This course introduces students to the purposes, theories, and methods of a family of approaches to social science research variously called ethnographic, qualitative, case study, naturalistic, or interpretive. Throughout this course, we will draw on resources in anthropology and sociology to explore issues that are central to understanding the epistemology and methodology of interpretive inquiry. The purposes of this course are to: (a) examine the nature, purposes, theories, and methods of qualitative inquiry; (b) introduce several approaches to qualitative inquiry; and (c) learn how to assess the quality and trustworthiness of qualitative inquiry.