Religious Tourism: The Way to Santiago

CHAPTER 4 METHODOLOGY
Nevertheless, the new quantitative techniques, like the analysis of social networks
(e.g. Scott, 2000), or the history of events, is to a certain extent able to surpass these
limitations. The previous thing is related to one third characteristic also born of the
positivism that is the search of the generalization.
4.2.2.2 Qualitative research
Consists of detailed descriptions of situations, events, people, interactions and
behaviours that are observable. It incorporates what the participants say, his
experiences, attitudes, beliefs, thoughts and reflections as they are expressed by
themselves and not as one describes them.
As Walle (1997) states, one of the most important characteristics of the qualitative
techniques of investigation is that they try to catch the sense that the people give their
acts, to their ideas, and to the world that surrounds to them. They are considered
between the qualitative methods to the ethnography, the studies of case, the
interviews to depth, the participant observation and the investigation-action.
One first characteristic of these methods is pronounced in its strategy to try to meet
the facts, processes, structures and in its totality, and not through the measurement of
some of its elements (Walle 1997).
The same strategy already indicates the use of procedures that give a unique
character to the observations.
The second characteristic is the use of procedures that make the observations in the
time and different cultural circumstances less comparable, that is to say, this method
looks for except the generalization and more approaches the phenomenology and the
symbolic interactions.
One third important strategic characteristic for this work (since it feels bases for the
method of the participative investigation), talks about to the paper of the investigator
David Mashhadigholam Rojo 41