This exciting new book brings together contributions from world-leading scholars as well as younger researchers and focuses on cutting-edge issues related to the practice of qualitative research in the field. It provides a forum for contributors to discuss the issues and processes which inform qualitative research in its various forms as based on fieldwork experiences.
In achieving this in an accessible manner to both practicing students and researchers, it seeks to enable a dialogue over ideas and provide the reader with a "state of the art" overview of the topic from a contemporary perspective.
Rather than being a "how to do" book, this volume should prove vitally useful for advanced students and researchers who wish to engage with those ideas and practices in terms of their applicability for an understanding and explanation of the place of qualitative research in the social sciences. It is also a forum in which leading scholars make an original contribution to the subject.
Lively and highly readable throughout, Qualitative Research in Action will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and above in a variety of disciplines, as well as researchers who wish to engage with contemporary ideas and practices in relation to qualitative research.
Introduction
Transformation in Principles and Practice
PART ONE: PUTTING THE PRACTICE INTO THEORY
Institutional Ethnography - Dorothy E Smith
Critical Realist Ethnography - Sam Porter
Framing the Rational in Fieldwork - Peter K Manning
Analysing Interaction - Christian Heath and Jon Hindmarsh
Video, Ethnography and Situated Conduct
PART TWO: GENERALIZATION, INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSIS
Generalization in Interpretive Research - Malcolm Williams
Representation, Responsibilty and Reliability in Participant-Observation - Mart[ac]in S[ac]anchez-Jankowski
Automating the Ineffable - Nigel G Fielding
Qualitative Software and the Meaning of Qualitative Research
Subjectivity and Qualitative Method - Valeria Walkerdine, Helen Lucey and June Melody
PART THREE: CHOICES IN CONTEXT
Observation and Interviewing - Kathleen Gerson and Ruth Horowitz
Options and Choices in Qualitative Research
Qualitative Interviewing - Jennifer Mason
Asking, Listening and Interpreting
Narrative in Social Research - Steph Lawler
PART FOUR: POWER, PARTICIPATION AND EXPERTISE
Engagement and Evaluation in Qualitative Inquiry - Linda McKie
Negotiating Power and Expertise in the Field - Lynne Haney
On Relations between Black Female Researcher and Participants - Tracey Reynolds
PART FIVE: REFLEXIVITY, THE SELF AND POSITIONING
Ethnography and the Self - Amanda Coffey
Reflections and Representations
Reflexivity and the Politics of Qualitative Research - Lisa Adkins
Techniques for Telling the Reflexive Self - Beverley Skeggs
Emotions, Fieldwork and Professional Lives - Sherryl Kleinman
