The field of psychology has evoled in the 20th century from what many considered the magical work of Sigmund Freud to a respected scholarly discipline. A great deal of research appears in psychology journals every year, and four of the methodological traditions are the focus of this paper: phenomenology, heuristics, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism. For each tradition, epistemological assumptions, methods of inquiry, and research environment are described.
Phenomenology is the unbiased description of immediate experience just as it occurs. The experience is not abstracted or analyzed into elements, it is uncorrected observation. It