Table of Contents

Preface
1. Why Readme First?
Goals
Methods and Their Integrity
Methodological Diversity and Informed Choice
No Mysteries!
Learning by Doing It: Qualitative Research as a Craft
Qualitative Research as a Challenge
Using Readme
The Shape of the Book
What to Expect
Doing Qualitative Research
Resources
PART I. THINKING RESEARCH
2. The Integrity of Qualitative Research
Methodological Purposiveness
Methodological Congruence
The Armchair Walkthrough
And Now-Your Topic?
Summary
Resources
3. Selecting a Method
Commonalities and Differences
Phenomenology
Ethnography
Grounded Theory
Additional Qualitative Methods
Summary
Resources
4. Qualitative Research Design
The Levels of Design
Planning Design
Doing Design
Project Pacing
Overall Project Design
What Does the Computer Offer?
Summary
Resources
PART II. INSIDE ANALYSIS
5. Making Data
What Are data (and What Are Not)
Ways of Making Data
Who Makes Data?
Transforming Data
Managing Data
The Role of Data
Yourself as Data
What Does the Computer Offer?
Summary
Resources
6. Coding
Getting Inside the Data
Storing Ideas
Doing Coding
Theme-ing
Purposiveness of Coding
Tips and Traps: Handling Codes and Coding
What Does the Computer Offer?
Summary
Resources
7. Abstracting
The First Step: Categorizing
The Next Step: Conceptualizing
Doing Abstraction
Managing Abstraction
What Does the Computer Offer?
Summary
Resources
8. Revisiting Methodological Congruence
Phenomenology
Ethnography
Grounded Theory
Summary
Resources
PART III. GETTING IT RIGHT
9. On Getting It Right and Knowing If It′s Wrong
Ensuring Rigor in the Design Phase
Ensuring Rigor While Conducting a Project
When Is It Done?
Demonstrating Rigor on Completion of the Project
Summary
Resources
10. Writing It Up
Ready to Write?
Re-revisiting Methodological Congruence
Protecting Participants
Evaluate Your Writing
Polishing Summary
Resources
PART IV. BEGINNING YOUR PROJECT
11. Groundwork for Beginning Your Project
Writing Your Proposal
Ensuring Ethical Research
Summary
Resources
12. Getting Started
Why Is It So Hard to Start?
How to Start?
Congratulations, You′ve Started!
Resources
Appendix: Qualitative Computing Tutorials: Lyn Richards
References
Author Index
Subject Index

About the Author

Janice M. Morse, PhD (Nurs), PhD (Anthro), FAAN is a professor and Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah College of Nursing, and Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta, Canada., from 1991-1996, she also held a position as professor at The Pennsylvania State University. From 1997-2007, she was the founding Director and Scientific Director of the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, University of Alberta, founding editor for the International Journal of Qualitative Methods, and Editor of the Qual Press monograph series. She remains the founding editor for Qualitative Health Research, (now in Volume 2, Sage1), is currently editor for the monograph series Developing Qualitative Inquiry, and The Essentials of Qualitative Inquiry (Left Coast Press). Her research programs are in the areas of suffering and comforting, preventing patient falls, and developing qualitative methods. In 2011, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement in Qualitative Inquiry from the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry, was an inaugural inductee into the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame (2010), the 5th recipient of the Episteme Award (also Sigma Theta Tau). She received awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Newcastle (Australia) and Athabasca University (Canada). She is the author of 460 articles and chapters and 19 books on qualitative research methods, suffering, comforting and patient falls. About the author

Lyn Richards has a highly unusual range of relationships with qualitative research. After undergraduate training as a historian and political scientist, she moved to sociology. Her early work as a family sociologist addressed both popular and academic audiences, with a strong motivation always to make the funded research relevant to the people studied, and the qualitative analysis credible to those affected. Each of her four books in family sociology was a text at university level but also widely discussed in popular media and at community level. During her tenure as Reader and Associate Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, she won major research grants, presented and published research papers, was a founding member of a qualitative research association and taught qualitative methods at undergraduate and graduate level, supervising Masters and PhD students.

She strayed from this academic pathway when challenges with handling qualitative data in her own studies led to the development, with Tom Richards, of what rapidly became the world’s leading qualitative analysis software. They founded a research software company, in which for a decade Lyn was Director of Research Services, writing software documentation and managing international training of researchers and trainers in the methods behind the software. Designing and documenting software taught her to confront fuzzy thinking about methods, and to demand straight talking, clarity of purpose, detail of technique and a clear answer always to ‘Why would we want to do that?’ Teaching methods to thousands of researchers in dozens of disciplines in 14 countries, she saw what worked and what didn’t. From those researchers, graduates and faculty in universities and research practitioners in the world beyond, she learned their many ways of handling data, on and off computers, and their strategies for making sense of data.

Handling Qualitative Data is a direct result of this experience. It offers clear, practical advice for researchers approaching qualitative research and wishing to do justice to rich data. Like her previous book, with Janice Morse, Readme First, for a User’s Guide to Qualitative Methods it strongly maintains the requirements of good qualitative research, assumes and critiques the use of software and draws on practical experience of helping researchers whose progress has been hindered by confusion, lack of training, mixed messages about standards and fear of being overwhelmed by rich, messy data.

Throughout this hybrid career, Lyn continued contributions to critical reflection on new methods, as a writer and a keynote speaker in a wide range of international conferences. She has life membership of the International Sociological Association and its Methodology section. Her writing aims always to cut through barriers to high quality qualitative research and to assist researchers and teachers in making the inevitable shift to computing whilst maximizing the benefits for their research processes and outcomes. On leaving software development, she took an Adjunct Professorship at RMIT University, creating and coordinating an active, informal and splendidly supportive Qualitative Interest Group (QIG). She currently works from home, (online, of course), combining research advising with convening of an asylum seeker support group and growing roses and vegetables, all of which provide marvellous metaphors for qualitative research.

 

Reviews

"For the price, you get not only a sound introduction to qualitative research in three of the most commonly used methodological traditions (phenomenology, ethnography, and grounded theory), but an opportunity to "test drive" one of the modern software systems for analysis of qualitative data and project management- complete with access to data files from two actual studies- all before you begin to plan your own project."