Handling Qualitative Data: A Practical Guide

Review This book provides helpful tips and easy-to-follow guidelines for carrying out rigorous qualitative data-collection and analyses. Lyn Richards’ straight to the point explanations of various techniques and methodological procedures can help novice students and seasoned researchers conduct systematic qualitative research. -- Rudy Leyva Published On: 2020-07-20Strengthening an already impressive publication, Richards has produced an excellent addition to the literature on qualitative research. The signposting of additional resources within the text allows readers to further hone their analytical skills. Written in an accessible format, I would recommend this to both experienced researchers and those beginning their research journey. -- Lyndsey Harris Published On: 2020-07-20 Product Description Starting with what’s special about qualitative data, this book covers more than simply data collection. It guides you through skilfully, thoughtfully, and ethically designing a project, managing data, exploring records, creating and justifying sound theories, and reporting results in ways that will be heard. With a positive and jargon-free style, it discusses how setting up, working with, making sense of and presenting data can be a springboard into learning key research skills and reflecting on methodological issues. With even more material to help researchers navigate the practicalities of working with qualitative data, this edition includes:‘To do’ lists and annotated further reading suggestions to help establish ethical practice Guidance on tackling emerging challenges in handling qualitative data, such as uses of visualisation and online data Advice for communicating data to different audiences and writing a convincing research report Online resources that illustrate effective qualitative research in action and aid researchers in their own work, including first-hand researcher accounts, qualitative analysis software support, step-by-step guidance on software use and visualising data, and examples of communicating real-world research effectively. About the Author About the authorLyn 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 computer