Human experience is of primary importance and in-depth reports by those having the experience are the best source of understanding. Experiences cannot be removed from their contexts. Qualitative research seeks to identify the deeper structure and common elements in experiences while valuing the uniqueness of each person's experience.

1. Phenomenological focus; studies experience and behavior.
2. Use of natural phenomena and contexts, not contrived or manipulated. Context is primary. Control is gained (if at all) at the expense of context-stripping. I.e., removing an experience or behavior from its context changes its meaning or makes it meaningless.
3. Close rapport and trust between researcher and informant or research participant (not "subject"). Researcher is involved with informants, not distant. Quality of the data is increased by a relationship built on rapport and trust.
4. Informant is allowed to tell their own stories and to stay close to immediate experience rather than interpretation or abstraction.
5. Usually a small number of subjects: 10-15, for instance. One way to arrive at a number of subjects is to analyze interviews as they are done. When no new information is coming (the point of saturation), no more data need be collected.
6. There are many qualitative methods and no set "recipe." Among them are ethnography, participant observation, and various kinds of in-depth interviews. Hermeneutic analysis and naturalistic inquiry are common terms for these kinds of interviews.

1. Identify topic (usually an experience) and do a literature search. (However, some suggest waiting until after the interviews are done so as to not bias the interviews.)
2. Identify informant pool, people who have had the experience.
3. In-depth interviews, tape-recorded with notes by the interviewer. Open-ended questions used to encourage informants to tell about the experience in their own words. An analogy to this style of interview is a client-centered psychotherapy intake interview.
4. Data analysis. Interviews are transcribed and "meaning units" are identified. These are organized into higher-order themes and, finally, over-arching themes, those that cannot be meaningfully combined any more.
5. Reporting. Themes are used to reconstruct or describe the underlying structure of the experience in a way that is faithful to the informants' experiences. Themes, examples, and frequencies are used but inferential statistics are rarely useful. Implications of the data, e.g., for caregiving or policy-making, are given also.
6. Cross-checking. The description is confirmed by showing it to informants, to others who have had similar experiences, and to "experts" who know about the experience. All should recognize the description as representing the experience. The researcher strives to have informants say, "That describes my experience better than I could.
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