Qualitative Research Design

Ideal for students, novice researchers, or professionals, this indispensable resource serves as a road map for readers who need to analyze and apply research findings. It helps them think critically about the credibility of what they are reading by showing them how to identify problems and develop constructive questions.

Key Features

• Assumes no prior knowledge of research procedures
• Provides readers with a step-by-step format for decoding the complex language and formats used in reports and reviews
• Includes the most common formats for both quantitative and qualitative inquiry
• Offers both illustrative examples and powerful training exercises
• Gives specific attention to strategies for critically appraising reported research
• Presents completely updated references as well as an annotated bibliography

Intended Audience

This text is appropriate for both upper-level undergraduate and graduate students across the social sciences enrolled in introductory research courses as well as students in professional preparation programs.

In this book Paul Willis, a renowned sociologist and ethnographer, aims to renew and develop the ethnographic craft across the disciplines. Drawing from numerous examples of his own past and current work, he shows that ethnographic practice and the ethnographic imagination are vital to understanding the creativity and irreducibility of experience in all aspects of social and cultural practice.

Willis argues that ethnography plays a vital role in constituting ‘sensuousness’ in textual, methodological, and substantive ways, but it can do this only through the deployment of an associated theoretical imagination which cannot be found simply there in the field. He presents a bold and incisive ethnographically oriented view of the world, emphasizing the need for a deep-running social but also aesthetic sensibility. In doing so he brings new insights to the understanding of human action and its dialectical relation to social and symbolic structures. He makes original contributions to the understanding of the contemporary human uses of objects, artefacts and communicative forms, presenting a new analysis of commodity fetishism as central to consumption and to the wider social relations of contemporary societies. He also utilizes his perspective to further the understanding of the contemporary crisis in masculinity and to cast new light on various lived everyday cultures – at school, on the dole, on the street, in the Mall, in front of TV, in the dance club.

This book will be essential reading for all those involved in planning or contemplating ethnographic fieldwork and for those interested in the contributions it can make to the social sciences and humanities.