This article exposes developments of qualitative methodology in French sociology with respect to methods proposed, by authors Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Touraine, provoked and accompanied self-analysis and the sociological intervention. In addition to the presentation of these two methods, the purpose of this article is to describe and discuss the position of these two authors on certain problems such as representativeness, objectivity, status of data, epistemological rupture and lastly on the question of the writing by which sociological knowledge is formed from common sense knowledge contained in the data. Finally, strengths and weaknesses of these two methods are examined.