Introduction
Part I: Setting up
Setting up Your Project
Making Qualitative Data
Data Records
Part II: Working with the Data
Up from the Data
Coding
Handling Ideas
Part III: Making Sense of Your Data
What Are You Aiming for?
Searching the Data
Seeing a Whole
Telling It
About the author
Lyn 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 computers, and their strategies for making sense of
data.
Handling Qualitative Data is a direct result of this experience. It
offers clear, practical advice for researchers approaching
qualitative research and wishing to do justice to rich data. Like
her previous book, with Janice Morse, Readme First, for a User’s
Guide to Qualitative Methods it strongly maintains the requirements
of good qualitative research, assumes and critiques the use of
software and draws on practical experience of helping researchers
whose progress has been hindered by confusion, lack of training,
mixed messages about standards and fear of being overwhelmed by
rich, messy data.
Throughout this hybrid career, Lyn continued contributions to
critical reflection on new methods, as a writer and a keynote
speaker in a wide range of international conferences. She has life
membership of the International Sociological Association and its
Methodology section. Her writing aims always to cut through
barriers to high quality qualitative research and to assist
researchers and teachers in making the inevitable shift to
computing whilst maximizing the benefits for their research
processes and outcomes. On leaving software development, she took
an Adjunct Professorship at RMIT University, creating and
coordinating an active, informal and splendidly supportive
Qualitative Interest Group (QIG). She currently works from home,
(online, of course), combining research advising with convening of
an asylum seeker support group and growing roses and vegetables,
all of which provide marvellous metaphors for qualitative
research.
Lyn Richards has produced a very accessible guide on how to work
with qualitative data in a meaningful way. This book is unique in
that Richards’ correctly assumes that today’s qualitative
researchers will be using technology in their analysis.
She weaves this understanding into each phase of the process she
describes, guiding the novice through key aspects of how to
effectively handle their data.
*Trena Paulus*
A really useful text to help students get to grips with data
analysis.
*Nikki Petty*
This is an excellent text, it is well structured and provides a
step by step approach for students to follow when analysing their
qualitative data with particular application to the use of computer
software.
*Glynis Bennett*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |