Qualitative methods can be traced back to ancient Greek historians. Herodotus, often called the father of history, traveled extensively in the ancient world and recounted in his Histories the stories he heard from the people he met. His successors over the centuries recorded their observations of the people they encountered on their travels. These types of observations eventually became formalized in the discipline of anthropology. In clinical research, qualitative methods were first used in case histories, for example, the early cases of Breuer and Freud (1895/1955), which started the psychoanalytic tradition, and the study of Watson and Rayner (1920 ) on "Little Albert", which helped establish the behavioral tradition. There is also a tradition of participant observation methods in mental health research, although they are more often conducted by sociologists than psychologists. Classic examples of participant observation studies are Goffman's (1961) Asylums study and Rosenhan's (1973) “Sane in unhealthy Places” study (Barker and Pistrang 2002). Qualitative research seeks to understand a social or human problem through a process of inquiry. It takes place in a natural environment and reports the opinions of the informants in a richly detailed way. Qualitative research strives to describe the extraordinarily complex nature of people and their perception of their experience in the specific social context in which the experience occurs. (Geertz, 1973). This is quite different from the quantitative research paradigm. The raw material for qualitative research is common language, as opposed to numbers which constitute the raw material for quantitative research. Language can be obtained in many ways. They could be the descriptions that the participant himself made of him or her... at the center of the article ......ings-Sanders & Anderson, 2003; Lawler, Dowswell, Hearn, Forster, & Young, 1999 as well as Schumacher, Koresawa, West, Dodd, Paul, Tripathy, Koo, Miaskowski, 2005). Others have used qualitative methods to improve their understanding of research participants who dropped out or did not adhere to the intervention (Jolly et al., 2003 as Schumacher et, al. 2005). Additionally, researchers conducted qualitative interviews following an intervention study to clarify the content and interpersonal processes of the intervention, to elicit participants' experiences of receiving the intervention, to evaluate the intervention, or to explain study findings (Gamel, Grypdonck, Hengeveld, & Davis, 2001). In these studies, sequential research designs, in which the qualitative investigation precedes or follows the intervention study, are more common (Schumacher et, al.. 2005).