Science and Data

Abstract Chapter 1 sets out to establish a foundational understanding of the place of qualitative methods within the broader context of public health knowledge generation. It outlines the principles that are key to qualitative methods and also discusses their disciplinary roots. It offers strategies for engaging students who might be more familiar or more comfortable with quantitative methods, and it suggests how qualitative methods can be taught as complementary to quantitative ones. The chapter also engages with the centrality of quantitative methods to much of public health research and explicitly considers the questions that are best posed and the perspectives added by qualitative inquiry.