Sarah J. Tracy - Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 3
3. Chapter 10
4. Chapter 13

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14

This text has a comprehensive instructor companion website.

Please visit http://www.wiley.com/go/tracy2e to access these materials.

The website includes:

• Powerpoint slides to accompany each chapter
• Sample syllabi for both undergraduate and graduate courses
• A testbank, containing problems for each chapter, including answers
• Lesson plan outlines for each chapter
• Additional activities and worksheets
• Master list of key terms and definitions
• Exam study guide

SARAH J. TRACY

Second Edition

This edition first published 2020
2020 John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Edition History
John Wiley & Sons Ltd (1e, 2013)

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication data applied for
ISBN 9781119390787 (paperback)

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Cover Image: Markus Gann/Getty Images
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Following, Forgetting, Improvising Image: (a) miss_pj/iStockphoto; (b) Asia Images Group/Shutterstock; (c) Anja Koppitsch/iStockphoto

I dedicate this book to my past students, research participants, mentors, and loved ones, who have taught me that anything worth doing well is worth doing badly in the beginning.

This book is an allinclusive treatment that leads readers through a qualitative research project including research design, data collection, analysis, theorizing, writing, and research disengagement. This book introduces relevant issues as they typically emerge in a qualitative research project. For example, consider ethics or the choice to use visuals or artsbased research. Those new to research must first understand these issues when conceptualizing a project, and then again as they conduct research and analysis, and consider them again when they are creating an ultimate representation and leaving the field. I provide a chronological discussion of relevant issues, which makes this book especially valuable for people to review (and return to) as they journey through a project. My approach contrasts with resources where information about certain theories, methods, or topics are each siloed into their own single chapter. Readers of this book will feel confident to jump into qualitative research straight away.

One of my ongoing aims is to provide clear explanation of qualitative analysis and theorizing in commonsense terms, understandable both to newcomers and to those well versed in qualitative research. Although students have a wealth of available pedagogical resources on methodological philosophies, research design, data collection, and writing, those new to research still struggle with finding appropriate instruction of what to do in between the time they collect data and the time they craft it into a polished representation. This book provides stepbystep instruction along with timely examples, backstage stories, visual images, and discussion. It also clarifies how the phronetic iterative approach in this book compares with other popular analysis approaches (e.g. grounded theory). In addition, it describes seven specific types of qualitative analysis and offers a new discussion of claimmaking and theory building.

The book is designed to be accessible to advanced undergraduate students while providing enough detail, references, and illustrations to make it valuable for doctoral students and advanced scholars. Undergraduate students tend to appreciate that I share my own joys and frustrations marked as they are by twists and turns, celebrations and disappointments as a method to make the research process poignant, interesting, real, and occasionally humorous. Graduate students have told me that they return to this book repeatedly as they write their theses and dissertations; and faculty have said they keep it on their bookshelves for ongoing reference. And, although this book is designed primarily for an academic audience, practitioners wishing to engage in qualitative research to solve organizational and societal dilemmas will also find good advice within these pages.

This book is appropriate for a variety of disciplines and classes and can be adapted for onesemester/quarter and to twosemester/quarter classes. The book is useful for college courses that appear under names such as research methods, qualitative research methods, ethnography, ethnographic methods, critical research methods, interpretive research, grounded approaches to research, naturalistic inquiry, autoethnography, performance studies, narrative research methods, and field methods. Examples and illustrations reach beyond my home field of human communication to numerous other disciplines, such as health, education, management, sociology, social work, justice studies, and ethnic and gender studies.