Qualitative research in Italy

Qualitative research in Italy has gone through hard times. On the one hand it has long been hampered by the hegemony of Crocean idealism. On the other hand survey researchers have also undervalued it. Despite, this from the 1980s qualitative research gained an important role in Italian sociology and at the end of the 1990s it conquered a space in Italian methodology, still ruled by the survey approach. At the beginning of the new millennium qualitative methodology has become institutionalized in teaching programs and courses of methodology. The article reconstructs, step by step, a history of qualitative research and methodology in Italy.