Supports David Howes's position that teachers engaged in qualitative research are best placed to enrich understandings of literacy learning and teaching. Cautions that the ethics and representational issues of such research are problematic and need to be considered. Reviews two books that explore the thorny questions surrounding qualitative…

Discusses how to analyze qualitative data, presenting rules for unbiased data analysis, describing how to think about analysis, and explaining the five steps of doing the analysis: tidying up, finding items, creating stable sets of items, creating patterns, and assembling structures. The paper concludes by discussing the importance of making sure…

Suggests why qualitative research is frequently neither discussed nor used by the broad public, considering five barriers to making research more accessible, discussing how to make it more germane to problems faced by diverse groups in their everyday lives, and offering constructive ways to make qualitative research findings more accessible to the…

Written for students, educators, and researchers, "Methods in Educational Research" offers a refreshing introduction to the principles of educational research. Designed for the real world of educational research, the book's approach focuses on the types of problems likely to be encountered in professional experiences. Reflecting the…

CHROMACODE is a conceptual tool that uses systematic, logical, and visual processes for organizing and analyzing qualitative research findings for the researcher with relatively low technical knowledge of data analysis. It can best be described as a visual conceptual scheme with coding based on a color-dependent procedure. Color provides a sense…

This book offers useful, prescriptive advice on how to enter different field settings for interviewing and observation. The chapters of part 1, "Stages of Access," are: (1) "Finding Informants"; (2) "Human Subjects and Permission To Contact Informants"; (3) "Making Initial Contact"; (4) "Developing a Rapport"; and (5) "Exiting: Ending the…

This book, designed for novice researchers, provides a step-by-step guide to the development of a research project. It emphasizes learning how to do qualitative work and provides specific examples from real studies. The chapters are: (1) "Deciding To Do a Qualitative Study"; (2) "Designing Qualitative Studies"; (3) "Collecting Qualitative Data";…

Guidelines are proposed to ensure rigor in case studies. Problem representation should be clear and consistent with the original intent of the research. The reader should be able to determine how the evidence was interpreted, conclusions reached, and judgments made. To increase the believability of the case study, the underlying assumptions must…

Discussion of criteria for evaluating qualitative reports of early intervention research identifies four important criteria: (1) where the investigators are coming from; (2) what they did; (3) how they arrived at their findings; and (4) what the study means. A checklist of key indicators of quality in reports of qualitative research is attached.…

Demonstrates how nonacademic interviewing talents can inform how qualitative researchers perform and produce interviews, outlining key concepts and practices for better qualitative interviewing from journalists and other researchers and examining four elements of interview practice (background information, interview analysis, protocol creation and…

This guide discusses combining qualitative and quantitative research methods in theses and dissertations. It covers a wide array of methods, the strengths and limitations of each, and how they can be effectively interwoven into various research designs. The first chapter is "The Qualitative and the Quantitative." Part 1, "A…

This book presents a method for the qualitative assessment of text difficulty, a method that relies on a total impression rather than on an analysis of text features. The method is based on matching samples of text to exemplars that have been scaled for comprehension difficulty. These exemplars range in difficulty from those suitable for the…

In conducting research, the identified problem in the field will determine the research strategies chosen to address the problem. When a qualitative research strategy is deemed as the most appropriate strategy to get answers to research questions, the researcher should be aware of obstacles that can be encountered in the research process. If the…

This book for doctoral students is designed to provide direct, in-depth support for learning about qualitative research. The data sources for the book are reflections of research correspondents who describe their experiences with choosing qualitative research methodologies for their thesis research. The book begins with a chapter about "the end,"…

This book outlines the basic elements of longitudinal qualitative data, focusing on micro-levels of change observed within individual cases and groups of participants, and presents 16 questions through which researchers can approach the analysis of longitudinal qualitative data. The chapters are: (1) "Longitudinal Qualitative Studies, Time, and…