are interested in accessing experiences, interactions and documents in their natural context and in a way that gives room to the particularities of them and the materials in which they are studied.
Qualitative research refrains from setting up a well-defined concept of what is studied and from formulating hypotheses in the beginning in order to test them. Rather, concepts (or hypotheses, if they are used) are developed and refined in the process of research.
Qualitative research starts from the idea that methods and theories should be appropriate to what is studied. If the existing methods do not fit with a concrete issue or field, they are adapted or new methods or approaches are developed.
Researchers themselves are an important part of the research process, either in terms of their own personal presence as researchers, or in terms of their experiences in the field and with the reflexivity they bring to the role – as are members of the field under study.
Qualitative research takes context and cases seriously for understanding an issue under study. A lot of qualitative research is based on case studies or a series of case studies, and often the case (its history and complexity) is an important context for understanding what is studied.
A major part of qualitative research is based on texts and writing – from field notes and transcripts to descriptions and interpretations and finally to the presentation of the findings and of the research as a whole. Therefore, issues of transforming complex social situations (or other materials such as images) into texts – issues of transcribing and writing in general – are major concerns of qualitative research.
If methods are supposed to be adequate to what is under study, approaches to defining and assessing the quality of qualitative research (still) have to be discussed in specific ways that are appropriate for qualitative research and even for specific approaches in qualitative research.
Scope of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit
Designing Qualitative Research (Uwe Flick) gives a brief introduction to qualitative research from the point of view of how to plan and design a concrete study using qualitative research in one way or another. It is intended to outline a framework for the other books in The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit by focusing on how-to-do problems and on how to solve such problems in the research process. The book addresses issues of constructing a research design in qualitative research; it outlines stumbling blocks in making a research project work and discusses practical problems such as resources in qualitative research but also more methodological issues like quality of qualitative research and also ethics. This framework is filled out in more detail in the other books in the Kit.
Three books are devoted to collecting or producing data in qualitative research. They take up the issues briefly outlined in the first book and approach them in a much more detailed and focused way for the specific method. First, Doing Interviews (Svend Brinkmann and Steinar Kvale) addresses the theoretical, epistemological, ethical and practical issues of interviewing people about specific issues or their life history. Doing Ethnography (Amanda Coffey) focuses on the second major approach to collecting and producing qualitative data. Here again practical issues (like selecting sites, methods of collecting data in ethnography, special problems of analyzing them) are discussed in the context of more general issues (ethics, representations, quality and adequacy of ethnography as an approach). In Doing Focus Groups (Rosaline Barbour) the third of the most important qualitative methods of producing data is presented. Here again we find a strong focus on how-to-do issues of sampling, designing and analyzing the data and on how to produce them in focus groups.
Three further volumes are devoted to analyzing specific types of qualitative data. Using Visual Data in Qualitative Research (Marcus Banks) extends the focus to the third type of qualitative data (beyond verbal data coming from interviews and focus groups and observational data). The use of visual data has not only become a major trend in social research in general, but confronts researchers with new practical problems in using them and analyzing them and produces new ethical issues. In Analyzing Qualitative Data (Graham R. Gibbs), several practical approaches and issues of making sense of any sort of qualitative data are addressed. Special attention is paid to practices of coding, of comparing and of using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis. Here, the focus is on verbal data, like interviews, focus groups or biographies. Doing Conversation, Discourse and Document Analysis (Tim Rapley) extends this focus to different types of data, relevant for analyzing discourses. Here, the focus is on existing material (like documents) and on recording everyday conversations and on finding traces of discourses. Practical issues such as generating an archive, transcribing video materials and how to analyze discourses with such types of data are discussed.
Three final volumes go beyond specific forms of data or single methods and take a broader approach. Doing Grounded Theory (Uwe Flick) focuses on an integrated research programme in qualitative research. Doing Triangulation and Mixed Methods (Uwe Flick) addresses combinations of several approaches in qualitative research or with quantitative methods. Managing Quality in Qualitative Research (Uwe Flick) takes up the issue of quality in qualitative research, which has been briefly addressed in specific contexts in other books in the Kit, in a more general way. Here, quality is looked at from the angle of using or reformulating existing criteria, or defining new criteria, for qualitative research. This book examines the ongoing debates about what should count as defining ‘quality’ and validity in qualitative methodologies and examines the many strategies for promoting and managing quality in qualitative research.
Before I go on to outline the focus of this book and its role in the Kit, I would like to thank some people at SAGE who were important in making this Kit happen. Michael Carmichael suggested this project to me some time ago and was very helpful with his suggestions in the beginning. Patrick Brindle, Katie Metzler and Mila Steele took over and continued this support, as did Victoria Nicholas and John Nightingale in making books out of the manuscripts we provided.
About this book
Uwe Flick
In the early as well as in the more recent development of qualitative research, ethnography has played a major role. Much of what we know about field relations, about openness and directedness towards a field and its members is known from research in ethnography. Although ethnography is closely linked to the method of participant observation, and was based on it or maybe has replaced it more recently, ethnography always included a variety of methods of data collection. Quite often we find combinations of observation, participation, more or less formal interviewing and the use of documents and other traces of events in ethnography. At the same time, not every relevant issue is accessible for ethnography, participation and observation. Sampling in this context is less focused on people to select for the research than on selecting fields or institutions, or more generally, sites for observation. Towards the end of the twentieth century, methodological discussions in ethnography more and more shifted from issues of data collection and finding a role in the field to questions of writing about and reporting from the field, the research and the experiences in it. Analyzing ethnographic data is often oriented towards searching for patterns of behaviours, interactions and practices.
In this book such key topics of doing ethnography are unfolded in some detail. Whereas the other books are more focused on verbal data, like interviews (Brinkmann and Kvale, 2018) or focus groups (Barbour, 2018), or concentrate on analyzing conversations (Rapley, 2018) or images (Banks, 2018), Doing Ethnography brings the pragmatics of field research into the scope of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit. At the same time, it can be complemented by more detailed analysis of using these sources (from interviews to visual data) in the more general context of ethnography. The books on analyzing data (Gibbs, 2018), designs and quality in qualitative research (Flick, 2018a, 2018b) triangulation (Flick, 2018c) and grounded theory (Flick, 2018d) add some extra context to what is outlined here in some detail. Together these books and this one allow us to decide when to use ethnography and observation and provide a methodological and theoretical basis for using this strategy in the field. The exemplary studies repeatedly used for illustration in this book are helpful