meta-theoretical foundations, texts by Lazarsfeld, Merton, Glaser and Strauss, Becker and Geer, Mead, Blumer, Cicourel and many others reached a broader audience, especially in sociology. Thanks to the influence of interactionist, phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, some techniques such as objective hermeneutics (Oevermann) and the narrative interview (Schütze) were developed. The deep-structure hermeneutics approach also appears in this period, led by the Bremen group based on the work of Lorenzer. In the third phase, recognized as empirical elaboration, some other approaches are outlined, including the problem-centred interview and the ‘qualitative content analysis’, developed by Mayring (2000). This phase is characterized by an interest in empirical research instead of methodological and meta-theoretical debates. 


During the four phase, German researchers were no longer concerned about data collection; their interest was focused on data analysis. Therefore, the Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) Networking Project from the United Kingdom found excellent ideas and software prototypes in Germany to enhance discussions about technology and methodology. AQUAD, ATLAS.ti and WINMax (very well-known now as MAXqda) are some examples of qualitative computing developed in this phase that, as Mey & Mruck state (2007, 142) was developed from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s. The consolidation of German qualitative research is associated to the strengthening of some working groups and associations as well as to the appearance of various journals and books. Metaphor and conversation analysis and biographic approaches are relevant in this phase. Finally, the years of German qualitative research internationalization in the 21st Century is seen as a consequence of the development of some traditions as a whole and the permanent effort of projects such as the FQS journal (Mruck, Bergold, Breuer and Legewie, 2000).


It is important to say that Mey & Mruck’s cartography, as they like to call their contribution, never mentions Gerhardt’s analysis (1988) of qualitative sociology in the Federal Republic of Germany, even though her analysis is illustrative of the presence of Weber, Schütz, Simmel and Mannheim at the origins of qualitative research. Mey & Mruck’s description is similar to Flick’s scheme about the trajectory of qualitative research in Germany. Flick (2002, 2005) wrote about six phases of qualitative research in Germany: 


Gerhardt (1988) recognized five divergent positions in the German sociology of those days -narrative interview, objective hermeneutics, life cycle, grounded theory, and constructivism- and two traditions of methodology: sociology of language perspective and the biographical perspective.


Even though the “hegemonic position” of sociology in qualitative research fields is partly a self-construction of sociologists and others, as Mruck, Cisneros and Faux (2005) have outlined when talking about the centers and peripheries of qualitative research that it is relevant to see the important role played by the Qualitative Sociology at the end of the 80s in the discussion of international perspectives around qualitative research. Beyond any possible sociological bias in the evaluation of qualitative research, for instance, as in the case of Israeli qualitative researchers, Cohen (1988) has recognized them as peripherical in the context of American and European sociologies. Nowadays we have enough information about the Israeli national experience (Weill, 2005) to know about the absence of an anthropology department in any Israeli university or college, which would traditionally foster qualitative methods, although it is visible in the activity of the Israeli Center for Qualitative Methodologies http://www.bgu.ac.il/ICQM/ . Going back to the current German Sociology case Hitzler (2005) recognized four main perspectives: methods, biographical research, sociology of knowledge and Objective Hermeneutics.


Currently, interest in qualitative methodologies is increasing in Mexico. Not counting the professional associations that gather researchers of this orientation nor the specialized journals dedicated exclusively to qualitative research, Mexican social scientists have been working on these traditions against the mainstream paradigm. From previous decades, cultural anthropology, urban studies, feminist theory and practitioners of community work accumulated experiences that nowadays make the methodological reflection very rich. Just with illustrative purposes it is interesting to compare Mexican case to the New Zealand one because Mast (1988), for example, has based her overview on qualitative research in New Zealand in three substantive areas: cultural studies, feminist studies and community studies.


From diverse fields of knowledge, researchers have started to analyze people’s daily experiences, aiming to overcome the gap created by the conventional empirical paradigm between science and common sense. This way, the narrative turn has been enriching the Mexican way of performing social research. It is clear now that qualitative inquiry is a critical, hermeneutical and interpretive analysis of the narratives of everyday people in the real world. 


