Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice - Softcover

`[This book] kept being borrowed while I was reading it.... My graduate students walked off with it. Even our new professor of psychology wanted to have a look.... The book is a collection of wonderfully assembled reminders that the ordinary is the baseline from which social research must proceed.... This is something the whole field of qualitative research has needed for some time: an approach outwith the restrictions of both "correctness" and "authenticity" and, instead, predicated on a resolute ordinariness or empiricity' - Discourse & Society

`This is a superb set of cutting-edge works by a group of leading international social science researchers. The authors push the boundaries of the interpretive qualitative, situated approach to observations, textual studies, interviews, discourse analysis, validity, social problems analysis and the aesthetics of inquiry. It promises to become a most valuable and useful resource and text for scholar and student alike. We owe David Silverman and his colleagues a great debt' - Norman K Denzin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Building on the success of David Silverman's Interpreting Qualitative Data, this book assembles a well-known international team of researchers who share a commitment to rigorous, analytically derived but nonpolarized, qualitative research. Each contribution reflects on the analysis of each of the kinds of data discussed in Interpreting Qualitative Data - observations, texts, talk and interviews - with the contributors using particular examples of data-analysis to advance analytic arguments. Common themes include: the centrality of the relationship between analytic perspectives and methodological issues; the need to broaden our conception of qualitative research beyond issues of subjective `meaning' and towards issues of language, representation and social organization; and the desire to search for ways of building links between social science traditions and a commitment to a dialogue between social science and the community.