2016 Volume 47 Issue 6 Pages 353-361
There is a growing interest in qualitative research among Japanese clinicians. Many of those who are interested in qualitative research attempt to identify the best method to guide them throughout their research. However, good qualitative research never arises from a method but a researcher's way of looking at reality. This paper, therefore, is based on cultural anthropology that has a long history of conducting qualitative research and illustrates three philosophical attitudes that leverage these clinicians for generating significant qualitative research results. These are: (i) looking at the reality from the perspective of informants, (ii) suspending researchers' ethics and their attempts to control people, such as patients and their families, and (iii) aiming at discovering not the average of the collected qualitative data but a new perspective that can only be found in the research field.