Social sciences as a whole have experienced unequal processes of development both at a national and international level. Keeping in mind the big cultural differences, I could say the history of Mexican qualitative sociology is similar to that which has been described by Kato (1988) for the Japanese case, since in both countries qualitative traditions were assumed to have the same origins based on the analysis of the rich cultural inheritance that had accumulated for centuries. The two were also similar in the debate between Sociology and Marxism in the 60s.

Sociology as a discipline was born in Japan after the Meiji Revolution (1868) and in Mexico before the Revolution of 1910. Regarding this science, the two cases are different at the present time, especially in the relationship with the empirical or quantitative sociology. In Japan its presence is peripheral while in Mexico the quantitative sociology dominates the institutional panorama, marginalizing the interpretive paradigm constituted by comprehensive tradition, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. 


Our social psychology is also very recent and could also be compared to Japanese Psychology (Suzuki, 2000). This science dates back to the 80s and the terms of the debate are still being defined between the objectivistic and the interpretive paradigms. The first Department of Psychology was founded in the first half of the 70s, when the Department of Philosophy was separated in the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In those years, psychology was defined in behaviourist backgrounds and social psychology was reduced to laboratory research on basic processes of minimum group. Recently, however, researchers who practice the interpretive paradigm formed by symbolic interactionism, phenomenological and/or constructionist traditions, are gaining ground. 


The theoretical homogeneity of the 70s was based on diverse interpretations of Marxism as well as on the Sociology of Development and in the Theory of Dependence. In the 80s, Mexican sociology was characterized by the crisis of old theories and a frenetic search for possibilities of empirical investigation that are more related to empirical problems. Theoretical pluralism and a set of disenchantment characterized those years. 


Although Oomen (1988) saw Indian qualitative sociology as a fostered result of three basic orientations of Indian sociology: traditionist, nationalist and pluralist, he highlighted (:51) the influence of some Latin-American social scientist –as Andre Gunder-Frank, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, among others- on the Indian qualitative sociologists. 


Thinking on a Latin-American perspective it could be possible to explore the pertinence of the next periodization of qualitative research in the Spanish-speaking countries belonging to American continent. Undoubtedly there are differences between Panama and Venezuela or between Nicaragua and Mexico but, from my analytical view the development of qualitative research in the region is understandable if we see it as: 


In his goal to provide a pictorial-cartographic representation of the case of qualitative research in Spain, Valles (2005) drew six different stages of qualitative social research in such country. At the beginning of 20th century he found some roots in the social reform and the novel in the works of authors as Pérez Galdós, Baroja, Unamuno, Palacio Valdés or Clarín. The sociological philosophy of Ortega y Gasset (1913-1939) as well as the socioeconomic crisis (1913-1917), the Second Republic (1931-36), and the end of Civil War (1936-39) are the context of the second period which is dominated by the influence of German neo-kantism and phenomenology. The post-Spanish Civil War and exile (1940-1959) outline the next stage. During the fourth period the contribution of Jesús Ibáñez is the main feature. Valles called it “near sociological research roots” and it goes from 1960 to 1975. The “boom: use and abuse?” period (1975-1993) is the fifth one. It represents the process of institutionalization of sociology in a post-dictatorship process. Finally, the specialization and systematization stage (1994- today) depicts the coming-of-age period for qualitative applied research and methodology in the Spaniard social sciences field. 


As we can see in the next section, the dialogue between qualitative researchers from Spain and colleagues from other Spanish-speaking countries has been permanent and very rich. Bolívar & Domingo (2007) meticulously review and describe the biographical-narrative research origin, development and variants in the social sciences of Ibero-American countries, showing the reciprocal enhancement that qualitative researchers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean who belong to the Spanish-speaking world have had for decades. It would be interesting to evaluate the English-speaking world to highlight the specific features of British and American qualitative research in the way some authors have done (Henwood & Lang, 2005; Strong, 1988) and compare also to the German case (Flick, 2005).