Empirically Grounded Construction of Types and Typologies in Qualitative Social Research

Abstract

In qualitative social research, there are only a few approaches in which the process of typology construction is explicated and systematised in detail; furthermore, you can find very different concepts of types like ideal types, real types, prototypes, extreme types, types of structure. Because the construction of typologies is of central importance for the qualitative social research, it is necessary to clarify the concept of types and the process of typology construction. Therefore, this article will first present a general definition of the concept of types, and then how this definition forms the basis of rules for a systematic and controlled construction of types and typologies. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0001145