These new [qualitative] methods are not for the faint of heart. They demand imagination, courage to face the unknown, flexibility, some creativeness, and a good deal of personal skills in observation, interviewing, and self-examination-some of the same skills, in fact, required for effective counseling.
- Goldman, 1989, pp. 83-84 We counselors have entered the 21st century with a great challenge in the field of counseling research. A review of the research carried out in this field shows that the large majority of the studies are framed in the quantitative paradigm. The last decade has witnessed slow growth in the publication of qualitative research articles despite increased recognition of its value (Hanna & Shank, 1995;McLeod, 2001;Merchant, 1997;Ponterotto, 2002). The use of qualitative research is not new to the field of counseling and the helping professions. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud (1925) and Jean Piaget (1929) used qualitative approaches for a better understanding of human development. For instance, by means of qualitative research strategies, specifically naturalist observation and in-depth clinical interviewing, Piaget was able to develop a theory of cognitive development. In the latter part of the 1970s, Valliant (1977) and Levinson, Levinson, Mckee, Darrow, and Klein (1978) used qualitative methods, in particular longitudinal studies based on interviews, in order to study adult men, a study that helped to construct the theory of masculine adulthood development. Some authors prognosticate that the qualitative research approach will have a strong impact in the helping professions like psychoanalysis, behaviorism, humanism, and multicultural-feminism did in the past (Ponterotto, 2002;Ponterotto, Costa, & Werner-Lin, 2002).
In the 1980s, a concerted plea for the use of qualitative research began within the discipline. Goldman (1989) voiced that practitioners in the helping professions should depend less on experimental research, and Howard (1986) recommended expanding scientific research to include more practical methods, such as case studies, historical investigation, and other qualitative research designs. Still, in the 1980s, training programs in counseling were strongly supported by positivism and, as such, by quantification and experimentation. In view of this state of affairs, Hoshmand (1989) urged that three elements be incorporated into qualitative research in the field: (a) the naturalistic-ethnographic, in which the investigation is carried out in natural settings; (b) the phenomenological, with an emphasis on the meanings of human inner expressions; and (c) the cybernetic, based on the understanding of social aspects and the process of change within systems.
In the beginning of the 1990s, some qualitative studies began to appear in professional counseling journals, for example, the works of Skovholt and Ronnestad (1992) and C. L. Thompson and Campbell (1992). In 1993, for the first time, the Journal of Counseling & Development invited authors to submit qualitative research articles (cf. Borders & Larrabee, 1993). In the last decade of the 20th century, many journals in the helping professions have increasingly published qualitative studies, for example, the