Merriam Sharan B. - Qualitative Research

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Merriam, Sharan B.

Qualitative research : a guide to design and implementation / Sharan B. Merriam & Elizabeth J. Tisdell. Fourth edition.

pages cm (The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-119-00361-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-119-00365-6 (ebk.)

ISBN 978-1-119-00360-1 (ebk.)

1. EducationResearchMethodology. 2. EducationResearchCase studies. 3. Case method. 4. Qualitative research. I. Tisdell, Elizabeth J. II. Title.

LB1028.M396 2015

370.72dc23

2015005272

The Jossey-Bass Higher and
Adult Education Series

Qualitative research is a mature field of study with its own literature base, research journals, special interest groups, and regularly scheduled conferences. Indeed, staying current is a daunting task for any single individual. Van Maanen (2011) humorously describes trying to keep up with developments in ethnography, just one type of qualitative research:

The ethnography industry now includes the ceaseless production of authoritative monographs, exhaustive reviews of the literature(s), method manuals, encyclopedias of concepts and theories, meta-critical expositions, themed anthologies, handbooks of door-stopping weight, established and quasi-established journal publications, formal presentations of talks and papers presided over by umpteen academic societies, online publications, blogs, topical chat-rooms, message boards, forums, social networking sites, and on and on. The answer then to how a single person can keep up without gagging is that he or she can't, for the potentially relevant materials are overwhelming, and new theories, new problems, new topics, new concepts, and new critiques of older work multiply with each passing year. It seems the best one can do is to selectively pursue and cultivate an ever-diminishing proportion of the potentially relevant work that comes one's way and assume an attitude of benign neglect toward the rest. (p. 146)

However, what has remained constant amidst the burgeoning of resources for doing qualitative research is the value of a practical guide for designing and implementing this type of research. Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation represents our effort to explain qualitative research in an easy-to-follow narrative accessible to both novice and experienced researchers. In essence, it is a practical guide without being just a cookbook for conducting qualitative research; readers also come to understand the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of this research paradigm.

This edition of Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation represents the latest iteration in thinking about and understanding qualitative research. The first edition, published in 1988, centered on qualitative case study research; the 1998 second edition featured qualitative research, with case study as a secondary focus. The 2009 third edition saw a further reduction in the attention to qualitative case studies. For this fourth edition the focus is largely on interpretive/constructivist qualitative research, of which qualitative case study is one common design, along with what we call a basic qualitative study, ethnography, grounded theory, narrative inquiry, and a phenomenological qualitative study. In fact, we have retained and updated the chapter on types of qualitative research because from our experiences teaching and conducting workshops, there is little clarity about the differences among these approaches for researchers new to qualitative researchhence, a chapter devoted to differentiating among these common types, as well as exploring their overlaps.

There are two other substantive changes to this fourth edition of Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation. First, we have added a new chapter of research designs in which qualitative methods are heavily used, often with other more quantitative and/or creative methods. This chapter reviews mixed methods, action research, critical research, and arts based research. The second substantive change in this edition is more attention to how technology permeates the processas in, for example, online data sources and qualitative data analysis software packages.

This book continues to be positioned in applied fields of practice. Participants in our workshops and courses have come from nursing, social work, management, allied health, administration, counseling, religion, business gerontology, and human resource development, among others, as well as every subfield of education. Although our field of practice is adult education, and therefore there are many examples from education and adult education, we have made an effort to bring in examples from a variety of fields of practice. Certainly the design and implementation of a qualitative study is the same across these fields.