is done.
Qualitative researchers 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 the 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 and Its Second Edition
Uwe Flick
Analyzing discourse is currently one of the major approaches in qualitative research. Analyzing conversations has a long tradition in the history of qualitative research, as has the use of documents as data. In these approaches, data collection is often focused on creating a set of materials, by recording naturally occurring interactions, or selecting articles from newspapers or documents from institutional files, for example. In this process, the traditional methods of data collection, which produce the data especially for the research process – as is the case in interviews or focus groups – play a minor role. Here, it is rather the ways of making available and of making up the existing materials for research purposes that are decisive. Thus, steps like the transcription of audio or video materials and the generation of an archive are core steps in the research process and not just technical or even minor issues. Ethics become relevant in this context in a particular but also different way.
This book addresses these issues from the points of view of discourse analysis and conversation analysis. In doing so, it gives topics like transcription a different and perhaps even more systematic appraisal than in the other books in The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit. Nevertheless, it is supplemented by the other volumes in the Kit as well, as interviews and focus groups are special situations of conversation, which can be analyzed as such and not only for the contents that are communicated in them. Therefore, this book and the ones by Barbour (2018) on focus groups and Brinkmann and Kvale (2018) on interviews are complementary to each other.
The same can be said for the use of visual materials (Banks, 2018), which can also be used for studying discourses. Gibbs (2018), in his more general approach to data analysis, outlines ways of coding materials relevant for discourse and conversation analysis in more detail, especially concerning the use of computers and software. The same applies to the outline of Doing Grounded Theory (Flick, 2018a). The present volume is above all devoted to a single approach in the context of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit, but at the