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to be found between qualitative and quantitative approaches regarding thesame research themes. The examples relate to “looking behaviour”, or moreappropriately “eye contact”. As considerations of space do not allow thecomplete examples to be accommodated here, we shall have to rely uponsummaries of these. In our discussion, we shall merely present an indication ofthe most important differences between them; the reader can compare the twoexamples more thoroughly by employing the research model that we outlinedearlier.Confidentially speaking...This example consists of brief summaries from two different researchtraditions on the topic of interpersonal perception. Example A is a summary ofSartre’s analysis of interpersonal perception derived from a summary originallyprepared by Van Leent (1965). According to Van den Berg, this is one of thebest phenomenological analyses yet undertaken and it is, therefore, a goodexample of qualitative research. Example B is a summary of a typicalexperimental investigation into interpersonal perception, and is typical of theresearch conducted by well-known empiricists such as Argyle, Exline, andJaspars.Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.zaEXAMPLE AIn this study, Sartre was intensely involved with an attempt to determine themost deep-seated meaning of gazing or glances. To achieve his aim he neitherconducted laboratory experiments, nor did he get involved with opinionsurveys in his attempts to determine how people experience this phenomenonor for that matter, what the extent of their experience in this regard may havebeen. He actually set about trying to interpret everyday occurrences andpeople’s largely unconscious experiences at this level. Stated differently, Sartreprovided a description of what occurs in real life when an individual is awareof the fact that he or she is being looked at. To attain this end, he makes use ofexamples of which the following is probably the most striking (our translationof Van Leent’s Dutch summary, 1965: 154):Imagine, he said, that I were peeping through a keyhole, I am entirely an eye,having totally lost myself in what I am able to see in the other room. Myconsciousness consists entirely of looking, absorbed by the act of looking asink is absorbed by blotting paper. I have become entirely transcended,myself— my body that is standing in front of the door, my inquisitive innerbeing — having reached out to the scene which I have “joined”. My attitude isnothing less than a connection between a means — the keyhole — and a goal—the scene while my inquisitiveness merely exists in the fact that there issomething to be seen behind the door that cannot be missed. At that stage I amnot aware of my own existence, “or as Sartre would have164